April 15, 1978 review: The Grateful Dead movie

 


Pot, popcorn and the Grateful Dead 

April 15, 1978 review

Sound Problems Fatal to ‘Dead’ Film 

          “I can’t believe this is happening,” the kid in the back near the projection booth is saying. “I can come back, but I’m not gonna be able to come back the way I am now.” He grins wildly.

          The house lights have come up about an hour into “The Grateful Dead Movie” in the Century Theater Friday night. Instead of refunds, there are passes good for any of the other showings of the rock concert film tonight and tomorrow.

          “What if we drove 40 miles to get here tonight?” a disappointed young woman with blond hair asks theater manager Phil Rosen in the lobby.

          Rosen demurs.

          “There’s no way I can issue you a refund right now,” he says. “If you can’t make it back, send the green refund stub to my attention and I’ll see what I can do.”

          The problem, Rosen says when the furor subsides, has to do with the multi-channel sound. It could be the Century’s quadraphonic system. It could be the film. Or it could be that the film’s magnetic line doesn’t match up with the theater’s magnetic line. The technicians will have to sort it out.

          Before it sputtered out entirely, the soundtrack was highly eccentric. The musical sections were virtually inaudible. The spoken parts were so loud they distorted.

          Friday night’s first-show crowd of about 500 saw roughly half the film – to nearly the end of the first of two sequences taken live in San Francisco’s Winterland in October 1974, just before the Grateful Dead took a couple years off from being the patron saints of psychedelia.

          That much of the movie is a fan’s delight. The screen brings guitarist Jerry Garcia closer than he’ll ever get in real life. Keith Godchaux’s brow is caught furrowing at a sour note. And since it’s film, there’s no protracted tuning between songs.

          When the camera isn’t examining the band, it zooms in on the crowd. Deadheads are always entertaining and this Bay Area crowd includes painted faces, dancing dervishes and one proud pyromaniac whooshing flames in time to the music.

          Between the concert shots are pre-concert scenes – roadies wrestling with the Dead’s mammoth 1974 sound system, an uncommonly chummy Bill Graham, the line at the ticket window, guitarist Bob Weir playing with feedback in the sound check.

          To start it all off, there’s an award-winning animated sequence which uses the Dead’s skull and roses trademarks in kind of an intergalactic pinball game. It’s great fun. As one fan in the film notes soberly, there’s nothing in the world like a Grateful Dead concert. Even half a one.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Poster for the film. 

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: The movie’s Wikipedia page notes that it took three years for this movie to come out after it was filmed and by then the Dead had moved on significantly – personnel had changed, the massive sound system had been trimmed and the band had released two albums of new material. Fans would have to wait until 2004 for a high-quality version of the film to appear on a two-disc DVD. The Blu-ray edition that appeared in 2011 is longer and has better audio.

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