The Big Lookback: The Grateful Dead

"The Grateful Dead in Four Dimensions," from The Village Voice, June 13, 1977

The basic idea of the Big Lookback has been to focus in on past writing that brushes against a subject or theme I’ve been exploring anew, thus adding an extra dimension to the matter at hand. The work the incredible Tom Hull has overseen at my website, which he created in 2001 and which involved among other things a few generous volunteers who went so far as to type up old pieces of mine, enriches this process, helping me locate dimly recalled old writing on my site.

Sometimes, however, I come up dry, and this brings us to the Big Lookback at hand, which commenced with a fruitless search for a May 1977 piece I wrote about the Grateful Dead at the Palladium on 14th Street. Not archived on my site, and further delving indicates that’s because this piece provided much if not all of the four-page Dead entry in my Harvard collection Grown Up All Wrong. But absent that find, my editor Joe Levy utilized technology that was either primitive or nonexistent when Hull was creating my site. The primitive part involved one of the many file cabinets I’ve crammed full, where Joe found the Voice clip that harbored the below Lookback, from June of 1977, “The Dead in Four Dimensions.” The new part was Joe using the optical character recognition built into his phone to digitize the newsprint—a lot faster than typing, though Joe reports it still needed some corrections. The piece itself reads pretty good, I think. The film can be rented for four bucks on YouTube, which I expect to do so sometime. I was never a true Deadhead and never a true pothead either. But I’m proud and, yes, grateful that unlike so many of my rockcrit pals I followed the Dead for nearly a decade, with a tail-off in the wake of a circa-1979 Madison Square Garden show that never came together, as sometimes they didn’t. They were a great band.

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The concert movie is the ultimate fan-club item. Who wants to see something as plotless, visually limited, and aurally unfulfilling as The Song Remains The Same except someone who longs to relive the Zeppelin concert epiphany—or who lingers among those statistical outcasts who were never granted a shot at an epiphany during the group’s sold-out tour? Theoretically, a kid who got stuck in the upper deck at Madison Square Garden might even prefer the movie—at least he would get to see his heroes close up if in two dimensions, and to hear the music loud if not real. But you know damn well he’d rather have been there anyway. I was there for Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, and for the Rolling Stones’ sweep of America in 1972, both documented in proficient and thoroughly unsatisfying films. I would have been better off remembering.

So perhaps it is my own fannish relationship to the band in question that leads me to believe that The Grateful Dead, a multiple-channel concert movie scheduled to run at the Ziegfeld until June 14, redeems the genre. Perhaps, but I don’t think so—I am, after all, a rather shameless Rolling Stones fan, too. Anyway, I can adduce specifics.

For starters, this is the first concert movie in which the sound mix follows the cut. As the camera moves in for one of those boring dancing-fingers closeups (at least one of which justifies itself visually by catching the hesitations and second thoughts that go into Jerry Garcia’s improvisation) the volume of the appropriate instrument comes up. The general volume diminishes realistically as the scene moves into the outer halls and refreshment areas, encouraging periods of relative inattention to the music just as they’re encouraged during the live show. The only time the device turns into a gimmick is when the sound travels in an amusement-park circle as the obligatory 360-degree shot makes its round.

It is also gratifying that neither Leon Gast, the location director, nor Jerry Garcia, who directed the editing, indulge in the routine sexual pandering ordinarily counted irresistible by filmmakers confronted with bare midriffs. There are a few pretty-girl shots, a communard belly-dances in the wings, and one R. Crumb dreamboat with legs like young trees does some crotch rolls that are burlesque in more ways than one, but there is almost as much solo boogieing by men as by women. In addition, more than a few of the featured audience faces are pudgy, pimply, or merely ordinary. Jerry no doubt considers each beautiful in its own way. Such soft-headedness is his fatal flaw, and such equanimity is the secret of his magic.

Musically, the film is not ideal. The group was obviously up for these shows, presented at Winterland in San Francisco in the fall of 1974. They were putting out not only for the camera but also for old times’ sake, because this was their announced farewell to live performance. Even if diverging individual ambitions could be transcended for a final bash, the disintegration was evident in the dearth of good new songs. Since the film sticks almost entirely to Dead originals—thus dispensing with the rock-and-roll highs the Dead often generate off inspired cover versions—this means too much of the material is a little flat. Although the tone-poem meander in the midst of “Morning Dew” deserves relative inattention, the shapeless modern dance by a pretty but pretentious fan fails to encourage it. And Bill Kreutzmann’s fascinating explanation of how hard it is to drum for the Dead is demonstrated by his clumsiness throughout the film; when Mickey Hart sits in for an encore the intensified drive is startling. Still, Deadheads do not seek perfection in a Dead concert, and most of the music is quite wonderful. Keith Godchaux ranges effortlessly between Jerry Lee and Thelonious, Donna Godchaux’s strength proves anything but ornamental, and Garcia establishes himself again and again the master of rock and roll improvisation—improvisation that doesn’t distract from the beat.

The film opens with an eight-minute animation by Gary Gutierrez in which the skeleton who has become the Dead’s mascot and avatar trips through a bewildering succession of heavens and hells. The animation defines the Dead’s wacked-out tragic-sense-of-life, neither as profound as Deadheads believe nor as banal as anybody else might take it to be. It is this one-man-gathers-what-the-other-man-spills mentality that informs the movie. The ignorant person who reviewed it for the Times complained that the film doesn’t probe, which it certainly doesn’t—it wouldn’t be a Dead film if it did. What it does is lay out enough information for anyone who is genuinely curious to find out what the Dead are really about. The ticket hassles and awkward bodies, the spaced-out gibberish and inspired nonsense, the music with all its highs and lows—they’re all here. In 50 years, when people want to know what a rock concert was like, they’ll refer to this movie. But all they’ll find out is what a Dead concert was like. It’s not the same thing—not the same thing at all.