Like the recent Zappa DVD from the same source, this cheekily-titled movie is a fine example of how to make a music documentary. Exhaustive at 138 minutes, it’s a slickly told, well-crafted and fascinating look at the rise of the Grateful Dead and, to a lesser extent, their fellow travellers like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Charlatans and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

I’ve always found the Grateful Dead to be a band that it was easier to admire than enjoy, but there’s no question that their story is an interesting one. This documentary sticks to the 1960s, tracing the story from Jerry Garcia’s early jugband days through the band’s first incarnation as The Warlocks, the rise of the hippy movement with Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in 1966, the Summer of Love in 1967 and the rise of San Francisco as a rapidly overcrowded, out-of-control counter-culture capital in the wake of the Monterey Pop Festival, and the inevitable collapse of the dream in 1968 and 1969 with riots, police brutality and the spectacularly ill-conceived Altamont festival – co-organised by the Dead – where hippy ideals were crushed by Hell’s Angels brutality. Along the way, the film covers the early Dead recordings as well as the work of other bands, and is packed with rare footage – as well as extensive scenes from the Monterey Pop documentary film and the notorious Altamont movie Gimme Shelter.

For reasons of mortality, most of the Dead themselves are represented by archive interview footage, but there are enough connected people featured here to make this considerably more than just a collection of old clips. And while many of the stories here might be familiar, it’s good to see the period captured so thoroughly. I’m still not sure I want to listen to any more Grateful Dead records (their psychedelic epic Dark Star sounds every bit the dirge I recalled it as being), this film has given me a new understanding of their importance as leaders of a scene that arguably changed popular music more drastically than at any time before or since.

DAVID FLINT

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