›› MUSiC
One more Saturday night... Deadhead planets re-align for Jerry Garcia’s 70th by G r e g Cahill
“J
erry was the sun of the Grateful Dead,” Carlos Santana wrote recently of guitarist Jerry Garcia in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Rock Guitarists of All Time. “The music they played was like planets orbiting around him.” Thirteen years after Garcia’s untimely death at a Marin County rehab clinic, the world—or at least a segment of the rock world—still revolves around the late axe slinger. Upcoming celebrations of Garcia’s 70th birthday on Aug. 1 range from tribute concerts and a Web broadcast hosted by his former bandmate Bob Weir to a special San Francisco Giants-sponsored Grateful Dead theme night (Aug. 9) at AT&T Park and a one-night-only re-release of the 1977 concert film and paean to psychedelia, The Grateful Dead Movie (co-directed by Garcia and Leon Gast), featuring freewheeling performances captured during a five-night stand at the long-defunct Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The core of the national observance of Garcia’s 70th birthday is A Birthday Cel-
ebration: The Grateful Dead Movie Event, presented on Aug. 1 in theaters across the country by NCM Fathom Events and Rhino Entertainment (which handles distribution of the Grateful Dead’s Warner Bros. albums and related product). The pre-show birthday commemoration features Weir and other luminaries, including Santana, reflecting on Garcia from Weir’s new state-of-the-art multimedia studio, the Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), which is located in San Rafael. That tribute features Weir, Benmont Tench of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Phish bassist Mike Gordon, Chris Robinson Brotherhood guitarist Neal Casal, Furthur/Duo drummer Joe Russo, session guitarist Jonathan Wilson, singers and songwriters Cass McCombs and Harper Simon, and RatDog/Furthur keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and Donna Jean Godchaux, a full-fledged member of the Dead from 1972-1979. According to Relix magazine, the event will be hosted by actor Luke Wilson. The tribute segment is being directed by Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s son,
‘The Grateful Dead Movie’ was co-directed by Leon Gast, who would go on to direct the 1996 Oscar-winning Rumble in the Jungle doc ‘When We Were Kings.’
filmmaker Justin Kreutzmann. Audiences will also see a slideshow of rare photos of the band set to a previously unreleased live track. The Grateful Dead Movie was shot in October 1974 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco before the Grateful Dead took a two-year sabbatical. It chronicles the original Deadhead phenomenon and includes band performances of “U.S. Blues,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Casey Jones,” “Playing in the Band” and “Sugar
Magnolia,” among other Dead classics. In a 2004 review of the then-newly remastered film, San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin lauded the movie as “the definitive Dead concert film” and noted: “Even for Deadheads who have watched the movie more times than was probably healthy, the new high-definition video digital transfer will still yield revelations. Crisp, rich colors bring back those nights at Winterland with the clarity of a glossy post card.” In a press release, Shelly Maxwell, executive vice president of NCM Fathom Events, noted: “Bringing The Grateful Dead Movie back to U.S. cinemas is the ultimate way for Dead fans to celebrate Garcia’s 70th birthday. This one-night event will allow fans to gather at their local theaters to honor Garcia as they once again experience the music that made him a legend.” This one-night event, a follow-up to last year’s successful national screening, will be broadcast to more than 450 select movie theaters across the country through NCM’s Digital Broadcast Network. The Grateful Dead Movie will screen at the Regency 6 in San Rafael, the CineArts Sequoia 2 in Mill Valley and the CineArts Marin 3 in Sausalito. Earlier this year, Shout! Factory released The Grateful Dead Movie as a deluxe twodisc DVD set. “The film intertwines the band playing with backstage tomfoolery, audience chicanery, stage door negotiations and the scene on the street outside,” Selvin noted in his 2004 review. “The Dead, impossibly young, unbelievably skinny, perform a baker’s dozen of the band’s classics, nine years after the band first rolled into the Fillmore Auditorium, arguably at the peak of the group’s storied career. When the band returned from the year-and-a-half hiatus these performances occasioned, the golden era of the Grateful Dead was over. But The Grateful Dead Movie remains.” < Dead reckon with Greg at gcahill51@gmail.com. JULY 27- AUGUST 2, 2012 PACIFIC SUN 19