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Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack
(Grateful Dead)
The Music Box's #4 specialty package for 2005
First Appeared in The Music Box, June 2005, Volume 12, #6
Written by John Metzger
The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack isn’t the first attempt to
encapsulate the Grateful Dead’s 1974 "farewell" concerts at Winterland Arena in
San Francisco, but it is a vast improvement over Steal Your Face, the
hastily constructed and jarringly uneven double-LP collection that in 1976 was
issued to fulfill a contractual obligation to United Artists. Indeed, while the
latter set had its moments, both the songs that were selected as well as the
manner in which they were presented did little to further the band’s cause. The
newly minted five-disc package that has been dubbed The Grateful Dead Movie
Soundtrack, however, not only is something entirely different, but it also
is utterly sublime.
For the record, the Grateful Dead has been known quite infamously for falling
apart when placed within a pressurized situation, and while there certainly are
plenty of examples to support this claim — the frustrations of both Woodstock
and Altamont, for example — there also are an equal number of illustrations to
disprove it. True, the five shows that marked the band’s departing soiree in
October 1974 contained some shaky moments — most notably, during the final
send-off, which was performed under the heavy influence of psychedelics — but as
The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack confirms, there were far more than
just a handful of worthwhile highlights from these concerts. In fact, the audio
collection is as essential as the film that inspired it.
Beginning with the one-two punch of U.S. Blues and One More
Saturday Night, the first disc of The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack
initially follows the path outlined by its namesake documentary, but as it
progresses, its affiliation becomes more loosely defined. While all of the
tracks that appeared in the film are represented on the collection, they each
are reinserted, at least in part, within the context of the concert from which
they originally were taken. After the opening suite of songs, which compiles
several exquisite snapshots of the band’s stage persona into a sparkling
gemstone of sonic splendor, the rest of the albums in the set provide four
distinctly different intergalactic travelogues: There’s a chapter that meshes
the group’s propensity for jazz-permeated, deep-space freak-outs with the
ominously heavy, cataclysmic thunder of The Other One; an installment
that emphasizes its gracefully apocalyptic, but beautiful explorations of Dark Star; a segment featuring He’s Gone, Truckin’, and Black Peter that focuses upon the ensemble’s blues- and gospel-infused
undercurrents; and an episode that stresses its percussive tribalism by fusing
Not Fade Away with another wild romp through The Other One.
Like many of the magnificent outings within the Grateful Dead’s extensive
series of archival releases, The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack perfectly
preserves the collective’s preeminently precise method of unspoken communication
while leaving behind its self-admitted ragtag tendencies. By the time the band
embarked upon its fall tour of 1974 — of which the Winterland shows were the
culmination — its adventurous pursuits of unbridled, jazz-fusion-driven
exploration were nearly at an end. Although its subsequent studio effort Blues for Allah, which was recorded during its hiatus, undeniably was shaped
by these exploits, the sonic architecture of its later concerts reflected a
different, more tightly-knit perspective. It’s here, then, within the
concentrated confines of the extracts from the "farewell" shows that its
dabbling in what Ornette Coleman dubbed "harmolodics" is most explicitly on
display. To be sure, each of the elongated improvisational segments is a
veritable showcase for the Grateful Dead’s slipstream spontaneity. On the
rendition of Playing in the Band that concludes the first album in the
set, for example, the group wove together a series of melodic elements, and
whenever one instrumentalist’s thematic interlude dissipated, one of the other
musicians gently caught the conceptual thread and carried it to its destination.
Essentially, this is the aural equivalent of cloud-hopping, and scant few
artists ever have been able to achieve this feat with such impeccable regularity
as the Grateful Dead.
Featuring six hours worth of material, The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack
might appear, at first glimpse, to be a tad unwieldy for some casual fans to
undertake, but the Grateful Dead’s variegated, multi-textural approach allowed
it to cover vast expanses of terrain with magnificently stunning ease. Although
there are numerous songs from its canon that are absent from the effort, all of
the band’s tricks for transcendental transportation are given a chance to shine.
Better than any of the group’s countless other multi-disc collections — many of
which are superb in their own right — the package provides a flawless
representation of the ensemble’s intrepid trips through the space-time
continuum. In other words, much like The Grateful Dead Movie is the
epitome of the "Grateful Dead" experience, The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack
is the quintessential audio collection of the band’s mind-bending sojourns, and
miraculously, its sheer sophistication makes even the much-revered music of Live/Dead seem one-dimensional. 
Other Articles & Reviews
The Grateful Dead Movie
From Chaos to Beauty: The Transformation of The Grateful Dead Movie
The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack is available on CD from
Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
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The Grateful Dead Movie is available on DVD from
Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
Click Here!
For UK orders, please
Click Here!
Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2005
The Music Box
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