This is a concert film about a five-day engagement for the Dead in San Francisco in 1974, but it also includes a good deal of footage of fans (dancing, talking, waiting in line), some animated psychedelia, and a tidbit of history. It's decent. The only really amazing concert film I've ever seen is This Is It, and most of the rest are like this: good, shot from the usual dozen angles, including lots of footage of fans having a great time/embarrassing themselves, offering virtually no actual insight into the band.
I have never had any interest in the Grateful Dead, and have always been a bit mystified by their popularity, as the music seemed surprisingly generic to me. I'm not going to say I understand everything better now, but I do see that the concerts were an experience in their own right - that the concerts (gatherings) were an excuse for the music instead of the other way around. With KISS, the concerts are kind of a vehicle for fetishism and spectacle rather than music, and the Dead are only minimally different. (I also know firsthand that some bands come alive only in concert, and on albums are dull as white toast. I figured that was the case with the Dead before, but I still couldn't understand how such a mild force as their music, even in concert, could propel such a long, successful, cultish phenomenon.)
A few little things interested me about this film with regard to my project. One was the feeling I had that this was less capturing something vital than nostalgia for a cultural movement that had all but vanished. By the late 70s, hippies had drifted up into mainstream society, down into violent fringe movements and poverty, or out entirely, into death. Weed, the drug of choice in the 60s, had been traded for cocaine, and the difference between the two carries a lot of weight for me in terms of what had changed by the end of the 70s. Fast vs. slow, addictive vs. non, skinny vs. fat. Granted, this was filmed in 1974, which - truly, I know, it's only three years, but truly - had a totally different feel, culturally, than 1977.
It's difficult to put the culture captured in this film up against Saturday Night Fever, you know? Not that the two subcultures can't exist alongside each other in America (surely the weirdest country). But if either of them expresses the actual national mood, I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and this one is the relic.
Also, some of the animation in the opening offered strong reminders of the Bicentennial, the year before, which is a small bright thread I see running through movies of the year, particularly low-budget ones. It was a big deal, the Bicentennial, and remnants of it being inescapably a part of life in America in 1976 are scattered across the films of 1977.
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