One of the few great live documents of the band

Prior to the 1990's, I think The Grateful Dead Movie was one of the few truly great officially released documents of the band onstage.

Oh, Live/Dead was a great album (hampered a bit by the double LP format), but after that, each succeeding live album, to me, always seem to just miss the mark in terms of presenting what The Grateful Dead sounded like onstage at that time.

Well, maybe Skull***k I suppose comes close, but it's weighed down by too many cover tunes. They could have included any of a number of Garcia or Weir songs that were played at the same bunch of shows in place of Big Railroad Blues, Me And My Uncle, Mama Tried, etc. Also, Playin' In The Band wasn't yet the jam vehicle that it would soon become.

Europe '72 was pretty good, but again, the song selection, at times is, questionable. I mean, how could they include You Win Again, but leave off something like Two Souls In Communion (perhaps Pigpen's finest contribution to The Dead's music)?! And I really wish they could have included the entire jam that Truckin' and Morning Dew are drawn from, but I guess since they used a version of The Other One on Skull***k, they decided they couldn't repeat it on the very next release (and probably the same reason that the great Dark Star performances from the Euro '72 tour couldn't be used). Besides which, that jam would have probably required the jam to spill over onto a third LP side.

Likewise, there are too many cover tunes on Steal Your Face. Even if you when you count out all the songs that couldn't be repeated from the first three Grateful Dead live albums, there was still a lot of great songs they SHOULD have been on Steal Your Face, including Eyes Of The World, Weather Report Suite, and Scarlet Begonias.

Which is why the movie was the best document of The Dead onstage, because it didn't use whatever crazy logic Lesh used when putting together Steal Your Face, so Jerry was able to present the truly best music (or at least some of it, anyway) from those five nights at the Winterland in October of 74. And a good sized chunk of what didn't appear in the original movie is either on the bonus DVD disc or on The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack.

Of course, nowadays, with all the many archival releases the band has put out, such as the Dick's Picks series and so forth, to say nothing of the high quality board tapes that circulate amongst traders, it seems a moot point.

But back in 1987, when I first got into The Grateful Dead, the Weirdness jam that precedes Morning Dew in the movie was one of the few examples of that side of The Dead's music that was easy to acquire. You didn't hear much of that on The Grateful Dead Hour (which was broadcasting in Cleveland at the time, anyway) and it'd be a few years before I'd find myself trading tapes with other collectors (took me awhile to figure out how to slide into that), so that was a bit of a rarity at the time.