Customer Reviews

Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack

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To second Mr. Sherwin's motion, this is an unusually fine vintage Dead release, better perhaps than the movie on which the recording is based.
Those who love the band know all the songs and so many permutations. What they haven't heard is how very polished the band could be in extended performance: tight and musical and inventive and lovable.

As for the engineers who produced this release, words are insufficient. There is wide dynamic range here, solid definition of all pieces and voices. As for value, five superb discs at this price is almost ridiculous.

Just as Bach taught the world counterpoint, the Dead taught rock the way of improvisation, and they teach it more effectively here than on any other concert reccording, Dick's Picks or compilation I've heard in years.

A release that makes you feel glad you're alive, and that reminds you quietly and with dignity, that the world was aactually a little better once.

A fabulous live release. Easily one of my top-10 live releases -- period.
Buy it, or wonder what you missed.

Some people won't believe me, but I swear, I swear it's true! Just two days ago I watched The Grateful Dead Movie I rented (from an online movie rental company) and I really wanted to get the CD soundtrack from the movie! Imagine my surprise when I just found out this remastered five CD set/soundtrack is actually a BRAND NEW release! I ran out, bought the set and after a listen I felt compelled to write this review from sheer enthusiasm! GRIN! Ecstasy, man!

First of all, if you've ever been to a Dead concert or heard your friends talk about the group you know they were first and foremost a live performance band. (But yes, they put out many albums, too.) They were also well known for their generous many hours' long concerts-and you know what? This five CD set of live performances reflects again the group's generosity! Just as they gave us so much more than the standard two hour concert length many groups after them began to give, there are FIVE CDs here with not only the movie soundtrack but with 32 bonus songs! Making this set even more valuable to fans and collectors is that these songs were recorded in 1974 at San Francisco's legendary Winterland when The Grateful Dead were far more than just kinetic and mesmerizing! All in all everything here makes for a "DeadHead's Delight" and this set is a must for any serious rock fan.

The film is just over two hours so there wasn't time to show the band performing the full length versions of these songs during the movie. But on this set you get it ALL! This CD set more than makes up for that with a 32 minute awesome "Playing In The Band!" and the entire 60-minute blockbuster jam featuring "Sugar Magnolia," "He's Gone," "Jam," "Caution Jam," "Drums," "Space," "Truckin'," "Black Peter," and "Sunshine Daydream." "Not Fade Away," and "Dark Star" are both here, as well as classics many people know even if they aren't serious fans of The Grateful Dead: "Casey Jones," "Uncle John's Band," "Truckin'" and an electric performance of "Johnny B. Goode!"

The set includes some great photos and memorabilia from the movie presented in a 24 page booklet. A good plus!

Simply put, if you're a rock fan and especially if you're a Dead fan you just can't go wrong with this five CD set. It is very reasonably priced for five CDs-you're gonna be thrilled to say the least! A grand slam home run by the best! POW!

The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack is an excellent collection for both long time Deadheads and those new to the boys. It is taken from a period in time (Oct. '74, just before they took a touring break) when the Dead were really smokin'. Those familiar with the Grateful Dead will know how great the songs are from the movie, and the extra tracks are just as good. There are the familiar crowd pleasers (Truckin', Casey Jones, etc.) as well as the long jams (Dark Star, Playing in the Band, etc.) and everything in between in this huge collection. Some of my personal favourites include Eyes of the World (the same version as on the So Many Roads box set, but shortened from 18 to 13 minutes due to tape damage), a 31 minute Playing in the Band, a great The Other One > Spanish Jam > Mind Left Body Jam > The Other One segue, and Weather Report Suite. In all, a great set and a great price considering it's 5 discs, all packed with tunes. My only complaint is that the booklet has pictures but no text, but that is very minor. Check this out; you won't regret it!

'74 is by far one of my favorite performance years in the Dead's touring history. other greats are '68, '70, '72, and '77. This is strange considering I was born in '79, but thats why I love the Dead's commitment to releasing archival live recordings, because I can familiarize my self with every era. I have over 100 Dead albums and live performances and I can definately say this is a top five collection. This is collection of the Dead at their jazziest.

Disc 1:
The set begins with well played versions of US Blues and One More Saturday Night just as they are featured in the Grateful Dead Movie. We are then treated to an energetic China>Rider. Eyes of the world is jazzy and flows nicely into a peaceful China Doll. It that isn't enough we get a nearly 32 minute version of "Playing In the Band." The jam section of this tune is other worldly and never dull.

Disc 2:
Scarlet Begonias is a welcome addition to any collection. Jerry's guitar playing is always sooting on this tune and I actually enjoy Donna's ooohing on this version, it kind of gives the tune an ethereal feel. The rest of the cd is all jam, beginning with He's Gone through some strange and spacey stuff that leads nicely into a rumbling version of The Other One which calms into a beautifully performed Stella Blue.

Disc 3:
This disc begins with a great version of Weather Report Suite. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe '73-'74 was the only time this tune was performed in its entirety. Later versions just began at Let It Grow. This disc is also a jam heavy affair with an excellent Dark Star, Morning Dew, and the always great combo of Not Fade Away and GDTRFB.

Disc 4:
Uncle John's Band is a great performance as usual. However disc 4 contains the collection's only low point in Tomorrow Is Forever. This tune and its performance just plain sucks. The rest of the disc is flawless. The jam begins with Sugar Magnolia and continues into another version of He's Gone. This is where the jamming becomes very interesting. As He's Gone closes it flows nicely into a Caution Jam that teases at Truckin' before moving toward space. The drums follow before we hit an early performance of Space which does decsend back to the Truckin' that was hinted at earlier. The performance is pure improvisational magic.

Disc 5:
After all the great music contained on the first four discs its hard to imagine that disc 5 could be any better, but it is. Mickey Hart rejoins the band after nearly a three year absence and the band is clearly energized by Mickey's presence. It truly shows in the percussive performances of Not Fade Away and The Other One. These are sandwiched between portions of another fantastic Playin' In the Band.

All in all I just can't get enough of this collection. So much of the jamming is truly exploratory and you can hear something new every time you listen. At nearly six hours in length most probably won't listen to it all in one sitting, but it is fantastic nonetheless. Buy this collection along with Dick's Picks 4 and you will have two of the greatest live albums that the greatest live band of all time have released. (Dick's Picks 4 Dark Star>Thats It For the Other One>Turn On Your Lovelight combine for ninety minutes of continuous jammed out ecstasy. nuff said)

I have to get this. I have heard pieces of it and it sounds great. They did and excellent job of mixing the sound of the hall to really give it a great live feel. Winterland was notorious for being a big cavernous hall where sound would bounce all over the place. There is an extraordinary amount of music on this for the price. Any Dead fan will tell you this was a revolutionary period for the band. Their playing had reached such a peak. I agree with the one poster that Garcia's playing had really matured by this point from say the 68-70 period. He now was much more smooth and less frantic. I think it's funny the one guy that posted about the "atrocious female singer". Yeah that's Donna, we know. It's not her fault, she really could sing but could never hear herself onstage therefore resulting in horribly out of tune singing, screeching whatever. One drawback to the wall of sound was the vocal mikes, though effective in blocking out outside noise by having one on top of the other, they were really meant to be instrument mikes and didn't lend themselves to giving the vocals a very warm tone at all. The vocals always kind of sounded tinny. I think I am going to purchase this today now that I have it in my mind. This is vintage Dead, it is almost too bad they stopped playing for a year and a half here, 1976 kind of chugged along but they found their stride again in '77. 1978 was a little more inconsistent. After that things were never as fresh. Good shows here and there definitely but the magic had faded in my opinion.

In October 1974, the Grateful Dead played for five nights at the Winterland in San Francisco by way of a temporary farewell, filming the shows for a film that they hoped would serve as a substitute until they resumed touring, but which didn't appear until 1977, by which time they were back on the road.

Meanwhile, selections from the concerts had appeared on the double-album set Steal Your Face. Generally regarded as the Dead's poorest live album, both in the song selection and the sound mix by Bear and Phil Lesh, it came to be known as Steal Your Money. It's not an album I have heard, but I do know that none of its detractors level the same criticisms at this magnificent 5CD set, culled from the same shows. It is the CD equivalent of the film but with much added, even more than the extended 300-minute DVD set that came out in 2004. There is little overlap with Steal Your Face: four songs appear on both (Ship Of Fools, Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo, US Blues, Stella Blues) but only Ship Of Fools comes from the same night. As the sound has been radically upgraded by Jeffrey Norman for this set, it would be interesting to compare with the earlier master.

At the time of these gigs Mickey was on a gap year (but guests on the final night) and Keith and Donna were fully paid-up members alongside Jerry, Phil, Bob and Bill. The recording dates are given and show that each disc favours one night in date order, but can contain performances drawn from any night between 16th-20th. For example CD1 contains tracks from every night except 20th but features a full half-hour segment of Playing In The Band from the opening night, whereas CD5 is entirely drawn from the final night. All the performances are complete (unlike the film) and when the songs run into one another (as they do for all but two tracks on CD2) they always come from the same performance.

Some songs are kept short, others are fully stretched, and each disc contains doses of spacey jams or drum extravaganzas. A few songs reappear on different nights (Playing In The Band, The Other One, Not Fade Away), always with good reason, and CD3 features the relatively new Weather Report Suite almost side by side with the ever evolving Dark Star (a blissful 24 minute version).

The Grateful Dead are unique among the rock fraternity and this generously priced, lovingly assembled artefact helps explain why and is bound to win them many new fans drawn from different generations. The package is rounded off with a colour booklet of photos and artwork. There are no notes but full credits are listed at the back. A tour de force.

This 5 disc set contains the uninterupted song sequences from the October 1974 Winterland concerts which provided the material for "The Grateful Dead Movie", the last shows to use the wall of sound PA system. If you have the DVD movie and like the performances, it is well worth your while to get this box set. Among the highlights are a 31 minute "playing in the band" that is a musical odyssey. When Garcia talks about whether "its flowing" in his interview segment on the DVD, you'll know what he means. All the songs have a sense of effortless musical communication. They would not stretch out like this in the coming years, at least not as effectively. For heads that love the seemingly endless permutations the dead could conjure up, this box is great news. Check out the jamming on the "Dark Star","eyes of the world", "the other one" or "weather report suite". As these recordings reveal, something about the wall of sound effected their playing for the better. This set is some of the best Grateful Dead I've heard. Phil Lesh recalls this time as among the most satisfying he had in the band....and it's easy to hear on these discs, he does some amazing playing on his custom Alembic bass. I also like the work by Keith Godchaux on the Fender rhodes piano. Garcia was making great strides in his musical vocabulary by this time. Rock scully describes this period in his book, saying how involved Jerry was with the band, turning up frequently at the Grateful Dead office and constantly practicing new scales and chords. Compared to a few years before, his playing is more finely honed. Just about Everything Bob Weir plays fits in perfectly. So what we get on these these discs is a band in their prime playing through the best sound system they ever used, at one of the most fabled venues in rock history. The remastering is great, easily the best 1974 GD recordings I have heard. The vocals have been equalized to sound fuller (a fault of all wall of sound recordings due to the mic arrangement). The engineer also plays back certain tracks through a guitar amplifier and re-records them, the overall effect is to give the recordings more of the ambience they would have in a concert hall. Some may question this practice, but I think it serves the music well. All in all another must have collection for any serious deadhead and it's reasonably priced for a 5 disc set.

First, let me say that the sound quality on this is execellent. The only problem that I guess I have is that once again alot of the jams have been edited. David Lemeiux (the band's vault archivest) said after the release that this was originally going to be a seven disc set instead of five (what it now is) but the higher ups thought that seven was too much and so it was edited down to five. Aside from some cool stuff that's still missing from this run of shows, this set is great. Highlights are many but don't miss Eyes Of The World, Playing In The Band, Dark Star-Morning Dew, The Other One into almost everything, Uncle John's Band, and the Truckin' jam.

Usually so-called "movie soundtracks" are little more than an excuse to sell CDs by bands not even associated with the movie. Either that, or the soundtrack is lifeless and more background music than something one would actively listen to.

Neither is true in the case of The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack.

This 5 CD set is stunning in its clarity and mesmerizing in its musicianship.

I'm no Grateful Dead expert. But I am a music aficionado. I know good music when I hear it. And The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack is very good music indeed.

I wish it was possible to give this '74 vintage Dead album more than 5 stars because, it may well be, song per song the best live Dead collection yet. These Winterland recordings showcase the Grateful Dead riding the crest of their early middle years and buoyed by the return of Mickey Hart to the band. Never before, or since, has the Dead played with more clarity, precision, vision, nuance, dynamics and passion than these Winterland '74 shows. I won't go into the content; the scope of the 5 disc box makes it impossible.

The ragged and often erratic sound console mix of the Dead during their early psychedelic years has evolved into a pristine fidelity that still sounds better than most live concert recordings of the current digital era. Bear and the Dead crew have fine tuned the Dead wall of sound by the replacing the conventional sound console with six separate channels that allows the musicians to adjust the volume of the vocals and instruments right on stage. This singular innovation allowed the band to concentrate on playing, instead of constantly working with the sound crew to recalibrate the sound mix, between songs. The speaker columns for the vocal mikes were moved to an unconventional location, behind the band, to allow the band to hear "what the audience was hearing" and make sound mix adjustments. It was a startling improvement on the Dead's live sound.

"The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack" defines the live sound of the Dead's watershed "middle years". The band is 10 years old and at the point where financial pressures that once threatened the survival of the band have eased. Bad management and royalty advances has piled up a mountain of debt,that forced the band members to live in the style of starving Bohemian artists despite being a first tier rock band. As in marriage, fianacial problems appear to be the prime mover in divorces of rock bands. For the Dead, thier long winter of financial discontent was nearly over.

With wolf no longer at the door, the Dead are able play in their finest form. Garcia has become a guitar innovator: his sense of guitar touch can be delicate or have the impact of a sledgehammer when he plays. The band members are so attuned to Jerry's sprawling leads, they are able to cue into a segue in the blink of an eye. The band has become so intuitive on it's jams, it's as if they've punched a hole in the comos and tranported listeners to the strange music of a parallel reality. Nearly all the perennial favorites are played in the sweep of the 44 cuts. Thirteen songs are expanded by jams of over 10 minutes. "Playing In the Band" has a brillant 32 minute jam that is among the best I've ever heard.

The under-thirty dollar retail price of this five disc set, makes it a gift to those accustomed to paying fifty or sixty bucks for a box set with a lot less musical content. It's the best live release of 2005 or any year, for that matter. File "The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack" under essential recordings.