The fact is, the Grateful Dead have always had too much respect for Deadheads — and I am most assuredly counting myself "among the faithful." The 30th Anniversary Edition of their silver screen excursion, The Grateful Dead Movie, is being feted with a double-disc DVD set containing over two hours of never-before-available concert footage, behind the scenes documentaries, and a few hidden "easter egg" goodies to boot. The accompanying five-CD soundtrack boasts 40 songs spread over six total hours, many of which were either included in the original cut, or as one of the bonuses on the DVD. But when has the band ever been satisfied offering their audience anything except the full monty?
Every note has been taken from the legendary five-night (October 16 - 20, 1974) stand at San Francisco's Winterland Arena. At the time, the shows were touted as their last, prior to a sabbatical of unknown length ? none of the band members, their crew, or extended business ?family? knew whether the Grateful Dead would ever play together again. That said, there was one thing they had all come to realize ? a first-hand understanding of the personal strains, the ever-escalating costs, as well as the logistics associated with many months of incessant touring. Thankfully, the ?retirement? or ?farewell? run turned out to be 21 years premature.
Prior to a 12-day, 7-show European excursion in September of 1974, a meeting was held and the possibility of taking some time off was discussed. Extreme fatigue, the financial drain that came from toting around their 604-speaker/26,400 watt "Wall of Sound," coupled with the respective personal excesses of the era, had finally taken an inexorable toll. In true Grateful Dead style, they planned to go out in a suitably grandiose fashion. Although the combo was admittedly light of coin, Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and then Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow were motivated by the possibility that this may well be the last vestiges of the band's nine-year musical experiment.
According to Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead historian and author of the definitive biography A Long Strange Trip (2002), the prospects of making a movie had been in the air since the spring of 1974. The idea was certainly not a novel concept either, as an attempt had been made two years earlier to cinematically document the charisma of a Grateful Dead concert. An amateur, but competent film crew captured an August 27, 1972 benefit concert. The band played in support of author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and his family — first generation Deadheads whose roots extended back to the days of the mid '60s Acid Tests — and their Veneta, Oregon-based Springfield Creamery. Although undeniably entertaining, the resulting film, Sunshine Daydream, was deemed unsatisfactory and remains unreleased to this day.
What Garcia and Rakow had in mind for The Grateful Dead Movie was something on a decidedly more ostentatious scale. This was especially true of Garcia, whose infatuation with the cinema dated back to his childhood. Eddie Washington, an old friend of Jerry's who had attended film school at Stanford University, and Leon Gast, who called the shots during the actual film shoot, were brought on board to help Garcia and Rakow work out the details. Less than two weeks before the performances, Rakow hired a 46-person crew to document every aspect of the proceedings. In addition to the obvious on-stage action, these cinematographers would also interact with the ever-enthusiastic Grateful Dead audience and road crew, all of whom were rightfully considered as integral as the performers themselves.
Gast brought with him a nine-man camera crew consisting of Johnathan Else, Thomas Hurwitz, Kevin Keating, Don Lenzer, Stephen Lighthill, Albert Maysles, David Myers, Richard Paup and Robert Primes. In the case of Keating, Lighthill, Maysles and Primes, their most notable and related experience had been on the Rolling Stones' infamous rockumentary Gimmie Shelter (1970), while Lenzer and Myers were veterans of Woodstock (1970). Without question, both films remain social, as well as visual and musical, time capsules of the late 1960s.
To finance what was turning into a considerable endeavor, Garcia and Rakow begged, borrowed, and possibly stole from every available source. Dennis McNally states in the liner booklet essay accompanying the DVD set, ?He [Garcia] spent more than two years sweating over that film, and it damaged him some.? When asked to expound on that, McNally added, ?The price of the movie to Garcia was the problem of financing. They didn't know what it was going to cost, and in order, in the end, to pay it, he had to run in ragged circles to find money. Considering that it was band money but, ultimately, his personal project, this created divisions. And his final decision, to present it as a concert rather than go through normal film distribution channels ensured that they'd not make their money back — good art, bad business.? Garcia and Rakow were able to pull off a major coup by convincing the Bank of Boston to front big bucks to the Grateful Dead's record and film companies, euphemistically dubbed Round Records and Round Reels. After the shows had been played (and already in debt up to his fretboard) the 20-plus hours of footage was given to Garcia to somehow create a cohesive film.
 The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Grateful Dead Movie features more than 95 minutes of never-before-seen concert footage and a new Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix. |
Every note has been taken from the legendary five-night (October 16 - 20, 1974) stand at San Francisco's Winterland Arena. At the time, the shows were touted as their last, prior to a sabbatical of unknown length ? none of the band members, their crew, or extended business ?family? knew whether the Grateful Dead would ever play together again. That said, there was one thing they had all come to realize ? a first-hand understanding of the personal strains, the ever-escalating costs, as well as the logistics associated with many months of incessant touring. Thankfully, the ?retirement? or ?farewell? run turned out to be 21 years premature.
Prior to a 12-day, 7-show European excursion in September of 1974, a meeting was held and the possibility of taking some time off was discussed. Extreme fatigue, the financial drain that came from toting around their 604-speaker/26,400 watt "Wall of Sound," coupled with the respective personal excesses of the era, had finally taken an inexorable toll. In true Grateful Dead style, they planned to go out in a suitably grandiose fashion. Although the combo was admittedly light of coin, Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and then Grateful Dead Records president Ron Rakow were motivated by the possibility that this may well be the last vestiges of the band's nine-year musical experiment.
According to Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead historian and author of the definitive biography A Long Strange Trip (2002), the prospects of making a movie had been in the air since the spring of 1974. The idea was certainly not a novel concept either, as an attempt had been made two years earlier to cinematically document the charisma of a Grateful Dead concert. An amateur, but competent film crew captured an August 27, 1972 benefit concert. The band played in support of author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and his family — first generation Deadheads whose roots extended back to the days of the mid '60s Acid Tests — and their Veneta, Oregon-based Springfield Creamery. Although undeniably entertaining, the resulting film, Sunshine Daydream, was deemed unsatisfactory and remains unreleased to this day.
What Garcia and Rakow had in mind for The Grateful Dead Movie was something on a decidedly more ostentatious scale. This was especially true of Garcia, whose infatuation with the cinema dated back to his childhood. Eddie Washington, an old friend of Jerry's who had attended film school at Stanford University, and Leon Gast, who called the shots during the actual film shoot, were brought on board to help Garcia and Rakow work out the details. Less than two weeks before the performances, Rakow hired a 46-person crew to document every aspect of the proceedings. In addition to the obvious on-stage action, these cinematographers would also interact with the ever-enthusiastic Grateful Dead audience and road crew, all of whom were rightfully considered as integral as the performers themselves.
Gast brought with him a nine-man camera crew consisting of Johnathan Else, Thomas Hurwitz, Kevin Keating, Don Lenzer, Stephen Lighthill, Albert Maysles, David Myers, Richard Paup and Robert Primes. In the case of Keating, Lighthill, Maysles and Primes, their most notable and related experience had been on the Rolling Stones' infamous rockumentary Gimmie Shelter (1970), while Lenzer and Myers were veterans of Woodstock (1970). Without question, both films remain social, as well as visual and musical, time capsules of the late 1960s.
To finance what was turning into a considerable endeavor, Garcia and Rakow begged, borrowed, and possibly stole from every available source. Dennis McNally states in the liner booklet essay accompanying the DVD set, ?He [Garcia] spent more than two years sweating over that film, and it damaged him some.? When asked to expound on that, McNally added, ?The price of the movie to Garcia was the problem of financing. They didn't know what it was going to cost, and in order, in the end, to pay it, he had to run in ragged circles to find money. Considering that it was band money but, ultimately, his personal project, this created divisions. And his final decision, to present it as a concert rather than go through normal film distribution channels ensured that they'd not make their money back — good art, bad business.? Garcia and Rakow were able to pull off a major coup by convincing the Bank of Boston to front big bucks to the Grateful Dead's record and film companies, euphemistically dubbed Round Records and Round Reels. After the shows had been played (and already in debt up to his fretboard) the 20-plus hours of footage was given to Garcia to somehow create a cohesive film.
Enter Susan Crutcher, the project's supervising editor. Crutcher connected with Garcia on a very personal level through her work on a documentary about the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Her contributions to the 30th Anniversary Edition of the Grateful Dead Movie include a full-length audio commentary alongside her assistant editor John Nutt.
 Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh |
CrutchfieldAdvisor was fortunate to spend an afternoon with Ms. Crutcher on November 17, 2004. She spoke candidly about her involvement in what became the Grateful Dead Movie, and also about the unusual path that led to her to becoming one of America's most lauded cinematic editors. Her diverse body of work speaks for itself, and includes The Wanderers (1979), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Right Stuff (1983), Twice Upon a Time (1983), The Moneytree (1992), Flypaper (1997), and Run the Wild Fields (2000), among others. While her answers capture her wit and wicked sense of humor, our brief meeting also revealed a sincere and fascinating individual whose talents may only be exceeded by her uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.
Lindsay Planer: Let's start with your background. How did you get involved in visual arts, specifically cinema?
Susan Crutcher: Actually, I was more of a painter. I went to various institutions of higher learning as many people did back in the '60s. I was living in Virginia and I really wanted to come back to California to college. My dad was in the Pentagon all during the Vietnam War and that presented its own set of difficulties because I was definitely a pacifist and I marched. All the while he was at the Pentagon.
LP: So, was he friends with Robert McNamara?
SC: Ha! Yeah, you know he probably was. See, not only was my dad there, both my uncle and my godfather were working there too. When we did our march (October 22, 1967) on the Pentagon — the first one before The Moratorium Marches — I vividly remember looking up at the top where all the officers were and thinking, "My dad's up there and my uncle is up there." That was very surreal and then they gassed us of course. That aside, I had kinda botched my grades up during my last two years of high school. I had been an A student and started to rebel about having to live in Virginia and attend this horribly conformist high school.
LP: Were you from the West Coast originally?
SC: I was born in Coronado, California, which is just south of San Diego. Since my dad was a Captain in the Navy, we spent most of the tour in that area — Monterey, Long Beach, and we actually lived in Coronado twice. When I was 16 and a young surfer chick, we were sent to VIRGINIA! That would have been around 1963 or 1964, right before The Beatles. That is exactly how I can place it because I remember hearing ?I Wanna Hold Your Hand? and calling a friend to tell her about this amazing group I'd just heard.
LP: That seems to have been a very visceral touchstone for many folks who would go on to become involved in art later in their lives.
SC: I always loved The Beatles. My roommate at this woman's college I went to in Virginia and I were such fans that we would actually send to England to get their albums. We sent to London to get the records and, of course, this was way before e-mail or anything even remotely like that. So, we had to send them pounds and it was cool. I remember we got Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966) that way.
LP: Was that your entree into rock'n'roll? In your audio commentary for the Grateful Dead Movie, you mentioned you weren't a Deadhead as such.
SC: I was always into rock 'n' roll and had inherited my older sister's 45 collection. I knew a lot about doo-wop and still do. If I heard the Flamingos, I'd know it was them.
LP: Didn't you use ?I Only Have Eyes For You? in the film The Right Stuff?SC: Yeah, I did and that was really a fun project. The music was something I was familiar with because my parents had all these Les Paul and Mary Ford records and I used one of their tunes, as well as Hank Williams.
LP: You also worked on several other high-profile films.
SC: Yes, I chose the music for The Wanderers and did sound design for Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Body Snatchers was the first film [that] I worked with Philip Kaufman [on], who also produced The Right Stuff.
LP: What was the bridge between your involvement with painting and getting into motion pictures?
SC: It's odd to think about, but I was initially wanting to do special effects. Not blow things up or anything like that. I came to the realization that I was not going to be a great painter. I was doing these huge abstract color canvases. To me they had meaning, but they weren't what you'd call realistic. I never learned to draw properly because I was just too impatient.
So, my thought was that if I got into film, that gave me 24 paintings or images per second. So, I thought I would just go out and shoot 24 paintings per second and I started capturing stuff with this little camera I had. I was pretty impoverished at the time and so I couldn't really shoot too much. I was also continuing to paint and one day when I was painting up at this lovely barn in Connecticut, right outside of New York City, I had dropped a huge blob of paint near my shoe. I looked down and there was this ad for New York University (NYU). It said something like, "Study at NYU Graduate School — Go to France and work with Francois Truffaut."
I said, "Oh yeah, that's me!", because I was a film aficionado and had gone to see French and German New Wave since I was 16 or so. I love Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. I must have seen [Bergman's] Shame (1968) at least four times. So, anyway, after seeing that ad I got all my stuff together, and these wild scenarios I had written that would probably cost millions of dollars to make. There was also some poetry I had, my paintings, and I put all this stuff together in a little package. I made an appointment to meet with the Dean of NYU's Graduate School. But see, I hadn't yet graduated from an undergrad school. I only had three years of college. But there was a caveat that had said "equivalent experience" and he very graciously granted me an interview.
There I was on the train platform in Westport, Connecticut, waiting and there was this lovely looking woman with her two young children. We struck up a conversation and she inquired about where I was off to. I told her that I was going to meet with the Dean of the NYU's Graduate Film School. She paused a second and then said, ?Oh! That's my husband and you will like him very much. He's a really nice man.?
LP: Wow! It's like you were placed there by some sort of divine providence.
SC: Absolutely! She told me not to be nervous and that she could tell he would like me very much. When I got there, I recounted the story about how I had just met his wife. He must have liked how precocious I was with all this junk I had laid on his desk — granted, the stuff had absolutely no value really, except I guess it showed interest and ambition. He told me that although he couldn't really accept me in grad school, NYU had a undergraduate school. I told him that I didn't know that.
He said, "Yeah, school starts in a couple of days. Would you be interested in undergraduate school?" I told him that I'd love to, but I didn't have any money. He then said, "Well, I think I can set you up with a loan. Go see this person downstairs in Administration, and three days later I was in NYU's Film School."
LP: Let's talk about how you eventually got involved with The Grateful Dead Movie (1977).
SC: I had worked with animator Gary Gutierrez on one short piece for Sesame Street in around 1972-1973. It was actually at independent filmmaker John Korty's house where Gary ended up shooting the animation. Although I was not in the band's family or circle, I heard that the Grateful Dead were going to be making a movie and that it was going to be edited in Mill Valley — which is where John [Korty's] studio was located. At that point I had been editing very small documentaries, and I was working at this little company down in the Sausalito houseboats. The guy who ran the company was Roy Nolen. That was the first place I landed when I came from the East Coast.
LP: What had you worked on up to that point?
SC: Prior to moving back to California, I'd worked on for a very small documentary company in Connecticut. After I got into NYU, I got a summer job working for a small company in Westport that was run by a guy named Bill Buckley — not the political one. He ran it out of his house.
After my summer there, they asked me to stay and I got $120.00/week, which I thought was fabulous. I had the chance to cut films [whose target audience was] junior high school kids. One was on gonorrhea and the other was on the horrors of marijuana. The only really good one was about Marion Anderson, the great opera star — that [film] was done for the New York Times/Arnold Press and was part of a series on black history. That project was elegant and very well done.
I kind of showed these three films to Roy and told him I wanted a job editing. My boyfriend (who was evading the draft) and I were driving cross-country and we picked up this hitch-hiker. Just by looking at a map, I decided that I wanted to live in Stinson Beach. So we asked this guy as we were driving, "Hey, every heard of Stinson Beach?" He said, "Yeah, it's all hippies and old folks there." So, I said, "Yeah, that's where we're gonna live."
So, we got there. Sausalito was just a bumpy drive over Mount Tamalpis and within months I had a job. We eventually got a place in Mill Valley and that was about the time the rumor was spreading about this movie that the Grateful Dead were going to be putting together. During that time, Mill Valley was just an amazing place to live. You could walk down most any little tree-lined street and hear this great music coming from God only knows where. It was people playing live, people like Santana. There were a lot of folks just tucked away up there.
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LP: Did you ever follow the sound and investigate?
SC: Nah, I was just glad it was there. A symphonic cacophony of sounds mixing with the birds and the breeze. It was nice. At that time, you didn't live in Mill Valley to be noticed. It was a creative community where no one was gonna bug you.
Anyway, I had heard that the band were trying to hire folks like Dede Allen or Thelma Schoonmaker — all these A-list editors from Hollywood. Of course, no one wanted to have anything to do with the Dead because they were considered too crazy; also, they really weren't paying what these top-shelf folks wanted. Ultimately, none of these people wanted to leave Los Angeles and come to Mill Valley — a place they would have probably adored, but knew nothing about — and work with an insane rock'n'roll group, with no idea how long it would take or anything else. Plus, none of them were documentary editors to begin with, so that type of film probably wouldn't have sounded like a very good idea.
I decided to take the Zen approach. I waited for all the dust to settle and then found out who to call. The band had already done the shows and they had the footage and a place to work in Mill Valley. They just needed a post-production staff. Leon Gast had already taken off, leaving Jerry [Garcia] and [Ron] Rakow in charge. Leon was a great guy who brought with him a great camera crew to capture all the footage. But he was on to his next project. So, as I say, Jerry came forward to pick up the pieces and became essentially what we called the Director of the Editing or Director of Post-production.
LP: You mention in your commentary that Jerry's credit was unusual in that it was the perfect description of what he actually did.
SC: Yes and one thing I think is important to mention is that on The Grateful Dead Movie, any credit that anyone has is accurate, and that is extremely rare.
LP: You mentioned earlier, as well as in the DVD commentary, that while you were a rock fan, you weren't a Deadhead per se. I found that really interesting, as your editing style is so very complementary to the organic nature or flow of live Grateful Dead shows. Since Jerry had such a hands-off approach, how were you able to so perfectly reflect the free-form improvisational spirit of the concert and attendees?
SC: I was editing all the music, and prior to actually cutting the movie, I had already worked on a very short, half-hour documentary piece that ended up being interwoven into the music. That might still exist, actually. I tell you, it was so weird for John [Nutt], my co-editor, and I to go into the vault and see our handwriting on all the stuff. It was like time traveling or something.
LP: Were you two hired at the same time?
SC: As I recall, we both came on as assistants to begin with, along with another guy. We first had to synch everything up. After all the dust had settled, I made my appeal to Rakow and told him straight out, "Ron, I'd really like to edit this movie." He said, "Fine, why don't you bring some of your films up to my house in Stinson Beach and Jerry will be there."
I didn't drive at the time so my boyfriend gave me a ride and dropped me off. Ron had a little 16mm projector and we screened some of my movies. The one thing that clinched the deal was the movie that I did about the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic, [which] included a scene with Garcia's friend Sunshine. She's talking about how the clinic helped her get clean. Jerry saw that and really got excited.
LP: Would it be fair to say that hearkened back to what you and Jerry had talked about regarding the first blossoms of the Haight-Ashbury scene and what Jerry called "The Drum" — how people are connected just by a motif of common experiences? Just by following that perpetual pulse of the social subterranean scene, they created a community and that rarest of fusions yielded the infamous "misfit power."
SC: Exactly. Garcia was able to re-connect with an old acquaintance and he just beamed and said, ?Hey, it's Sunshine!" I felt that was the moment I had the job. No one else had asked for it, I really wanted it, and Jerry and Sunshine have bonded from the [movie playing on Rakow?s] wall. So, after it was done, we were all sitting at the breakfast table and I'll never forget Rakow saying, "Well, I think everybody who needs to be involved in this movie is at this table."
LP: That's gotta be a good feeling.
SC: A very good feeling. And then, to top it all off, Jerry gave me a ride home. We walked outside and I said, "Hey, uh Jer . . . are you going over the hill?" He said that he was and I said, "Mind if I ride with you?" He said, "No man. C'mon." He was very sweet that way. I never asked much from him, so when I did, he always made sure he could accommodate me. It was a good time. We had just decided to work together and now we could have a nice little 40 minute chat.
LP: You guys worked fairly intensely together. What do you think Jerry learned from you, and what did you take away from him?
SC: I think maybe I was able to show him things visually that he knew instinctively, but maybe wouldn't have acknowledged within himself or perhaps developed a syntax for. The same is true for me in terms of music. I was not a musician and I didn't read music. We did work together very intensely, but then he'd go out on the road and tell me to just keep on working, just keep going. Often I made decisions based on my own ears in terms of cutting things. Of course, nothing was finalized without Jerry knowing about it. But we had to keep going. We couldn't just stop, because we knew the money was not going to be there forever.
 Featured from Left to right: Dennis McNally (Publicist for Grateful Dead Productions), Jere Rae-Mansfield (CFO and Managing Partner of Monterey Media Inc.), Eddie Washington (Producer of The Grateful Dead Movie), Tom Stack [front center] (Vice President of Licensing & Merchandising Grateful Dead Productions), Donna Jean Godchaux [Middle center], John Nutt (Editor of The Grateful Dead Movie), Susan Crutcher (Editor of The Grateful Dead Movie), Jeffrey Norman (DVD Producer of The Grateful Dead Movie), Cameron Sears (President of Grateful Dead Productions), David Lemieux (DVD Producer of The Grateful Dead Movie). |
LP: Explain how you were able to create several different edits of a particular scene without making splices that were irreversible. Did you make multiple work prints that you could play around with?
SC: Good question. No, the funds weren't there to do that. What we were doing at that point is splicing the pieces together with what is basically perforated Scotch tape, and you try not to hack it up too much. We'd watch the material until we had a sense of what we wanted to do, then we would do it. At that point I'd stop and not do any more until I showed it to [Jerry]. If needed, we would make changes.
Then you hand that over to a negative cutter, who will compare the negative to your work print. The places you may have made splices that you no longer wanted to be spliced would be [designated] by little double-hatch marks — those are called "unintentional splices." That lets the negative cutter know that you don't want to cut there anymore. What was once so hard is [now] much better with computers and digital video tape. The problem, for instance, if we had done ten re-cuts of a song, that tenth time might be better [to watch], but when you run it through the projector, every splice goes "ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump" and that will ultimately influence the rhythm. Plus, it is not very pretty to look at either. So, we carefully thought about what we were doing before we did it.
LP: In the commentary, both you and John Nutt mention how encouraging Jerry always was. How did you get him to perhaps change his perception or opinion about something that may have been a point of contention?
SC: Oh, well Jerry and I used to argue a bit about, for instance, what the first tune was going to be. It never got ugly or anything. We both had strong opinions and I remember getting a little exasperated because I wanted ?Uncle John's Band? to be the first tune. At that point, we had not talked about anything else opening up the film.
LP: When you were doing the edits of the performance footage — because you had so very much to choose from and ultimately could only use a fraction of what was available — were there any songs that you never got around to? Or did you make at least rough edits of everything you had?
SC: David Lemieux [audio/visual archivist for the Grateful Dead] would know better than I. I told him what songs I had already made edits of that I felt would be pretty good or were refugees from the four-hour cut of the movie. I told him what I would immediately think of in terms of superlative segments that didn't make the cut for whatever reason. I know that they went through everything.
LP: Did you work in a linear fashion, meaning the first thing you talked about and cut was the first thing that would end up on the screen?
SC: No. We went through all the material that we had from the concerts and cut [read: edited] all the songs that we thought were worthy. Then we looked at them all and decided, if we happened to have two versions of a number, which one do we want to favor. If we could, we might integrate some aspects of the other versions. We'd never use synch-shots of the musicians; we'd cut to the dancers or some audience, maybe a close up. But we never "cheated" stuff like a performer's hands on the guitar or anything like that.
 "We never cheated stuff like a performer's hands on the guitar." |
A good example of that would have been a shot of someone like Greg [note: Greg is the enthusiastic front-row pony-tailed Deadhead who can be seen mouthing the words to ?U.S. Blues? in the opening scenes]. We'd take that really great element from different performances. But we didn't have too many duplications of songs. Usually the guys who were shooting were so good that if the music came alive, they were immediately there.
LP: That is interesting, because many of these cameramen also worked on Gimmie Shelter together. Kevin Keating and Leon Gast worked on the Hells Angels Forever (1976) documentary, so there was an obvious synergy there. Did you have any involvement in the Angels movie?
SC: No, that was Leon's film and he had already completed it — by the time I came into the picture, he was trying to get it wrapped up and sold. It is a bizarre little movie, the part with Jerry playing on the barge. Everyone in the band looks terrified and the relationship between the band and the Angels was quite strange as well.
I think I told the story on the commentary about the day Little John, Sweet William, and a couple of other guys visited Jerry and me. They just kind of showed up one day and Jerry was cool, he invited them in to watch us work and they were sitting in director's chairs behind us.
I think this was actually one of the times when we were comparing one version of a song to another. One version was musically stronger and visually weaker; the other was just the opposite. It was obvious that the two were from different nights and we would never want to combine them. We were looking at them and talking about them the way that we always did, very candidly. When we got to the end of the first or maybe the second version, I said "You know Jerry, that kinda sucked."
What I meant was that I didn't think it was good enough for the movie. I think it was Little John, who was seated right behind me, who said to Jerry, "Who is this b--ch?" I kind of looked at him, but when I was with Jerry I felt really confident. Jerry just looked at him and said, "She's my editor."
At that moment, I said to myself, "Susan, you will never have to worry about producers in your editing room, because you have had Hell's Angels. So if anyone was going to give me a hard time, I could tell them that I have worked with Hell's Angels in my editing room, so back off! [Laughs]
LP: Although I know you were not at those shows, the Hell's Angels showed up en masse for the Sunday (Oct. 20) show. When you looked back at the raw footage, was much of the tension captured or evident?
SC: Well, Emily Craig — who was Rakow's wife at the time and became my assistant — said that there was, and Donna [Jean Godchaux] told me that as well. Everyone was totally dosed. It was the weirdest thing ever.
LP: Were they part of the contingency that showed up at the DVD release premier at the Ziegfeld Theater? You also told the story about your very straight-laced parents braving their presence outside the venue, waiting on you.
SC: [Laughs] No . . . no we didn't have a reunion. It was Sandy Alexander and his guys who were in New York City. I like Sandy, he is a cool guy.
LP: After having been so intimately involved in the creation of the movie, once it was done were you surprised when the band began performing live again?
SC: You mean after they pretended they were going to retire? [Laughs] Well, [at the time] we never even talked about the Grateful Dead ceasing to exist. I didn't even know that had been the premise behind the movie. I'm not saying that it wasn't or that they didn't feel that way, but it was wasn't as if there was a dark cloud , "This Is It." In fact, I think the movie may have energized Jerry actually.
LP: Did you get "on the bus" and start seeing shows once they began to perform live again?
SC: I didn't go on tour with them. I did go to the Egypt shows though [in 1978].
LP: I think it was you who made the comment on the DVD — in reference to Bill Graham — to the effect that he created a safe haven for people to congregate in.
SC: Absolutely and so did the Grateful Dead. It was a makeshift family with you, your friends, and likeminded folks who looked out for each other.
Again, CrutchfieldAdvisor would like to thank Ms. Crutcher for sharing her time and memories with us.
The realization of the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Grateful Dead Movie involved far more than a routine re-release of the film onto DVD. As they had done with The Closing Of Winterland (2003) DVDs, Grateful Dead audio/visual archivist David Lemieux and audio engineer Jeffrey Norman have co-produced a definitive statement about the band during a pivotal point in their collective history. They discuss their respective roles both on the bonus disc's ?Making of the DVD? mini-documentary and, more technically, within the accompanying 20-page liner booklet.
On November 18, 2004 we once again tracked down Lemieux — a friend of CrutchfieldAdvisor (see his earlier interview on The Closing of Winterland) — to expound upon the information in the package with regards to the considerable effort involved from the project's conception to completion.
Lindsay Planer: In the DVD booklet's "Technical Notes" you go into great detail about how the film was transferred from the original 16mm camera negatives to High Definition video. What was your specific involvement in the process?
David Lemieux: The negatives were at the Grateful Dead's other vault in Hollywood. So, I went down, found the negative (there was loads of GD Movie material in there), drove it back, delivered it to [the San Francisco telecine facility] Retina (after doing a test at Zoetrope). Then Gary Coates — the colorist — took it from there. Gary, David Weissman (line producer), and I would then sit at Retina every night for weeks and weeks from 6 PM to 12 AM and color correct every single shot of the Movie individually. [We did the] same for bonus songs.
LP: What was the condition of both the original negatives and the other elements you worked with?
DL: The 35mm negative was in excellent shape. Minimal-to-no scratches, minimal dust and dirt (all removed during cleaning), [with] no fading [and] rich colors. [So, we had] excellent source material for the telecine transfer machine to start with. The work elements, the 16mm positive elements that I was viewing during the cataloging and selecting of the bonus material were dirty, cut up, and scratchy. But that really did not matter, as that is exactly what it was — [a] "work print." Once you find what you want, you go and find the corresponding 16mm negative, which has never been touched, has not faded at all, no dust, no scratches, etc. Perfect film. THAT is what is ultimately used for the transfer, pristine 16mm negative.
LP: What — if any — challenges did you face from a technical standpoint in the creation of the package — either in remastering the film, the bonus features, or editing the bonus music?
DL: The movie itself from the 35mm blow-up negative (it was shot on 16mm) was in great shape, so little challenges there. There was a nasty camera scratch on a few shots in "Playing In The Band" that were there since Day 1, 10/16/74; [it] happened in the camera and we were able to remove those scratches digitally. So, this is the first time ever that this movie has ever been seen by anyone without those scratches (check out ?Playing . . . ? on your old VHS copy to see them). The bonus songs were more challenging, as it meant synching up the 16mm negative with the 16mm positive work print we'd been using as our guide. And synching up the sound for that. But, we hired excellent negative cutters, and American Zoetrope did the audio transfers in perfect time, so [the] synch all ended up working out perfectly.
LP: What — if any — editing was done to the DVD edition of the Grateful Dead Movie and how does it differ from the original theatrical release and the subsequent home video release, especially in terms of content?
DL: Zero editing. A couple of things are different. The third shot of the movie, once the animation is over, is of a guy wearing glasses in the crowd (Statue of Liberty breaks out of jail>shot of the mirror ball>shot of the whole crowd>close up on guy with glasses). This shot was inexplicably faded to black on the VHS. The fellow, Mike Cohen, is also seen later in the movie before intermission, talking about how the Grateful Dead have always reflected the generational changes, etc. So, that shot is back. The above-mentioned scratch on ?Playing . . .? is fixed. The VHS had lots of dirt and scratches and ink pen markers, but that's because it was transferred from a theatrical release print. The DVD is 100% identical, to the frame, to Jerry's original film.
LP: In the ?Making of the DVD? documentary, you mention there might be enough footage remaining for a future project. What were the time limitations that you had to work with in terms of space on the DVD?
DL: Well, the limitations (we have 99 minutes of bonus songs) was due to cost and time. Those bonus songs were immensely costly to synch the negative, transfer the film, edit the master video, plus mixing time for Jeffrey [Norman, audio archivist], so we decided early to keep it to seven or eight songs total, about 90 minutes.
LP: What were your choices in terms of bonus footage and what was the process you went through to determine what would be on this title and what would have to wait?
DL: We chose several songs that were possibilities in 1975-1976 during [the] making of the movie, for example ?Uncle John's Band? and ?Weather Report Suite.? After watching just about every minute of outtake songs, we selected [songs] based on performance quality, did we have footage, did we have adequate coverage (i.e. not just 1 shot during the whole song, but many choices). Also, a conscious choice was made to select things that were particularly hot in 1974: ?China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider,? ?Scarlet Begonias,? ?The Other One,? and ?Dark Star.? [There was] no conscious decision made to hold back anything for a future release. There is plenty of great film footage of great performances left.
LP: What else would you have liked to have included in the package that didn't work for whatever reason?
DL: Honestly, doing it as a three-disc set, with Disc One being the movie, with 40 more minutes of bonus songs (140 minutes total) on Disc Two, and Disc Three being the documentaries disc. There was a HUGE amount of backstage footage in dressing rooms, etc, that would make another great 30-40 minute documentary. So, Disc Three might have been the three you currently see, the Mars Hotel commercial, multi-track demo (but longer), plus the backstage stuff. Plus longer chunks of the Garcia and Weir interviews. Saying that, I think this two-disc set is PERFECT.
LP: What was the most important thing you learned from the Winterland project that you incorporated into this package?
DL: Taking care of EVERY detail. It went more smoothly this time. A photo gallery, for instance, allowed us to include hundreds of cool images that some might find interesting. Like [The Closing of] Winterland, we held nothing back.
LP: In terms of actual running time, how much footage remains unissued? Not counting the fact that you have seven cameras worth of the same coverage of a song.
DL: There is enough footage that at least two hours of songs could be edited into another DVD.
LP: What was the purpose of scrambling the image of the lady sitting beside Garcia during his interview segment? Can you reveal her identity?
DL: We were very cautious about not including people for whom we did not have releases on. Perhaps a little too cautious, but people would be in their right to get mad if they were included and didn't want to be. No idea who she was.
LP: Same question in regards to the dancer/model for the animated skeleton?
DL: Gary Gutierrez hired a dancer to dance so his moves could be roto-scoped, so a release was never signed to actually use his face. We couldn't find him to get him to sign off, and that was Gary Gutierrez's footage, so we scrambled his face at Gary's request. Allow me to say here that Gary Gutierrez is one of the most hospitable and generous people I've yet worked with.
LP: Who directed, wrote, and animated the ?From The Mars Hotel? advertisement?
DL: A firm in LA called "Spunbuggy." No idea of names of people, but the Grateful Dead hired the company to do it. It was transferred from the original 35mm film negative, and as you heard, we had three soundtracks to select from, so we included them all.
LP: I have seen a cinematic trailer for the Grateful Dead Movie — why wasn't it or any of the vintage trade paper/reviews included?
DL: The cinematic trailer that Garcia worked on was never completed, and the elements we had were such a work-in-progress that nothing could be done with them. The trailer you have seen is likely the one done by United Artists (who distributed the film for a spell) and was not really a Grateful Dead project, so we had no elements for it.
LP: In regards to the five-CD Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack box set, how were you able to avoid the same production problems and poor audio that [Grateful Dead bassist] Phil [Lesh] and Bear [aka legendary multi-media alchemist Owsley Stanley] faced with Steal Your Face — which came from the same concerts and presumably same tapes?
DL: Listen to Jeffrey's new stereo mix of "Sugaree" on the DVD, and then [the] Steal Your Face mix. Jeffrey worked with the same tapes as the Steal Your Face crew. Enough said.
LP: Indeed.
CrutchfieldAdvisor would once again like to thank Mr. Lemieux for his time and responses.
While on the subject of the Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack, we contacted ol' platinum ears himself, Jeffrey Norman, to get the skinny on what role he played in the restoration. One first-generation Deadhead who attended each and every one of the "retirement shows" referred to Norman's work on this project as ?perhaps his [Norman's] greatest achievement to date,? and even the most fastidious listener who has sampled either the DVDs or the CDs would be hard pressed to disagree.
That said, there is one point of contention that, under other circumstances, would have deemed the incomplete performances in question "unusable." Norman was faced with some fairly blatant edits and, quite literally, missing chunks of tape. On November 26, 2004 we went behind the music and beyond the oxide directly to Club Front — the Grateful Dead's own studios — to find out how Norman dealt with these issues.
Lindsay Planer: What were the state of the multi-tracks? I noticed there is a piece missing from ?Eyes Of The World.? Are there any other places you had to make-do with missing fragments of music?
Jeffrey Norman: Yes, ?Eyes [of the World]? is missing a piece, as well as ?Casey Jones,? and I know people are unhappy with that and felt that it was advertised incorrectly. This was never meant to mislead anyone; more like those who made up the marketing phases did so long before the engineering department (me!) realized that we didn't have all the pieces.
Generally the 16-track tapes were in good shape. They were recorded at 30 inches per second (instead of the usual 15). The end result was a much quieter tape, and except for very quiet songs, hiss was not an issue. Cassettes are 1-7/8 inches per second, [so it's] no wonder they're so hissy. Most things were fairly well recorded (except the bass drum, in my opinion), although there were only three drum tracks (bass drum, over-head, and snare/toms). The piano/electric piano track was generally problematic [due to] lots of clicks and crackles. You'll notice that for quite a bit of the [show on the 20th], it isn't even there. I tried to clean it up with a Sonic No-Noise plug-in as much as possible.
LP: What was the most challenging thing for you regarding this project? Both in regards to the soundtrack CD set and the actual soundtrack on the DVDs?
JN: Probably the most challenging aspect was the vocal sound. The differential mic set-up was great for the Wall of Sound (it rejected all other sound but the voice), but was terrible for recording. It's very thin and has a very smeary sound ("muffin mouth" is one description). Because the singers had to get right up on the mic, there were also a lot of pops — an explosive low-end sound. As I did more mixing, I found better ways in ProTools (where I had transferred all the analog 16-track tapes) to help control the popping and the muffin mouth. Some songs were worse than others, and the later mixes I did were better than the first ones.
Another consideration was that, for most of the songs in the movie, many of the vocals are overdubbed. Unfortunately, the audience tracks were often erased to accommodate these new vocals. The audience is a key element in a live show, particularly for the Grateful Dead Movie. The visuals are so energetic and so exciting, and I wanted the mix to reflect that (I'm sure Jerry and Dan Healy did also in their mix), and to try to give an essence of the Wall of Sound. This is a long-winded way of explaining that it was much more difficult to do this without the audience tracks helping out. The soundtrack songs all had audience tracks, but many had their audience on a separate tape that had to be "spun in" to the master [and] that took awhile because there was no time code to help synchronize with the master tape.
Once again, our thanks to Mr. Norman for his time and layperson-friendly explanations. Even after three decades, the enormous care and effort that Jerry Garcia and company put into presenting a realistic and heartfelt portrayal of the Grateful Dead circa 1974 remains a true and authentic testament to the power and spirit that had fuelled their long, strange trip since 1965 — and would continue to do so for the remaining 21 years of the band's existence. Although the monetary and personal expenditures of creating The Grateful Dead Movie may have ultimately been prohibitive, the immense foresight of Garcia and crew have made this modern memorial possible, not only for us but every future generation of Deadhead.
Perhaps, Winterland '74 concert attendee and subsequent cinematic participant Iggy, summed it up best. So we'll give him the final word:
'Cause the band I used to see, would be a cold memory.
But if the Dead were to live, free concerts they'd give,
Jerry G. on guitar would bring them in, near and far.
But if the band were to cease, there'd be no street peace,
We'd take on the power, skin a cat and take a shower.
But if the Dead live long, we'll be singing their songs,
And we'll all be so glad
Mama hated diesels so bad!