Earlier this year a friend on the Deadwood Society mailing list sent around this video excerpt from a French film called Gimme shelter, l’Airplane et les Stones à Altamont.
The first half of the clip shows the Dead playing “I Know You Rider” in Hérouville in 1971. I love the band from that era. Lean, with only five players, able to turn on a dime, heading into that Bill Kreutzman-peak jazzy sound of the early-mid ’70s, Pigpen still relatively hale and hearty, Jerry with his iconic Tommy Chong look, none of the weariness that would later hang over the band.
The excerpts from Gimme Shelter are depressing, the self-righteous Angels defending their right to beat up passive hippies with pool cues, the ineffectual complaints from the Airplane onstage. It’s interesting to see the lingo subtitled in French. The clip from the Dead’s one-off concert at a villa in France are really what bring me back to this footage for a second look.
The clip also features some documentary interview footage, all in French, which I can’t follow. I wonder if this movie is available in the U.S.?
(Administrivia note: This bit of Saturday Dead blogging is being posted on my main blog at not at the sorely neglected Uncle John’s Blog because these days I’m trying to do all my blogging in one place. I will try to figure out a way to make posts like this show up over there without munging all the stuff that has been posted there directly.)
