Grateful Dead: The Closing of Winterland (1978)
The Closing Of Winterland documents the Grateful Dead's landmark New Year's Eve 1978 concert that marked the end of the famed San Francisco Bay Area venue Winterland Aena. The Dead celebrated the closing as an approximately five-hour-long party (complete with breakfast with the audience at dawn) and invited some guests including guitarist John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service and Ken Kesey as well as actor Dan Aykroyd who provided the midnight countdown.
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A waste of 90 minutes of my life
A lot of fun.
Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.
There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck in this nostalgic concert DVD. It's nostalgic now because the footage took place just over 30 years ago on the last concert night on the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.You gets hours and hours of songs from two full discs worth of mostly-mellow Grateful Dead material. You get to see a dark-haired and slimmer Jerry Garcia perform his guitar magic.You also get to see what a lot of Dead fans probably never saw: a female singer doing a bunch of the songs along with the guys That was Donna Godchaux, who did both lead and backup vocals. She and her husband Keith sang with the famous rock group throughout the 1970s. Keith died at the age of 32 after an auto accident in 1980.In addition to the tons of music, there are a lot of extras, from features on the Winterland Ballroom, to the Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, bonus songs, on and on. If you enjoy the Dead, this is the DVD to buy.