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I just came across this video of The Grateful Dead on Saturday Night Live in 1978, performing the song Casey Jones. I'm not exactly sure who the woman is in this video. Maybe someone here will know.
Also, so that this post isn't completely off-topic.. I think that Jerry Garcia's hair and beard looked great in this video.
Garcia is definitely on my list of people that I wish were still alive today. He was such an icon, yet he seems like he was such a down-to-earth kind of guy.
in a way, Garcia is making English 102 a lot easier on me. This whole semester, my work consists of doing research papers on The Grateful Dead, Woodstock, etc. When I found out that 1960's culture was a topic option for the semester, I jumped on it.
Sometimes I wish I was around during the 60's and 70's, but as crazy as it may seem, future generations might wish they had lived in this one. I'm not exactly sure what is going to be so appealing about this point in history, but I'm sure the future generations will find something :)
The Dead toured well into the 80s, and possibly into the 90s although I'm not sure. I'm sure somebody here will correct me. I have a very vivid memory from when I was a courrier in the late 1980s. I had to make a delivery to The Capitols Center, where The Dead had played two or three days earlier. It seems that one of the follower's buses had broken down and was still there in the parking lot. It was everything you would expect such a vehicle to be--all decorated with wild colors that were obscured by a thick layer of dirt that had probably never been washed. Alas, the 'Heads were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had abandoned this objet d'art. I had no time to inquire.
That culture morphed into Phish, which I think has stopped touring also. At any rate, the phenomenon was around long enough that "following the dead" became a cultural fixture. For those of us who came of age in the 80s, perhaps it was our version of running away to join the circus, or a somewhat higher class version of joining a carnival.
With jam-band following out of the picture, I'm not sure what youth with a wanderlust, willingness to live in squaler, desire to drop out, desire to experiment with drugs, desire to "be different" or some combination of all the above will do. Certainly, they will think of something.
I'm sure many such people will be here in DC on March 17 to march against the war.
They toured until 1995. I had to go back and look over my last essay for that piece of info =)
Hey - Yeah Jerry was the MAN! That clip prompted me to search for some of the old CSNY vids. What a rush watching and listening to some of that old stuff; most of which I still know by heart. Funny, most of the longhairs (esp. at woodstock) had hair shoulder length at best with a few exceptions. Maybe cause it was just starting to be the "thing" and men were just growing it out for the first time. Anyway, just one more connection to my past and the reason I'm growing mine again and plan to keep it long forever! Peace'nicks! Bruce'ster P.S. One of my colleagues at work was teaching history and a discussion of hippies came up. One of the students asked if I was one! Ha Ha. The teacher (laughingly) said yes. So that's our running joke now and it's fine with me!
The woman is Donna Godchaux...married to Kieth (The keyboard player in the video). They joined the band in the early 70's and toured with them until Kieth's death in 1980.
I was lucky enough to catch the dead in May 1991 at the Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View, CA. and again that November at the famous Bill Graham Memorial Concert in Golden Gate Park...good times. My mom used to frequent the Fillmore Auditorium every weekend in the mid/late 60's and saw The Dead and other local bands play all the time.
Hey SOADdude, Jerry Garcia's hair and beard looked great in that video. And I see in 1978 that he had only a touch of gray.
It is sad that he is gone, but doing heroin is just not smart. He had diabetes which exacerbated things too. In addition, he did not exercise and weighed as much as 300 pounds. The result was his untimely death at age 53.
Absalom