Say what you will about tv, this week the Encore True Stories channel has had some great documentaries. Tonight we watched "Grateful Dawg" which was directed by David Grisman's daughter and chronicled the friendship and music-making between her dad and Jerry Garcia. This video came out in 2001, but the copyright is 2000. Have any of you seen it?
I was delighted to hear Jerry doing acoustic and trad music and David was fantastic on mando. I liked the Grateful Dead, but wasn't really into them so I never paid much attention to what Jerry was doing all these years.
This video talks a lot about the last five years of his life, when he and David got together a lot at the Grisman home, just playing acoustic together. There's a lot of home video footage, as well as concert stuff. The way the home stuff looked and the way they described the comfortable way the Grisman's encouraged good music (and offered Jerry a respite from his Deadhead personna) made me think of the descriptions I've read of Rick and Heather Fielding's house by Mudcatters who've gone visited and been made so welcome.
There were a couple of references to the lack of time Jerry had to get together and just have fun this way. It seemed really sad to hear, in retrospect, that he was always so busy doing the GD that he found it hard to find time to just jam with Grisman and learn more of the old trad stuff, etc. I had to wonder what might have been if he'd been able to slow down the schedule.
There was great footage of them doing Jenny Jenkins, Off to Sea Once More and a few others.
Some critics weren't very kind about this video, but we really enjoyed it and I would recommend it, highly. I'd be interested in what some of you thought of it, too.