Documentary short filmed on the road during The Grateful Dead's last Europe tour in 1990. for information or further inquiries: loewlens@gmail.com gerryloew.com
At the Halloween show in Wembley London, I stood near some leather clad rockers who were obviously used to harder edged punk and thrash bands. The entire first set they just stood there stiffly, drinking beer (in plastic bottles), not dancing and generally being uptight and seeming like they were looking for the mosh pit. They weren't sure what to make of the Dead, and they were thinking about leaving, when the band closed the set with a rockin' Promised Land, and took it's set break. During the break, a wild looking rastaman came by and seriously smoked all of us out (including the rockers) with some very potent hashish in a chillum. He never said a word, just got me and the rocker blokes very, very altered, and moved on. As soon as the rasta guy moved on, two very nubile young deadhead ladies came and stood near us. The band came out and launched into a long, smokin', trancey Scarlet>Fire>Truckin'>He's Gone>drums>space, while the young ladies swayed and swirled, right in front of the rockers, who at this point were relaxed and glassy-eyed, were moving in time and swaying along with the young ladies. One of the ladies even flashed a big old smile at one of the guys, and danced a nice, seductive circle round him. By the encore, the rockers were howling along to Werewolves of London, and having one of "the best times of me life, mate!" as one of them gleefully told me after the show. I'm sure the guys went back to the mosh pit as soon as the Dead blew town, but they did have their eyes opened a bit, and had an experience hard to replicate, courtesy of Jerry and the boys, a rastaman and his chillum, and two very lovely, feminine and friendly twirlers. A night those British boys will remember for the rest of their lives!
Haha awesome story man. I am/was a punk skater rock head who ALWAYS jammed out to the dead. Never gotinto any other jam music but the dead speaks to my soul. Also loving Dead and Company so far as well.
When you asked that local , “ is it your first time ? “;and his answer was “ yes it is and I hope not my last “ with a big smile 😀.... that says it all about a guys first Dead show !!
One time I was at Madison Square Garden for Jerry Garcia Band. They opened up with How Sweet It Is, and this very drunk woman in great spirits with jaw on the floor was dancing around, having a great time already, and turns to me. Looking down at Jerry and says, “Who is that!?!?!?”. “That’s Jerry Garcia!” What was she doing there? Someone must have felt some good vibes from her out on the street and given her a miracle ticket? And if she got a ticket didn’t she read the ticket? I don’t know. What grace, what a random gift to receive.
Was the trip of my lifetime! So good to see my fave band live at last but even better to meet like minded people!!!! Had a spare ticket for the first show and just gave it to someone you shoulda seen the smile on her face!!!! Welcome to England man!!!! Us British heads sure got lucky 3 shows in a row man 3 shows in a row!!!!!!!!!! 1st show was the best that terrapin was amazing & black Peter love light to finish Wow!!!!!!! The bandcame back out for the encore I thought attics but they blew me away with the weight went to London with 1/2 Oz hash & 9 window panes acid came back home with nothing but memories!!! Like I said earlier the time of my life!!!! Really man really!!!!!!!!!! Ems
Thanks for sharing this! I was lucky to catch the band at their first Wembley show in Oct 1990. My one and only time, but what a life changing experience!
What the World needs now, is love sweet love! Never seen or felt another band's scene so powerfully positive and welcoming since. Glad WE got to be part of it though, changed my life for good. Now i just try to spread and share that love and acceptance with everyone i meet... here in Hawaii we call it ALOHA 🤙🏽
31 years ago.......damn. I remember as a teenager back then thinking how far away the 50s seemed (when my parents were teens) and this is the 50s to my kids....That's right, I'm baked and rambling again.
I did the whole tour except Stockholm. Not remarkable musically so shortly after Brent's death but big fun out on the road. Small venues, too. I ran right into Phil in the Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. Very cool to have been in Berlin so shortly after the wall came down. I was able to grab a football-size piece of the wall off the ground that I lugged around for the rest of the tour. Glad I did; it's a great piece of world history and my history as well.
I met B Hornsbey in Amsterdam after Stockholm. He asked me what I thought of Vince which was not all that positive. He laughed then kicked ass the rest of the tour and then played off and on till Jerry perished. Bruce was a real gentleman.
I ran into Phil, Jill, and sons (in a pram) at Stonehenge and had a chat about John Michell and his books about stone circles in England. Cool! Great tour. Wembley was hilarious!
the dude whose first show was at the Warfield 1980, when they passed out the champagne, now that is the kind of show that would have you hooked for life. When you saw the full potential of this band you just couldn't stay away. So glad to have experienced a few of those.
thank you.! really enjoyed this...remembering what a fun part of your life their shows were........some of the best times..I'm at about 20 since jul/Aug of 87...... nicest/: friendliest fans...you know who you are!!!...:)
Wasnt in Europe for that tour, though it must have been an amazing time. Very cool to see the Grateful Dead immersed in different cultural environments. Sure do miss those days at the shows. Fun and joy, smiles and more smiles, tremendous soulful mesmerizing music, and just that amazing vibe in the air so thick you could...
Yeah... miss that "vibe" Never seen or felt another band's scene so powerfully positive and welcoming since. Glad WE got to be part of it though, changed my life for good. Now i just try to spread and share that love and acceptance with everyone i meet... here in Hawaii we call it ALOHA 🤙🏽
mahalo nui loa!watched this some time ago and just re-watched it.I was blessed to make it to all the shows except London.Turned 20 at the Paris shows.Beautiful memories.
How did you afford to not only travel Europe but afford the shows as well? Thats is one thing i NEVER understood about the EU tour. Be honest, Most were from better off families, even the girl in the beginning talks about her parents being "on board" with her tour. I know my dad/uncle/cousins dreamed of even catching a single EU show and never even came close.
I never toured Europe, or much of the US for that matter, but between 1987 and 1992 I went to the dead shows whenever they were near Philly and sometimes NY. I remember one time the Dead played Philly for 5 nights over 1 week, the park across the street from the Spectrum became another world, a psychedelic city. I didn't leave for 3 days. I still float back to those days every now and then and this video reminds me of that time in my life.
I saw the Dead a few times, Quicksilver, Airplane, Jimi, Janis. There used to be love-ins and free concerts all over the Bay Area. I've been talking about peace and love my whole life and I'm 70. But I'm heartened when I see the people at Coachella carrying on this spirit. I think young people are very attuned to mother Earth now and are going to do what they can to make it a better place to live. The Dead Heads were early pioneers in this movement towards sanity. I remember one time when some of us were beating on wine bottles because we liked the sound it was making and pretty soon people were playing along on tin cans, bottles of all kinds, drums, congas, you name it. It was a real cacophony in beat to the music and we all got on one psychic level. I felt a power surge through the crowd. We were all one spirit. If we could have harnessed that power we could have moved a mountain.
Every Sunday at Venice Beach in Los Ángeles a large group of local heads/people play drums and tambourines etc at around sunset, it’s always a great vibe! The rhythm of the world will never die! I saw the Dead in 1970 at the Hollywood Music Festival in the North of England, so long ago it’s all a haze lol
It's the music is right. Of course it's the head - the music makes the head and it's always a cool scene. The camaraderie of people was phenomenal. You met people, you saw them at shows - Hey, we saved you a seat! And it's NEVER A BAD SHOW! THERE'S NOTHING LIKE A GRATEFUL DEAD CONCERT!
So glad I came across this recently (Dec 2021) as it brought me back to the time when I first got into the Dead, back in 1993. Times were more simple then. Great tour perspective, felt like extended family. Thankfully the music and the culture lives on and will continue to grow. The music is timeless, lyrics tell real stories and of course enough great things can't be said of the band.
That was actually good. I liked it. That was over thirty years ago. And I have no doubt that the Dead family is still going strong in 2021. Jerry is God. LSD saves. NFA
I'm not sure how I never saw this until tonight. Thank you for the visual diary! I was barely 20 and saw 10 of the 11 sans Hamburg which was a late add. I bought through travel quest which sold whole tour packages so many of us had tickets next to each other night after night. I have so many great stories from this trip!
Really Wonderfully done. Always been fascinated by this tour as a younger franco american deadhead. Closest I ever got was bringing my cousin to a few furthur shows when he was visiting the states a decade back and watching him laugh at characters like Fast Eddie all dressed in tye dye. Gone are the days... Anyway, thanks for sharing!
I was in Denmark and Paris. I sold a lot of drugs and whatever to get there. No tix, no money. Thank Jerry kids that miracles me both shows. I miss Jerry so much. The summers have never been the same. Love all yheinz kids.💙⚡❤
I am so excited to find this wonderful documentation of Europe tour. I was interviewed by these guys in London. I was applying face makeup for Halloween. There is a shot of my face at 2:07. I would love to be able to see the interview!!! I have been wondering about what happened with to the interview for 25 years!!! Beautiful documentary!!! How would I be able to get a hold of Stewart or Gerry?
This whole tour is kind of strangely mysterious. Sorry don't want to sound paranoid but there were several camera crews who filmed and interviewed lots of us and never produced anything. This is the only group that managed to release footage. That guy with the curly hair and glasses playing guitar I remember well and I recall the other film crew was filming him playing acoustic as well doing interviews but they the footage is sadly in someones closet lost to the ages......
This brings back some nice memories! But it was only about the americans on tour. This tour changed the life of some europeans... Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
As a massive Deadhead, I'm also a Dylan nut - and I can tell y'all that the Dylan community is pretty switched too - I've seen Bob in excess of 260 times and wherever I am in the world to see Bob I ALWAYS meet up with a bunch of "Bobcats" I know at EVERY gig - never fails!!!!
“If and when the band stops touring. That’s what scares me”.. here we are in 2022 and they just announced that 2023 will be it. And unfortunately this time I think it’ll be forreal.. unlike fare thee well. What an amazing run. Dead won’t ever die though so
Another I wish he was my lawyer. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And this guy! My friend Ryan Poggali and Dale Beamis followed the Dead around the U.S. for years I missed my chance to see Jerry and get miracled in. I hopo to see with Jon Meyer soon. Phil Lesh."" It is better to regret something you have done. Then it is to regret something you haven't done! ""
The guy at 29:37 says what we all need to hear, especially in 2022 with John Mayer on the scene and all the new, younger folks joining in. They're going to keep the Dead going when we're all gone. We gotta teach & accept We don't own this. We're all just participants.
I was stationed in Germany from 2003-2006, my friends and I went to Paris, Amsterdam, all over Germany, rode the rails to Bosnia. I would be very cautious about doing that now, please don't even try it alone. If you aren't in a group of at least 4-5 just forget it unless you're going to stay in very sterile, safe spaces. Europe isn't Disneyland kids. It's a really sad thing how dangerous some places have become. I wanna know why we aren't growing thousands of acres of industrialized hemp and running our cars on it yet. The best thing would be bio diesel, followed by wood alcohol/methanol followed by wood gas/carbon monoxide produced with any kind of smoldering biomass. Only pushing for electricity to power everything is not realistic for every situation or budget. 90% of the vehicles on the road today already could be converted to operate on a form of hemp based fuel or even hydrogen gas separated from water with solar,wind,water power.
This is cool. I appreciate the time and effort that went into it. I did Phish Europe in 1998 at 20. I too was expecting to meet a lot of European fans of the band and it was all Americans save for a handful of examples. Also, I miss drum circles. They disappeared quickly, didn't they? There were three guys who were filming all the time on that Phish tour, and I've never found them again, as I would love to see the footage.
@@illuminotmereloaded6896 Yes I’m from Denmark. I bought A Live One a few years earlier without knowing anything at all about the band. It was just one of those albums, that said: “Buy me, I’m worth it.” I was at Midtfyns as usual, and I asumed, that this could be the only chance to see them ever, and I don’t know if they’ve ever been back in Denmark again. Or before, for that matter.
@@noersang That's awesome. Wish you would have caught the three Grey Hall shows. They were amazing. One of the few Europeans I hung out with on the tour was a Dane who camped with me in Christiania. I can't remember his name. Matty or something. Good guy. Blonde. Shocking!
Yup!! Unfortunately, I’m old enough to know that and I was on planes as a teenager people were smoking!!! WTF😮 Anyway, older Deadhead here 65 years young. Seen them too many times to count , very fortunate my favorite band on earth …still to this day.❤❤❤❤💨💨💨💨🍄🍄🍄
Trap the rat, bell the cat Ball the jack, chew the fat Live in shame, die in vain Catch the flu, burn the stew *Wave that flag, wave it wide and high *Summertime done come and gone, my oh my(~);}
Anybody know 'Shirt' by The Bonzo Dog Band? The guy at 28:33 sounds just like the guy that hops down the street and gives a friendly interview. I love it! You can tell this chap is all for the short shirts. You've got to be a bit modern these days, governor! Now heading across to the Earl's Court Olympia for the shirt event. I'll repeat that. The shirt event.
