The Halloween pay-per-view was a grand success, both artistically and financially, and during the first part of 1981 Dell'Amico and Garcia put together Dead Ahead using songs from the Halloween show and the previous night's concert (the last three were taped) to simulate a mini Dead show in a little under two hours, interspersed with comic bits from Franken and Davis. The video opens with several acoustic tunes — including a trippy version of "Bird Song" and the old Memphis Jug Band nugget "On The Road Again" — then settles into a wide-ranging selection of electric numbers, including a sprightly reading of the cowboy combo of "Me amp; My Uncle" and "Mexicali Blues," "Ramble On Rose," "Lost Sailor" and "Saint Of Circumstance" (from their still-newish album Go To Heaven), "Franklin's Tower," "Fire On The Mountain" and several others. There's also a "drums" segment with guest rhythm beast Billy Cobham powerfully assisting Messrs. Kreutzmann and Hart. When Dead Ahead finally came out on DVD in 2005, the expanded edition (included here) contained about 50 minutes more music, highlighted by excellent versions of "Shakedown Street," "Truckin'" and one more acoustic number — Bob Weir's instrumental tour de force "Heaven Help The Fool."
All in all, Dead Ahead is a terrific look at the band a year and a half into Brent's tenure with the group, which, as fate would have it, also turned out to be the group's halfway point. (The same audio and video source material also yielded two live double albums released four months apart in 1981 — the acoustic Reckoning and the electric Dead Set — as well as a 70-minute Showtime special that aired before Dead Ahead was released.)
The next big burst of video work from the band comes from 1985. In late April the Dead secretly convened at the Marin Veterans Auditorium in San Rafael (Marin County, CA), just minutes from their office and rehearsal space/studio, to shoot three long days of the group performing a variety of songs on the empty auditorium's stage. At the time they weren't sure what might become of the footage (and the multitrack recordings), as Dell'Amico and Garcia had discussed several different possible approaches, including one that would incorporate a script and dialog for animated creatures based on some of Garcia's fanciful drawings, and another that would take a more documentary-style look at the Dead's history.
What they settled on instead became the award-winning conceptual video So Far, which makes its maiden appearance on DVD in this box. The video contains footage from the Marin sessions, live portions from the Dead's 1985 New Year's Eve concert at the Oakland Coliseum Arena (a show that was broadcast on the commercial USA Network cable channel — another first for the band), and then a whole bunch of often amazing visual materiaclass="underline" old newsreel footage of dancers in the '20s and '30s, still images of everything from American Indians to outer space, plus some sequences created by computer specifically for the video, much of it seriously electronically altered for psychedelic effect.
After Garcia and Dell'Amico had assembled the audio track, they had to figure out which images, besides the Marin and Oakland band footage, they could employ to create something that would be visually interesting. As Garcia told me in 1987, around the time So Far was released: "We did a lot of brainstorming, just thinking, 'What kind of images do Grateful Dead songs conjure?' Well… nature, powerful forces of various sorts, volcanoes erupting, tornados, lightning, strong winds, the ocean and other archetypal things like fire and that sort of stuff. Then we got into human endeavors — everything that people do. And then we went off in an abstract space — OK, the music might not directly suggest these things, but these things are suggested by things that are suggested. So then we got into things like architecture, stained glass windows, tanks, that sort of stuff. It was really a sort of free-associative thing that took place over several months, just collecting lists and lists."
The video editors put together dozens of cassettes of footage and photos broken down by the multitude of categories they'd conceived: "We'd go into these postproduction places and have seven one-inch machines going for playback with different things on every machine," Dell'Amico said in '87. Then, with Garcia and Dell'Amico directing the work flow, the video team spent untold hours playing — trying out countless combinations of images, changing them outrageously using the top computer video manipulation tools of the day, letting the piece emerge, in a sense, from the image banks.
Dell'Amico again: "The idea is that instead of laying it out from a strictly cerebral starting point…it's more like you sculpt it as you go."
Garcia: "The video is the Grateful Dead way of doing things, which turns out to be expensive, difficult and unrepeatable. If we went back to do this again, we'd come out with a different finished version. We couldn't repeat it. If you're going to do something, it's important — for me, at any rate — to shoot high, even if you miss, or even if you're accused of being pretentious…We were after the idea of electronic mind-altering and consciousness-altering. And, on that level, I think it's pretty successful."
So Far was part of what seemed in 1987 like a full-on Grateful Dead assault on mainstream America. That summer they played a series of sold-out stadium shows backing Bob Dylan (playing their own sets too). They released In The Dark, containing the Top 10 single "Touch Of Grey" (its success aided by a Gary Gutierrez-directed MTV video of life-sized puppet skeletons performing the song). And the media that had long ignored the group as hippie relics suddenly couldn't get enough of them.
Dell'Amico was brought onboard over the next few years to capture the group's big stadium shows (and also a few others at places like Alpine Valley in Wisconsin and Shoreline Amphitheatre south of SF) — providing live video during the sets for folks far from the stage at large venues, while also addressing Garcia's desire to build a video archive for the future. From the outset of this period, however, Garcia, inspired by the process of working on So Far, insisted that Dell'Amico occasionally incorporate psychedelic visuals into the video feed that was being projected on large screens in the stadiums.
According to Dell'Amico: "When we were talking about summer tour '87, Jerry said, 'I don't want to just have a video where it's just us playing, because we're boring — we don't dance, we don't take our clothes off. I want to be able to do some of the stuff we did in the video, but live.' And some of the other band members started talking about how in the old days it was like a three-ring circus, with the band playing and Kesey doing his thing and a light show and all this other stuff going on.”