“Dawn of the Dead” is the title of an In-depth documentary about the legendary psychedelic band The Grateful Dead. In the mid-1960s a new type on contemporary rock music emerged out of San Francisco (California). Known as ‘psychedelia’, it was pioneered by a close-knit community of local bands who merged traditional American forms such as folk, country, blues and rock & roll with new sounds often developed under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Bound up with the social and cultural changes for which San Francisco was also the focal point, it was a combination that made for a radical re-imaging of youth culture.
Dawn of the Dead follows the movements, events and sounds of those heady days, and traces the story of the definitive band of the psychedelic age, The Grateful Dead. Giving time too for the involvement of San Francisco’s other lead players such as Big Brother & The Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans and Quicksilver Messenger Service, the program explores what it was that, for a while, turned San Francisco into a 1960s Shangri-La.
The film includes brand new interviews with Grateful Dread manager Rock Scully; the Dead’s experimental professor, Tom ‘T.C.’ Constanten; Big Brother’s Peter Albin; Mike Willlhelm from The Charlatans; publicist and official Dead biographer, Dennis McNally; Counter-Culture and Dead author and journalist (and host of ‘The Grateful Dead Hour’), David Gans; Merry Prankster and best friend of the late Ken Kesey, Ken Babbs, plus comment, criticism and review from Rolling Stone’s Anthony De Curtis, Village Voice’s Robert Christgau and Mojo’s Ritchie Unterberger.
Also including the rarest archive in existence, live and studio footage of Grateful Dead and the other San Francisco bands, vintage interviews, location shoots, news reports plus the music that soundtracked the entire movement, which all together make for the most detailed overview yet of the social upheaval on America’s West Coast which ultimately changed the world forever.