In the latest installment of the Grateful Dead‘s ongoing All The Years Live series, the band looks back to what was billed as the “final” run of Dead shows on October 16th-20th, 1974 at San Francisco’s historic Winterland Ballroom. Originally released on the 2004 DVD version of The Grateful Dead Movie, this October 18th, 1974 rendition of the Wake Of The Flood classic, “Weather Report Suite”, has made its way onto YouTube.
This performance is historic as it is the final time that the Dead would perform the entire movement arranged by guitarist Bob Weir and longtime lyricist John Perry Barlow. After this run of shows, the band did not do any full scale touring for two years and when they returned in spring 1976, they had added what became the song’s iconic partner, “Let It Grow”, but they had left the first two parts of the song behind.
The Grateful Dead’s YouTube channel has been a flurry of activity over the past seven months as they launched the All The Years Live series back in May with a “Morning Dew” from this very same night at the Winterland. Since then, Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux has helped the band release live archival footage from as far back as 1974, all the way through to the mid-’90s.
Watch the latest installment from All The Years Live below.
Grateful Dead — “Weather Report Suite” — 10/18/1974
[Video: Grateful Dead]
As he has done with each of the All The Years Live videos, Lemieux shared his thoughts on the performance and why it sticks out amongst a sea of archival recordings.
“Produced from the camera-original 16mm negative film, this beautiful and powerful rendition of the entire ‘Weather Report Suite’ was the Dead’s final performance of this ‘Wake Of The Flood’ masterpiece,” Lemieux mentioned in a statement go with the video. “A couple of nights after this performance, the Dead packed it in as far as touring went for almost two years. When they returned to the road in the Summer of 1976, they brought with them the final part of the Suite, ‘Let It Grow’, but left the first two parts behind. Thankfully this performance was filmed during [the] production of ‘The Grateful Dead Movie’, as well as recorded to 16-track analog tape.”
Previous editions of the band’s ongoing weekly “All The Years Live” video series have included: