Grateful Dead Live in Château d’Hérouville 1971

Grateful Dead at full strength, with Pigpen still in the group (he would leave in 2 months and be dead in 12). He sings Hard to Handle here in sudden color. I am a great fan of the great three:

• The Grateful Dead (1967)
• Anthem of the Sun (1968)
• Aoxomoxoa (1969)

After 1970 things started becoming too country for my taste, although the playing and jams remained the work of excellent musicians, the seeking become a parade rather than a quest. This hour long film from French TV could be one of the last documents of a time that was near spiritual in its intention.

The entire audio for this performance is streamed here:

"We went over there to do a big festival, a free festival they were gonna have, but the festival was rained out. It flooded. We stayed at this little chateau which is owned by a film score composer who has a 16-track recording studio built into the chateau, and this is a chateau that Chopin once lived in; really old, just delightful, out in the country near the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, which is where Vincent van Gogh is buried. 

We were there with nothing to do: France, a 16-track recording studio upstairs, all our gear, ready to play, and nothing to do. So, we decided to play at the chateau itself, out in the back, in the grass, with a swimming pool, just play into the hills. We didn't even play to hippies, we played to a handful of townspeople in Auvers. We played and the people came — the chief of police, the fire department, just everybody. It was an event and everybody just had a hell of a time — got drunk, fell in the pool. It was great." - Jerry Garcia