Classic Grateful Dead, Santana & Jefferson Airplane Concert Coming To DVD

Due out on May 12th will be a new two-DVD package featuring classic performances from the leaders of rock's legendary San Francisco scene. The collection includes A Night At The Family Dog, a DVD taped in September 1970 featuring vintage performances by the Grateful Dead, Santana, and the Jefferson Airplane.

The hour-long disc features highlights from each band's set, including Santana's “Incident At Neshabur” and “Soul Sacrifice”; the Dead's “Hard To Handle,” “China Cat Sunflower,” and “I Know You Rider”; and the Airplane's “The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil” and “Eskimo Blue Day.”

The concert, taped at the legendary San Francisco venue, was originally broadcast in 1971 on the National Educational Television Network, and culminates in a jam session featuring all three bands, as well as members of Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Band.

Go Ride The Music features performances by Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service — with cameo appearances from David Crosby and Jerry Garcia.

West Pole, “captures the magnetic attraction of musicians who provoked the establishment enough to create national news” and features performances by Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and others.

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart admits that with so many Dead shows under his belt, some nights seem blurrier than others: “It pretty well falls into, you know, history. I mean, we've done so many concerts that sometimes, we can remember the concerts, but what we played (chuckles) — I don't think so. That's left up to the archivists, the historians, and for the people now to savor it. We sort of cut it loose. You have to do that in music, 'cause if you live in the past and you have too much memory of that, there's no room for the present and the future. We just kept moving, moving, moving, and playing, playing, playing, and it was just fortunate enough that we have recorded most of the legacy.”

Jefferson Airplane's late co-founder Paul Kantner recalled the heady days of Haight Ashbury and the generation the bands represented: “And we were definitely, particularly in the beginning, us against the world. Acid was legal for one thing, for two or three years there before they even figured out that it was supposed to be illegal and made it illegal. So they had all these people wandering around, legally blitzed, communing with God, dogs, or plants or whatever they could find. . . (laughs).”