Every so often I go through our video catalog to make sure links are still alive, hunt down newly uploaded footage, and add the best videos to the site. A lot of this is automated, but it still requires manual intervention. And this inevitably involves watching much of the video (such a chore! :). I just finished another pass, and it was a fun and productive one.
This round added 58 videos, bringing the site’s catalog to 1,328 videos. Of those, 383 are complete shows covering 274 different dates. It is so cool that we can watch the complete footage from so many shows. And we also have 439 total dates represented in the footage.
We are almost wholly drawing from the Grateful Dead’s channel, the awesome remasters of Christopher Hazard, Kevin Tobin’s incredible efforts, and the Bill Graham collection. As always, if you know of a YouTube channel I’m overlooking, or if there’s a favorite video that belongs in the archive, let me know in the comments. The goal is to catalog as much of the Dead’s video material as possible to make it more widely available and more easily searchable.
This new batch of videos included a number of complete shows, 13 to be exact. And the earliest of those was a rather raw Kevin Tobin video of the October 12, 1984 Augusta Civic Center show, which we did not have any video of on the site before. The next earliest is a major upgrade to the November 21, 1985 show at the Kaiser, which we already had in the original.
There were a handful of new single sets and partial shows. But by far the biggest other group that got added was individual songs. The Werewolves of London from London’s Wembley Arena on the 1990 tour is pretty sweet. Just check out the ripping jams that Hornsby and Jerry kick up (and listen to Jerry’s ragged voice). I am also a sucker for a We Bid You Goodnight, and the encore of Last Time into one from July 14, 1990 is fantastic. Watching Brent kill Louie, Louie on September 20, 1988 is super fun too. Of course, we already had all these songs as part of complete shows, so none of this is entirely revelatory. But the single songs are always nice little treats.
We only added one documentary this go round, an A&E Biography on Jerry from 2005. I highly recommend checking it out, if you haven’t seen it. Jerry gets that classic Biography treatment with tons of great video snippets and talking heads.
Hopefully more and more videos come to light and Christopher Hazard and others keep working their restoration magic on the ones that we already have. We will certainly continue to catalog them here.
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