DVD Review: The End Of The Road

A friend of mine is a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I don’t hold that against him. Other than that, he’s a pretty good guy. He recently loaned me The End Of The Road, a documentary about the last Grateful Dead tour. The DVD doesn’t feature any of the band’s music, nor any interviews with members of the band, members of the band’s crew or the band’s employees, nor any up-close-and-personal footage of the band itself. Instead, the documentary is made up entirely of parking-lot interviews conducted with Deadheads.

Deadheads, of course, are the people who abandoned career and family so that they could follow the band for, in some cases, nearly all of the Grateful Dead’s thirty year history. After watching this documentary, you’ll be amazed that any of them… at least, any of the ones interviewed here… were capable of getting from one concert site to the next without getting arrested, dying, overdosing, or simply choking to death on a glass of water.

This is, without a doubt, the stupidest, most repugnant, most disgusting and entirely unpleasant group of people ever filmed for one project. That includes any and all reality TV programs you may have seen.

Jerry Garcia, of course, died on August 9, 1995, four hours after checking himself into a drug rehab program. The tour documented here turned out to be the last tour the Grateful Dead ever trudged through. The End Of The Road makes it obvious that, if Deadhead culture really ever was ever positive in any way, it’s positive days are were over long before Garcia’s death. After watching The End Of The Road, it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone would ever want to spend a couple of days, much less a large part of their life, on tour following this band.

During the summer ’95 tour, the Dead played in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, of course, is the expendable income capital of the United States. So, what happens when the land of strippers and casinos is overrun by people with no expendable income at all? Bad things, man. Very bad things.

At the Deer Creek Amphitheater show, a mob of drugged out Deadheads tore down fences in order to try to see the Grateful Dead for free. As a result, the band canceled that night’s show, a first for the band, according to The End Of The Road. In a tersely worded letter to their fans, signed by the entire band, the Grateful Dead chastised the Deadheads for their behavior. In retrospect, the wording of the letter makes it clear that the band saw the end of their subculture in sight. The authority and honesty of the letter gave me a newfound respect for the band itself, but only reinforced my negative image of the fans.

But, hey… you don’t need little old me to say things about Deadheads to give you a negative impression of them. I’ll let some of the ones in The End Of The Road speak for themselves. Here are a few screengrabs and direct quotes, word for word, from the people interviewed in The End Of The Road:

"I’m Brother Brown Bear, the Rainbow Keeper. What goes around comes around. Whatever you throw out comes back at you, good or bad, brother. You’re not my brother, dude. You’re not my brother. Never will be. Never were, and never whoa, once, ever be MY brother! I love you, man!"

"Don’t treat these people like animals because (unintelligible) hair long (unintelligible) foot on they head. There is only one constitution! That constitution fit all America!"

"I’ve gotten in fights, you know, with the orange jackets and the blue jackets because when I go to a Dead show I have my own way of going, and I don’t want them telling me I have to walk over here, stand over there, or I can’t pee where I want to."

Ultimately, Wendy and I were only able to get through The End Of The Road by resorting to mockery of the people on the screen.

Is that Rob Zombie’s grandfather?

Hey, look! That’s not just a dirty damn hippy… that’s a NAKED dirty damn hippy!

Oh, look… hippies doing nitrous. Who’da thunk it?

In the end, even poking fun couldn’t turn The End Of The Road into something fun to watch. We ended up feeling guilty for mocking people who deserved our pity. It was just depressing. These people lived with the delusion that their subculture was somehow utopian and peaceful. Maybe it was in the 1960's. I don't know. It obviously was anything but a utopia in 1995.

The one word these Deadheads used the most to describe their scene was “tribal.” Calling the Deadhead scene “tribal” is ultimately very insulting to people who… well, actually live in tribes. Let me illustrate:

This is a picture of a tribal ceremony.

This is a picture of a Deadhead parking lot.

If you need me to explain that there’s nothing remotely “tribal” about dirty white people jumping around and tripping on acid… well, you’re probably a Deadhead yourself.

The cinematography and editing in The End Of The Road may be the worst I’ve ever seen. If you know how to work the backlight button and the pause button on your camcorder, you’re capable of making a better movie, technically, than this one.

The real reason that The End Of The Road fails, though, is because it’s a fond tribute to a tour that doesn’t deserve to be remembered fondly. If the Grateful Dead's summer of '95 tour should be remembered at all, it should be as a cautionary tale.


  ¶ 12:19 AM