Joe Smith

[Eli Polonsky]

For what it's worth, a documentary video about the history of
The Grateful Dead called "Anthem to Beauty" contains a number
of segments of interview footage of Joe Smith, mainly talking
about what an unruly crew the Dead were in their early days
at Warner Brothers in the 60's, the huge (at the time) debt
that they ran up for studio time during recording of their
second and third very experimental acid-rock studio albums,
and then how surprised and overjoyed Warner's was when the
Dead unexpectedly changed musical direction in 1970 and came
out with the accessible, sparsely produced folk-country-rock
style albums "Workingmans Dead" and "American Beauty", which
became gold records a few years later.

The documentary is available on DVD and VHS on Rhino Records.
The interview segments were recorded about ten years ago. Joe
looked healthy and well at that time.

EP