For my money, the Grateful Dead was a clumsy doobie-toke garage band that had…what, two or three hit singles, okay, but their greatness was in their sloppy extended jam improvs that sometimes (I emphasize that word) resulted in some amazing passages. The Dead could be awful or certainly tedious one night and then inspired or even cosmically transcendent the next. For me their peak was the “Live/Dead” album, which was recorded at the Fillmore West and other venues in early ’69 and released in the fall of that year. (Rock critic Robert Christgau allegedly wrote that side two of the double album “contains the finest rock improvisation ever recorded.”) Jerry Garcia‘s sometimes beautiful, sometimes barely sufficient playing between the two- and three-minute mark in the “Turn On Your Love Light”…if you can get this portion, you’ll have a place in your heart for the Dead. Stoned, immaculate…Captain Trips. But it’ll always help if you have a little weed. In any event Amir Bar-Lev (Happy Valley, The Tillman Story) will direct a definitive Grateful Dead doc with Martin Scorsese producing. The doc, out next year, will celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary.