Uploaded September 2010 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
A soulful "Dew" from the Grateful Dead's Europe 72 album is synched with scenes from "On the Beach," the film that inspired the writing of the song by Bonnie Dobson. In an interview she had this to say about the connection between the song and film:
"I think it must have been maybe 1960 or 1959, I can't remember, when I saw a film called "On The Beach" and it made a tremendous impression on me, that film. Particularly at that time because everybody was very worried about the bomb and whether we were going to get through the next 10 years. It was a very immediate problem and I remember I was singing in Los Angeles at the Ashe Grove and I sat up all night talking with some friends. I was staying with a girl named Joyce Nastelin(sp) whom I lost contact with, nice woman she was. And I don't know, she went to bed or something and I just sat and suddenly I just started writing this song. I had never written anything in my life. I'd written some poetry as a kid. I'd never written songs and this song just came out and really it was a kind of re-enactment of that film in a way where at the end there is nobody left and it was a conversation between these two people trying to explain what's happening. It was really apocalypse, that was what it was about."
The full interview with Bonnie is here:
taco.com/roots/dobsoninterview.html
The movie scenes used in this video come from this segment, which is worth watching (to hear the dialouge):
youtube.com/watch?v=upg2eqNbF3w
In these scenes Anthony Perkins plays an Australian naval officer who here is spending his last moments with his wife Mary who earlier in the movie freaked out when he tried to show her how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with lethal pills supplied by the government. The man in the garage is Fred Astaire, commiting suicide with the fumes from his beloved race car. Gregory Peck plays a US submarine captian who has just returned from San Francisco, where they found high radiation levels and no survivors. Here he is greeted by Ava Gardner, into who's arms he has fallen as he struggles with acceptance of the fact that his wife and children in the US have all died already.
You can read more about the movie here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
It's powerful emotionally challenging stuff, but this is what the song "Morning Dew" is all about, these scenes from the end of the movie, so i felt it was worth making a video like this.
May we move into a future where the odds of such a tragedy diminish tremendously...
Peace,
Christopher
A soulful "Dew" from the Grateful Dead's Europe 72 album is synched with scenes from "On the Beach," the film that inspired the writing of the song by Bonnie Dobson. In an interview she had this to say about the connection between the song and film:
"I think it must have been maybe 1960 or 1959, I can't remember, when I saw a film called "On The Beach" and it made a tremendous impression on me, that film. Particularly at that time because everybody was very worried about the bomb and whether we were going to get through the next 10 years. It was a very immediate problem and I remember I was singing in Los Angeles at the Ashe Grove and I sat up all night talking with some friends. I was staying with a girl named Joyce Nastelin(sp) whom I lost contact with, nice woman she was. And I don't know, she went to bed or something and I just sat and suddenly I just started writing this song. I had never written anything in my life. I'd written some poetry as a kid. I'd never written songs and this song just came out and really it was a kind of re-enactment of that film in a way where at the end there is nobody left and it was a conversation between these two people trying to explain what's happening. It was really apocalypse, that was what it was about."
The full interview with Bonnie is here:
taco.com/roots/dobsoninterview.html
The movie scenes used in this video come from this segment, which is worth watching (to hear the dialouge):
youtube.com/watch?v=upg2eqNbF3w
In these scenes Anthony Perkins plays an Australian naval officer who here is spending his last moments with his wife Mary who earlier in the movie freaked out when he tried to show her how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with lethal pills supplied by the government. The man in the garage is Fred Astaire, commiting suicide with the fumes from his beloved race car. Gregory Peck plays a US submarine captian who has just returned from San Francisco, where they found high radiation levels and no survivors. Here he is greeted by Ava Gardner, into who's arms he has fallen as he struggles with acceptance of the fact that his wife and children in the US have all died already.
You can read more about the movie here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
It's powerful emotionally challenging stuff, but this is what the song "Morning Dew" is all about, these scenes from the end of the movie, so i felt it was worth making a video like this.
May we move into a future where the odds of such a tragedy diminish tremendously...
Peace,
Christopher
