This is a bit late, but neat. Via our forum, we learned that Furthur—a band founded by former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lash—held a concert on December 31st… and their “midnight moment”? Daenerys riding a dragon, to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”, followed by “Sugar Magnolia” after midnight. Quite cool! Besides “Dany”, a “Jorah Mormont” is also present for the 8-minute spectacular.
As noted on the forum, the audio of the concert was recorded and is now available at Archive.org.
Below is an embed of the “midnight moment”, and some discussion of how the Grateful Dead were almost involved in a film adaptation of one of Martin’s novels.
Interestingly, GRRM has had a brush with the Grateful Dead back in the day (besides attending a few concerts), as film producer Philip DeGuere (creator of Simon & Simon and an associate of members of the band) considered turning The Armageddon Rag—Martin’s horror-enthused rock and roll story—into a film. With his access to the Grateful Dead, the idea was floated of filming concert scenes for the film using crowd shots from Dead concerts, and he even had Robert Hunter (one of the most prolific of GD’s lyricists) and the late, great guitarist John Cipollina noodle around with some tunes for the soundtrack, taking song titles and snippets of lyrics from the novel and fleshing them out.
The film never happened, but some of those songs have been performed by Hunter, and lyrics and some more details about two of them, “Blood on the Sheets” and “Ragin’” can be found here and here. If anyone knows of a recording of Hunter or Cipollina’s band The Dinosaurs performing either of these songs, or “Armageddon Rag” or “Ashman”, that’d be interesting to hear.
UPDATED:
George’s wife Parris, who knew DeGuere, contacted us to provide some comments:
“Yes, Hunter did do some work on some songs for the proposed movie. IIRC, some of that work was re-done and recorded on an album with Cippolina and others called “The Dinosaurs”, which is out of print. I have a copy around here somewhere, but just moved the entire audio system and all the LPs, CDs and tapes and haven’t done the re-organization and database I intend to finally create, so can’t locate that particular CD right now.
“It was pretty nifty when Phil got us into to Dead shows, we had some good times, but hey, going to see the Dead was always a good time, no matter where you had seats or standing room.”