Twenty-six years ago today, The Grateful Dead took the stage at Buckeye Lake Music Center in Hebron, OH. On hand that night was Peter Shapiro, at the time a Northwestern film student spending a month on summer tour alongside cameraman Philip Bruell. The Buckeye Lake show opens And Miles To Go Before I Sleep: On Tour with the Grateful Dead Summer 1993, which documents the swelling Dead scene.

And Miles To Go led to Shapiro’s involvement with the Tie-Died documentary, which screened at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Shapiro returned to Sundance in 1997 to premiere “American Road,” a travelogue that he cut to the music of Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself.”

Shapiro’s connection with the Grateful Dead world continue over the years, through performances at Fare Thee Well, the Brooklyn Bowls, LOCKN’ festival and the Capitol Theatre, where tonight, Phil Lesh is performing his 80^th show at the venue, since Shapiro renovated and relaunched it in 2012.

Looking back on the making of And Miles To Go, Shapiro reflects, “I first ‘got on the bus’ in the parking-lot of Rosemont Horizon in March  1993. Three months later in June I went on summer tour with my friend, Phil, from film school at Northwestern, and a video camera.  We went on the road seeking to capture a bit of the magic that I had been turned onto that initial night in Chicago. While we never got any of the band members to speak with us we were able to meet and capture many of the other characters that, combined together, created the circus that followed and surrounded the Grateful Dead in the 1990s. I recently got to watch the film again for the first time in a number of years. It was cool to feel the energy of the Dead’s Summer Tour again, so we felt we should share it more broadly. Some of this scene is still going strong today, with Dead & Co., Phil & Friends and other bands, but some of it you need a time machine to go back and get that feeling. Hopefully watching And Miles To Go can give people a taste of that once again.”