May 7-9, 1968, The Electric Circus, 23 St. Mark's Place, New York, NY: The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead first came to underground prominence in San Francisco, but their next conquest was Manhattan. Although the Grateful Dead did not sell a lot of records until 1970, and did not become a significant concert attraction until that time, Manhattan took a shine to them early. New York City Deadheads, from Brooklyn and Queens as well as Manhattan, were among the first to make visits by the Grateful Dead an occasion to attend every single show. San Franciscans could afford to be casual, because the Dead would always return home, but Manhattan seems to have been the first place where fans were determined to go to every single show in town. Thus it is no surprise that there were legendary 60s Dead shows from Manhattan, most notably at The Fillmore East, but also at the Cafe Au Go Go, in Central Park, and at Flushing Meadows, among other places.

Yet the Grateful Dead played six largely forgotten shows in three nights in Manhattan, on the weekend of May 7, 8 and 9, 1968. All six shows were likely packed, and yet the shows are thoroughly forgotten. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that no tapes endure from those shows, and in this century that often causes Dead shows to drift into the darkness. Yet given the number of people who must have attended the shows, it is surprising how little references there are to the shows at Manhattan's now largely forgotten Electric Circus. There is enough evidence to be certain that the shows occurred, and yet the Electric Circus has become invisible in the 60s Grateful Dead narrative, a very rare state for any Dead shows in Manhattan. This post will look at what can be retrieved from the Grateful Dead's weekend at the Electric Circus, and attempt to look at the club itself, in order to try and sketch a picture of what the Dead's show may have been like.

Outside The Electric Circus on October 31, 1967 (from the Village Voice)

The Grateful Dead, Spring 1968
In the Spring of 1968, the Grateful Dead were finishing recording Anthem Of The Sun. By April, they were working on the final mixdown, so they spent a week in Miami, working at Criteria Studios in Miami. It's not clear if they accomplished anything at Criteria, but they did play seven shows that week, six at Thee Image and one free one at Graynolds Park. This was followed by the Dead's debut at Philadelphia's Electric Factory on April 27 and 28, and then a swing up to New York. Since the Dead did not have shows until the next weekend at the Electric Circus, they found time to play free shows at Columbia University on Wednesday (May 3) and Central Park on Thursday (May 5). A band who came to town and played two high-profile free shows loomed large in hip New York City, and those events seemed to have completely overshadowed the Electric Circus shows.

Although the Dead probably got paid decently at the Electric Circus, it was not a first-tier venue. Sly had played there, but at the time Sly And The Family Stone would have been completely unknown on the East Coast. Often, the Electric Circus didn't even mention the names of their bands in their weekly ads in the Village Voice, so it may seem like a strange choice for the Dead to have played there. After all, the premier rock venue on the East Coast was only a few blocks away from 23 St. Marks Place--why didn't the Grateful Dead play the newly-opened Fillmore East, nearby at 105 2nd Avenue (at 6th Street)?

Touring rock bands generally book their shows 60 to 90 days in advance. Bill Graham had opened the Fillmore East on March 8, 1968. Back in early '68, the Grateful Dead and the other San Francisco rock bands were running the Carousel Ballroom, and they were one of Bill Graham's principal competitors back in San Francisco. The Dead would have booked their Eastern tour in February or March, and they weren't very likely to get a call from Bill Graham at the time. But there weren't a lot of good rock gigs in Manhattan in 1968, either, so the Dead found themselves playing two shows a night for three evenings at the Electric Circus.

The Grateful Dead debuted at the Fillmore East shortly after the Electric Circus shows, on June 14-15, 1968. By that time, the Dead's enterprise at the Carousel was doomed, and Bill Graham was on the verge of taking over the lease, soon to rename it the Fillmore West. Granted, the Dead's June Fillmore East shows would have to have been billed before the Carousel collapsed, but by April or May the writing would have been on the wall for the Carousel. In any case, with Summer coming on, even if the Carousel might have survived--some thought it would--Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead needed each other on the East Coast. Thus the legend of the Grateful Dead at Fillmore East has rightly been remembered as the Dead playing at their Eastern Division "Home Court," but the result has been that the Electric Circus was written out of the Dead's history. As Graham and the Dead became the only permanent institutions from San Francisco's 60s, both sides seemed to have preferred to forget the time they wouldn't play nice.

Francine Azzaria (Frankie Weir)
One lasting impact of the Electric Circus shows was having Francine "Frankie" Azzaria get on the bus with the band. Frankie ended up moving in with Bob Weir in the 70s, taking his last name, and she was very much a part of the family. She worked in the Dead's Travel Agency in the early 70s, and she also sang in the obscure band James And The Mercedes, who opened for Kingfish a few times around 1975. McNally describes her arrival into the band's orbit:

Frankie [Azzaria] was the woman Weir had in mind when singing "Sugar Magnolia"...Funny, bawdy, a high-energy dancer, Frankie had been a finalist on American Bandstand and worked at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, then on the TV shows Hullabaloo and Shindig. Following her first Grateful Dead show in 1968, she ended the night at a jam with Mickey. Afterward, she and Mickey walked around Washington Square. and Hart persuaded her to run away with the Grateful Dead. They had not kissed, or even touched. She went home to bed, and was awakened the next morning by Ram Rod, Jackson and Hagen, who were there to pick and give her a ride in the truck to the next show, in Virginia..."[they said] 'Hey look lady, you're either coming or you're not'...I got into the truck and we drove away." (McNally p.359)

The last show of the Eastern tour was in Virginia Beach on May 11, so Frankie's meeting with Mickey Hart clearly was at the Electric Circus. Wherever the jam was that Mickey attended, Washington Square was over in the West Village (at 5th Avenue), so all the geography fits. Of course, Frankie left with Hart, yet she ended up with Weir, but then, it was the 60s.

A publicity photo from The Electric Circus

The Electric Circus--What Was It?
Given the paucity of detail for what should I have been a high profile memory, I have attempted to reconstruct a little of the history of the Electric Circus, in an effort to consider what the event must have been like. My principal source for the first rock incarnations of 23 St. Marks Place owe a lot to Richie Unterberger's excellent White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day (2009: Jawbone Press). My principal source for information about The Electric Circus itself is the indispensable blog for New York 60s venues, It's All The Streets You Crossed.

April 1-30, 1966, The Dom, New York, NY: The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground
The Dom had been a Polish hall, and "Dom" means "home" in Polish, so the building was known as The Dom. The Dom had a long history, which I won't go into here. In early 1966, however, the first floor ballroom in The Dom was rented by Andy Warhol's crew, for a unique sort of "environment" called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The event included an elaborate light show, performance art and music by an unknown band called The Velvet Underground. Although The Exploding Plastic Inevitable grew out of the same cultural firmament that had created The Trips Festival, in many ways it was quite the opposite, edgy and self-conscious where The Trips Festival and The Fillmore were relaxed and liberating.

In any case, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable took New York by storm. The Velvet Underground, themselves a unique and fascinating group, became the new underground Greenwich Village rock sensation, long before they had even recorded. After the April engagement, the EPI performance, with the Velvet Underground, went on to tour various places, most famously with The Mothers Of Invention. The West Coast was not really ready for them (although the "feud" between Lou Reed and Frank Zappa was probably invented for the press), and the tour was not a success. By the time The Velvet Underground had returned to New York, however, expecting to return to The Dom, they found that Warhol had lost control of the building.

An ad from the March 30, 1967 Village Voice, for what appears to be the last shows at The Balloon Farm

The Balloon Farm
According to Richie Unterberger, 23 St. Marks Place had been taken over by Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman. The always-shrewd Grossman, no doubt having noticed how well the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were doing at the Fillmore, seems to have looked to start his own venue. Apparently, the Balloon Farm was at the same address as The Dom, but on the second floor rather than the first. "The Dom" remained as the name of the restaurant on the first floor.

While various nascent psychedelic bands played The Balloon Farm, the Velvets actually played every weekend between September 16 and October 16, 1966, further confirming their legendary status in Greenwich Village. The Balloon Farm never really caught on, and it ground to a halt by April 1, 1967. Nonetheless, the East Village was clearly still where the action was, just as it had been during the Folk Boom, because it was so accessible by subway and rail from both the city and the surrounding suburbs.

An ad for the opening of the Electric Circus, from the June 29, 1967 Village Voice

The Electric Circus
Sometime in the Spring of 1967, the lease on 23 St. Marks Place was transferred to Jerry Brandt, a former William Morris agent turned impresario. Brandt attempted to merge the innovations of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Trips Festival inspirations of the Fillmore. It was completely over the top, of course, but that is New York's stock in trade. San Francisco was very hip in the middle of 1967, so there was a definite nod to the city at the beginning. For the first several weeks of the Electric Circus, refugees from the Bay Area's Renaissance Faires juggled and promenaded for the souped-up masses.

The Electric Circus was mainly a nightclub, open 7 nights a week. There were bands every night, but mostly a house band played for at least a week, and possibly weeks, at a time. The Circus had taken over both the 1st and 2nd floor ballrooms of 23 St. Marks, so it encompassed both prior incarnations, as The Dom had been on the 1st floor, and The Balloon Farm on the 2nd. Still, there were periodically name bands, such as Sly And The Family Stone, who played the club on the weekend of August 29-31, 1967.

Nonetheless, initially at least, The Electric Circus was a popular nightclub in New York. I discovered an obscure but fascinating book, self-published in 1988, called Crying Out Loud. Author Sean Hutchinson had been the bass player in a late 60s band called Far Cry, who released one album on Vanguard Apostolic Records in 1969.  Among the many fascinating insights into the fringes of the late 60s rock industry are some vivid descriptions of Far Cry's stint as the house band at the Electric Circus. He sets the scene:

Midway down St. Mark's Place [E. 8th St],  against a backdrop of leather shops, boutiques, head stores and other psychedelic squalor stood the Electric Circus, which was the site of Far Cry's new nightly job. Outside, faded flower children went to seed against the dirty pavement. Inside, in a black, womblike, chamber, the big beat pounded out, wrapped in a multi-media, strobelit, amplified frenzy.

On hot summer nights the Electric Circus would thunder until the wee hours, hosting a thousand hyperactive teenagers from the Bronx or New Jersey. They, it seemed, could dance for hours, tireless in the swelter of drugs and heat (p.140).

Are these teenagers from the Bronx or New Jersey? Given the bright light of the room, I suspect that this photo was somewhat staged for the cameras

Far Cry played The Electric Circus for much of the Summer of '69. Hutchinson:

On weekends, the place was like the stockyards. By early evening the street outside would be teeming with a waiting throng, all dressed in suitable hippie attire. Boots and bell bottom jeans with army surplus jackets proved to be a popular mode at that time--one that was suitable, with variations, for both male and female. Few women wore skirts or dresses those days; functionality was in, while femininity, with all its sexist connotations, was out.

At nine pm, The Electric Circus would open, and from then on until closing some five hours later the room would be filled to the bursting point. Packed in shoulder to shoulder, the crowd continued to boogie despite the congestion, wriggling in the semi-darkness with sweaty and determined fervor. At the back of the cavernous hall was a sort of grotto, walls upholstered with small upholstered cells, and while they were hardly comfortable, these spots were just the place to catch one's breath, grope with one's partner, or simply swallow a few pep pills before rejoining the fray.

All night long the din was incessant, live music instantly supplanted by recorded offerings; to the band members it appeared that the crowd did not bother to distinguish between the two. Four shows a night was hard work, but such was the musician's crucible, and we hammered our hardest with every set.

By two A.M. the revels would be ended in exhaustion. The band would play a final barrage while the audience stumbled out, shell shocked with ears ringing...The Electric Circus was silent at last. The "Ultimate Legal Entertainment Experience" was over for another evening (pp.140-141).

Inside at the Electric Circus

Far Cry wasn't that great a band, but they played wild, free-form type music: a reviewer suggests "imagine Blood Sweat & Tears locked in a closet with Captain Beefheart and John Cipollina." So primal 1968 Grateful Dead, with a raging "Alligator>Caution" jam, would probably have fit right in with the Electric Circus. Back in '68, some places weren't ready for the Grateful Dead, their feedback, extended jamming and their careening sense of musical danger. Greenwich Village was ready, however, since musical madness seemed to be on the menu every weekend regardless of who was booked.

One commenter on the Archive does seem to have seen the Dead at The Electric Circus, and he had an amusing memory

Of note--footnote--to historians: The Electric Circus had an unofficial policy of letting people in free if they were barefoot. Sort of a hip statement. We found a spot under a stoop where we would hide ours--until one night after a Hendrix show they were gone. Well worth the loss of a cheap pair of sneakers, however.

A recent online article had some interesting memories from musicians who played the Electric Circus. The most interesting comment comes from avant-garde composer Morton Subotnick

Don Buchla designed the whole sound system. The sub-woofers were huge, they were actually attached to the floor so you could feel the vibration of the sub-woofer. And of course people were moving, so once everybody moved together with that, it was pretty impressive.

Don Buchla was a legendary California synthesizer pioneer, intimately connected to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Buchla, for example, built the sound system for the Prankster's famous bus. I wonder if the Dead hitched up their sound system to Buchla's PA? You'd have to think Phil Lesh would have enjoyed playing through giant sub-woofers located in the floor, and the crowd would surely have felt every Phil-bomb.

It may be that many of the people attending had little idea who was actually playing, nor did they actually care. In any case, The Electric Circus rarely booked name bands, and with the Fillmore East just a few blocks away, there was no way the Dead were going to play there again. New York is fashionable, and things happen fast, but they end fast too. The Electric Circus had a pretty good run, but it faded away around 1971. Jerry Brandt had sold the club around 1969--I'm not sure to who--and went on to manage a singer named Jobriath (google him yourself), and then opened a club called The Erotic Circus, which I think became Plato's Retreat, another legendary club well outside the subject matter of this blog.

The Afterlife Of The Electric Circus

The Electric Circus had its moment, and then New York moved on. Nobody thought about it much for the next few decades. I only thought about it when I tried to figure it out as a rock venue, which turns out to have been only a slight part of its legacy. Yet one characteristic of New York is that it is full of writers and artists who lend their talents to enshrining the city they know in their own imaginations. 

Lacking a tape of the Grateful Dead's 1968 Electric Circus shows, we can only imagine what their performances might have been like. But we have some help, something to play a soundtrack over. The Electric Circus seems to have been memorialized on screen at least twice. In the 1968 Clint Eastwood movie Coogan's Bluff, where a rural Arizona detective has to recapture a fugitive in New York, Eastwood looks for a suspect's girlfriend in a hip New York nightclub.  The film's Pigeon Toed Orange Peel Club was shot at The Electric Circus. See for yourself on YouTube (by the way, the white guy called "Omega" is supposedly future New Rider bassist Skip Battin).

For a more modern version, in Season 6 of Mad Men, some characters go the Electric Circus.

Although it's hard to be certain about filmed recreations, it does suggest that even if the Dead played well at The Electric Circus, it may not have mattered that much to the patrons. Of course, that may very well suggest that the band was free to play whatever they wanted, and the music may have been really special, even if no one was in a state to remember it. 

After 1971, 23 St. Mark's Place was too small to be a rock concert venue. Supposedly the building was relatively intact, if somewhat run down, until about 2002, when it was substantially remodeled. It looks nice today, although it is just a typical condo/apartment development, with retail and restaurants on the ground floor. There's no hint of the Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead and thousands of teenagers from around the Tri-City area, rocking it out until the early morning hours.

23 St Marks Place, New York, NY, the former site of The Electric Circus, in May 2013

Grateful Dead Live FM Broadcasts 1970 (FM Broadcasts III)

The David Singer flyer for the Dead/Airplane shows on October 4 and 5, 1970. The Sunday, October 4 show was broadcast on KSAN-fm and KQED-fm to provide a true Quadrophonic mix

The Grateful Dead have been influential to the music industry in ways that are not always self-evident. One way in which the Dead have had a huge influence on the music industry was their enthusiasm for live FM broadcasts of their concerts. In the early 1970s, the Dead's willingness to broadcast their performances free over the airwaves was in complete opposition to music business orthodoxy. Very rapidly, however, as the Dead started to sell records without benefit of a hit, the industry started to take notice. Live FM broadcasts became a staple of rock radio by the mid-70s, and they laid the groundwork for the explosion of music available on the internet, however distant that future might have been.

In the first installment of this series, I described the very earliest live FM broadcasts of rock shows. The first show broadcast, to my knowledge, was the HALO Benefit at Winterland on May 30, 1967. I remain alone in asserting that the Dead did not play that show, even though they were billed, but the show was unquestionably broadcast, as KMPX-fm's Tom Donahue can be heard as the host on a circulating Quicksilver tape. In any case, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and The Fish broadcast live from the Carousel Ballroom on February 14, 1968, and the resulting copies were foundational for Grateful Dead tape collectors over the years. There were a few other early experiments, including a live broadcast on Berkeley's KPFA-fm from the Avalon Ballroom on April 6, 1969, and a set from San Diego on KPRI-fm (106.5) on May 11, 1969.

For my second installment, I analyzed how many of the Grateful Dead tapes from the 1960s that circulated in the 1970s and 80s were broadcast on San Francisco's KSAN-fm in the 1970s, although they were not in fact actually broadcast during the 60s. Now, in this post, I am going to look all four of the Grateful Dead's live broadcasts in 1970, an unscheduled guest appearance by Jerry Garcia and Duane Allman and a brief acoustic performance. During this period, we can see the Grateful Dead experimenting with different ways of getting their music heard. None of the circumstances of any of the 1970 broadcasts were ever duplicated, but it makes a good case study on how the Grateful Dead determined the best way to promote their music to their own benefit.

[update] As always, Commenters have made tremendous additions and corrections to the blog. Thanks to cryptdev, LIA, runonguiness, DavMar77 and everyone else. I have interpolated the key points into the blog, but the Comment thread--as always--is worth reading in its entirety.

Workingman's Dead was released in June, 1970, although FM radio stations had been playing tracks earlier than that

The Grateful Dead, 1970
The Grateful Dead surprised the music industry, and perhaps themselves, by making 1970 the year that they went from being infamous to successful. As the year began, Live/Dead had just been released (in November, 1969), and it got its share of airplay, as FM rock radio had become popular throughout the country. A concert industry had developed beyond the Fillmores and a few big cities, so the Dead had more opportunities to play live. As more people heard the Dead in person, particularly in colleges, more of them got on the bus, and few ever got off.

It was fortunate that the Dead were willing to take advantage of the burgeoning concert circuit, since they were effectively broke. The Dead had spent an inordinate amount of money in 1968 and '69 making Aoxomoxoa, so they weren't getting much from Warner Brothers. In the meantime, they had discovered that manager Lenny Hart was stealing from them, so he had been summarily fired in February of 1970. Sam Cutler took over as tour manager, and the Dead evolved a strategy of playing as much as possible, thus building up their audience while they made money the only way available to them.

However, despite or perhaps because of their difficult financial situation, the Dead managed to record and release two iconic albums during 1970, making them accessible to a much wider audience than ever before. Workingman's Dead (June 1970) and American Beauty (November 1970) were hugely popular on FM radio. Even though no one song was a true hit, for many people, tracks like "Friend Of The Devil" or "Casey Jones" were the first Dead songs they heard, and it made the band all the more attractive as a concert attraction.

Nonetheless, the Dead did not let either their financial difficulties or the chance for conventional success stand in the way of innovative ideas. The Grateful Dead continued to experiment with FM radio broadcasts throughout 1970. I do not think they had a specific plan in mind. In their prime, however, the Dead would assent to any idea that seemed interesting or untried. Looking backwards at their FM broadcasts from that year, we can see the ways in which the band determined how to make FM radio broadcasts into a tool that would allow the band to succeed on their own terms.

May 2, 1970 Gymnasium, Harpur College, Binghamton, NY
Broadcast: June 1970, probably June 21, KPFA-fm Berkeley
The first and most important Grateful Dead FM broadcast of 1970 was one of their most legendary, the broadcast of the May 2, 1970 show at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton). The entire show was recorded and broadcast on KPFA-fm in Berkeley, and apparently on WBAI-fm in New York. As far as I know, the show was not broadcast live, but was broadcast on a Sunday night some weeks later. I believe the date of the broadcast was June 21, 1970. The show was the source for numerous bootleg lps, and it was one of the first widely available circulating tapes, so the Binghamton show was widely heard even before it was released in 1997 as Dick's Picks Volume 8.

The Harpur College broadcast is rightly legendary--four hours of music, including an acoustic set, a New Riders set and two crushing electric sets. The acoustic set and the New Riders sound familiar to us now, but in 1970 they would have been fabulous, unexpected delights. Whenever exactly the show was broadcast, Workingman's Dead would have just been released, or just about to have been, and the New Riders were little more than a rumor. Most rock shows featured an hour-long performance by the headliner, if that. Four hours on stage, and a wide range of music that had barely been heard on record, was completely unthinkable.

Yet to my knowledge, for all the interviews with the Grateful Dead over the years, no one has ever pursued how the KPFA broadcast came about. Was it the Dead's idea? Was it KPFA's? I highly doubt it was Warner Brothers' idea--the idea of giving away music for free must have been anathema to them. Yet given the legendary status of the broadcast, why wasn't it repeated? Why didn't the Dead do it every year? We can only speculate, but given what we know of what the Dead did with FM broadcasts in the future, we can make some interesting inferences.

KPFA had a significant if now somewhat forgotten role in promoting live rock music in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Every Sunday night, KPFA would broadcast an hour long live concert from a recent show at the Fillmore West or Family Dog. Although I think most or all of the tapes were broadcast in mono, the tapes were the source of many of the cleanest board tapes from the 1969 era, particularly from lesser known bands. I do not have a list of those broadcasts, and I don't know if anyone does. However, I think KPFA Sunday night shows were the source of many circulating 1969 Grateful Dead soundboards, before they were superseded by the originals.  KPFA had also broadcast the April 6, 1969 show from the Avalon, with the Dead, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and AUM, so they were very supportive of the Grateful Dead's live FM adventures.

[update] cryptdev was an earwitness, and he has plenty of valuable insights (or inears?)

The KPFA broadcast series was called "Stays Fresh Longer" and indeed consisted of one live broadcast every Sunday night at, if I remember correctly, 10 PM. I religiously taped these shows in 1970 and shows included the following:

Miles Davis Fillmore West 4/10/70
Youngbloods - Pepperland 1/71
Joe Cocker Fillmore West 4/26/70
Sons of Champlin 10/24/69
Aum 4/30/69
HP Lovecraft from the New Orleans House in 1969
and of course the Dead 5/2/70 show

According to some very vague but plausible rumors, much of the technical support for KPFA's early forays into live FM rock broadcasts were provided by one Owsley Stanley. Stanley was known as a familiar sight in Berkeley folk and rock clubs, and indeed his first Berkeley residence (on Berkeley Way and McGee Street, according to legend), would not have been far from the KPFA studios. In the Spring of 1970, the very same Mr. Stanley would have been prevented from traveling with the Grateful Dead thanks to getting busted on Bourbon Street in February, so he might have been available to help with a broadcast of a complete Grateful Dead show. [update] cryptdev:

I remember the regular emcee of the show saying that the Dead had provided the tape of the Harpur show for Broadcast. Since this was just before Bear was incarcerated, it is indeed possible that he contributed the tape. 

Whatever the role of mysterious ursine characters, the KPFA broadcast set the table for future Grateful Dead FM broadcasts, even though that future would not be seen for another nineteen months. The key difference between the Binghamton show and its predecessors was that the Grateful Dead's show was broadcast in its entirety. The previous stabs at Grateful Dead broadcasts had included complete sets, but never both sets, much less three Grateful Dead sets and one New Riders set. Without question, amongst bands that had made records, the Grateful Dead were playing the longest concerts in rock music, and here they were broadcasting every note.

Deadheads have always treated as an afterthought the fact that the New Riders of The Purple Sage set was broadcast as well as the Dead. In June, 1970, when the tape was broadcast, Workingman's Dead would have just been released. Most FM stations would have already been playing the album for some weeks, so regular radio listeners would have heard songs like "Uncle John's Band" and "Casey Jones," and thus even in places where the album was not available Deadheads would have had some consciousness that the band was no longer all-psychedelic, all the time.

Yet the New Riders were a new thing. It was unthinkable in 1970 rock that a genuine rock star would play live with an opening act, generally eschewing the spotlight. Nobody but the Dead were broadcasting live FM shows, anyway, save for some out-of-the-way experiments. The concept that a bona fide guitar hero would play a different instrument in an opening act and then broadcast it on the radio was unprecedented. Warner Brothers must have had an apoplectic fit. Still, as far as 1970 went, hearing the Dead live on the radio, for those lucky enough, or hearing a tape, for those so equipped, must have been a revelation, and they barely seem to have noticed the New Riders.

Numerous bootleg lps were produced from the KPFA broadcast--yet another subject--and I can assure you that even in 1974, when I first got my hands on such items, the acoustic "I Know You Rider" and blazing electric "Dancing In The Streets" absolutely spun my head around. I know I wasn't the only one. Bootleg lps had a much bigger role in spreading the word about the Dead in the early 70s than anyone wants to concede today. There was even a New Riders bootleg from the show, though it's impossible to determine if it came out before the first NRPS album.

July ? 1970, "KSAN studios": Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, John Cipollina, others
broadcast: July ?, 1970, KSAN-fm, San Francisco, CA
[update] This tape has floated around for years, and its provenance and dating is uncertain. However, crypdev recalls hearing it on KSAN around July 1970, and that sounds plausible. Why it was recorded for broadcast isn't clear. The existing tape is Weir singing a few country numbers, backed by Garcia on pedal steel and other musicians. Garcia's voice can be heard, and the others are supposedly John Cipollina and Pete Sears. If Pete Sears was in town, it was because he was playing the Fillmore West with Silver Metre (July 18-22), but there's no guarantee that it's him. Crypt recalls

another curiosity not mentioned was the 7/70 broadcast of Garcia/Weir/Sears/Cipollina at KSAN studios. This has circulated with a variety of dates, some suggesting that it was Bill Champlin rather than Pete Sears playing keys. I tuned in to this just as it was wrapping up, and heard the players announced. Garcia and Weir also said they would drop by the next night to play some more. I was glued to my radio the next evening, tape deck poised, but they never showed.

KSAN didn't really have studios where a band could play. I assume they were actually using Pacific High Recorders, on 60 Brady Street, soon to become Alembic Studios. In any case, no members of the Dead ever participated in a KSAN broadcast that was this informal ever again.

August 23 (?), 1970 KCBS-tv Studios, San Francisco, CA
Broadcast:  August 30, 1970 KQED-tv and KQED-fm, San Francisco
For their next broadcast experiment, the Grateful Dead went in the opposite direction of the KPFA adventure, and performed just five songs in the KQED-tv KPIX-tv television studios, with the music simulcast on KQED-fm. This performance is generally listed as "August 30, 1970," because that was the date of the broadcast, but JGMF has demonstrated definitively that the show was actually taped prior to August 28, even if we aren't sure of the precise date.The show was some sort of weekly (or occasional) show called Calebration.

Given the paucity of professionally shot video from this era, it's interesting to see the Dead perform in a properly lit environment, and the performances aren't bad. But it's still a kind of lifeless TV show, limited to half an hour, and nothing like the real thing. It's no surprise that the Grateful Dead didn't repeat this experiment. However, I think the Calebration show was an indicator that the Dead were experimenting with different venues and mediums for getting their music heard, beyond the existing confines of rock touring, FM radio and record sales.

[update] I was wrong. The show was filmed at KPIX-tv studios, and broadcast on KPIX (Channel 5-CBS affiliate), with FM on KSAN and another commercial station. Cryptdev:

There were only two Calebration broadcasts. The first one comprised sets by Boz Scaggs and Linda Ronstadt, and the second was the Dead, followed by R&B singer Swamp Dogg, and then by Quicksilver - each played about 30 minutes. All were clearly recorded in the same studio, but it was NOT KQED. I believe the show was broadcast on KCBS, with the FM feeds at KSAN and another commercial station. The broadcasts included advertisements which would not have been broadcast on public TV or radio.

According to one commenter on the Archives, Calebration was a regular show that was actually broadcast on two FM stations simultaneously, to create a Quadrophonic sound mix. I can't confirm that, but since that is what KQED did a few months later at Winterland, it sounds plausible. In any case, for all of the progressive vibe, short-form television shows were not conducive to Grateful Dead music, so the band seems to have moved on, never to repeat the experiment. They did go on to perform more extensive live shows on television on various occasions, but I am not aware of another effort to shoehorn the Grateful Dead into a standard-length television format.

October 4, 1970 Winterland
Broadcast: October 4, 1970, KSAN-fm and KQED-fm, San Francisco (Quadrophonic), KQED-tv
The October 4, 1970 Winterland show was a major event, featuring broadcasts of complete performances by three of San Francisco's most legendary bands. Not only was the Winterland show broadcast live on KQED-tv, the audio was broadcast in true Quadrophonic, with a feed to two separate radio stations (KSAN-fm and KQED-fm) mixed together. Many people recall rigging up two stereos in their room to get the full quadrophonic effect while they watched the TV with the sound turned down.

KQED-tv (Channel 9) was San Francisco's Public Television (PBS) station, and it was a pretty hip and forward looking organization. Through a connection with Ralph Gleason, KQED had regularly broadcast San Francisco rock bands on TV shows, from as early as 1967. Among many other things, KQED would produce Sesame Street (it debuted on November 9, 1969) which included sub rosa participation from many members of the San Francisco rock scene, including Grace Slick.

KQED also had an FM station, and while it did not play rock, the station was willing to use the FM band to simulcast TV shows. From that point of view, KQED was as open minded and forward looking a station as the Grateful Dead could have asked for.
Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service had booked Winterland for two nights, Sunday October 4 and Monday October 5. Bill Graham held the lease on Winterland, and the bands would have hired his crew to run the shows, but BGP would not have been the promoter of the event. All three bands played one extended set each. To my knowledge, all three headline bands were broadcast, and there were between set interviews as well, so it was a true audio verite broadcast.

The October 4 show was a major event, but it was a major event that was overshadowed by the tragic death of Janis Joplin in a hotel room a few hundred miles to the South that very afternoon. My general understanding is that people at home had heard the news that Janis Joplin had died, but initially backstage interviews suggested that her friends in the bands had no idea. Rightly or wrongly, people could not help but feel that Janis should have been in the hall at Winterland with her friends, rather than alone in a hotel room in Hollywood, and it added to the sadness of any memories of the event. Fans and band members rarely mention the event except to lament Janis's passing.

There has never been another live remote Quadrophonic FM broadcast, to my knowledge. There may have been a few experiments before, if the Commenter who said that the Calebration show did it regularly (which seems plausible), but I am aware of none after October 4. Any tapes that endure are almost certainly from one feed or the other, and thus the true effect of the mix can never be recaptured. Notwithstanding that Quadrophonic never caught on--it was the "Surround Sound" of its time, and an early effort by the music industry to find a rock-friendly sound format that would generate highly profitable sales, an end not fully achieved until the Compact Disk--any FM Quad broadcast required not one but two stations, and outside of San Francisco that was a problematic proposition indeed.

One crucial factor to consider with respect to live FM broadcasts on commercial stations is the financing of any broadcasts. FM rock stations (higher than 92.0, anyway) were businesses, and hip or not, they could only afford to broadcast hours of live rock if it was paid for. In order for the Grateful Dead or anyone else to broadcast a live concert on KSAN, someone had to pick up the cost of the advertising that would be lost by a continuous broadcast. For a lengthy multi-act show, or even any Grateful Dead concert, broadcast on the top FM rock station in a major market, this could turn into real money.

KSAN, among many other innovations, pioneered sponsored live broadcasts, as local hi-fi retailers Pacific Stereo often presented the station's "Live Weekend" broadcasts, with ads before and after each set. However, I don't believe that major bands would have tolerated a sponsor at the time, even a "cool" one like Pacific Stereo. I presume that the record companies of the bands footed that bill. My guess is that RCA (Airplane), Warners (Grateful Dead) and Capitol (Quicksilver) committed themselves to a certain dollar amount of ads over the next 30 days, or some similar arrangement, rather than strictly laying out cash.

I do not believe any video from the show has survived either.  A few old heads have fond memories of seeing a show live on TV with true Quadrophonic sound, but like a light show, it's here and then it's gone. By all accounts, the subsequent Monday night show (October 5) was depressing and unmemorable, so the fact that there was no tape doesn't seem a great loss.

[update] cryptdev clarifies some details

You are correct that all three bands were broadcast for the 10/4/70 broadcast, which was on KSAN and KQED FM. The Dead's set was underway when the broadcast started. I have never heard verification of whether Hot Tuna or the New Riders played beforehand - neither set was broadcast.

November 22, 1970 WBCN-fm studios, Boston, MA Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Duane Allman
Broadcast: November 22, 1970, WBCN-fm, Boston, MA
On Saturday, November 21, 1970, the Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers Band The New Riders of The Purple Sage and a chimp act (with some very unsettled chimpanzees) played Sargent's Gym at Boston University. Just down the road apiece, The Allman Brothers Band were headlining at the Boston Tea Party (thanks to various Commenters for catching my error). Some time shortly after the show, Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, Bob Weir and Pigpen visited the WBCN-fm studios and hung out with the dj live and on the air. They were invited to perform acoustically in the studio, but there were only two guitars. Garcia and Weir played a little together, and Duane and Weir played as well. Pigpen declined to perform, apparently. They played about twenty minutes, and tapes circulate. It's very enjoyable, but very casual, with a lot of chatter.

KMPX-fm in San Francisco had drawn up the blueprint for FM rock stations when it began in February of 1967. Stations in other cities soon followed. Boston, always hip thanks to a huge population of college students, joined the party with WBCN on March 15, 1968. Initially, WBCN broadcast from a room above the stage at the Boston Tea Party. On occasion, the bands playing the Tea Party could be heard behind the dj (to give you a comparison, imagine if KSAN-fm had broadcast from a room at the Fillmore). WBCN's legendary all-night dj, The Woofah Goofuh, had his own band, The Hallucinations, who often played The Tea Party themselves. Later, The Woofah Goofuh went on to become better known as Peter Wolf, lead singer of the hugely popular J. Geils Band. By 1970, the Tea Party had moved to the site of the old Ark, and WBCN had moved too, but they were both still central to the Boston rock scene.

Throughout the 1970s, there have been numerous instances of touring rock musicians having been invited into the dj booth and encouraged to play a few songs in an acoustic configuration. Some stations, such as WHFS-fm in Bethesda, MD, made a practice of this, and some great tapes have come from such sessions (there are some great Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt tapes from WHFS, for example). However, Garcia and Weir--and for that matter Duane Allman--seemed to have had little interest in doing this again. I'm not aware of another instance where Garcia, Weir or Duane played an acoustic number live on the air from the dj booth. So the peculiar event at WBCN seems to be another instance of the Dead getting in early on another way of playing their music to people, and choosing to pass on it afterwards.

December 27, 1970 KPPC-fm studios, Pasadena, CA: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, John Dawson and David Nelson
broadcast: December 27, 1970, KPPC-fm
[update] On the weekend of December 26-28, 1970, the Grateful Dead played three shows at the El Monte Legion Stadium, which was actually an indoor arena. El Monte is East of Los Angeles, 15 miles west and a world away from downtown LA, halfway to Pomona. It apparently wasn't Grateful Dead territory in those days, and Garcia, Weir and two New Riders appeared on KPPC on Sunday morning in an effort to encourage listeners to come down and see the shows on Sunday and Monday nights.

KPPC-fm had originally been started by "Big Daddy" Tom Donahue as a sister station to KMPX in San Francisco. I don't know if there was still a financial connection to Donahue, but KPPC was a hip LA station. The foursome called themselves "the Sunday Quartet" and played some bluegrass gospel material. Appearing in this fashion was somewhat different than the casual appearance in Boston, in that Garcia and company had a plan, and some music appropriate to a cramped radio booth. However, this experiment, too, was never repeated.
(thanks to numerous Commenters for reminding me about this one)

An ad for upcoming Bill Graham Presents shows from the December 20, 1970, SF Chronicle, including the Grateful Dead at Winterland on New Year's Eve

December 31, 1970 Winterland
Broadcast: December 31, 1970, KQED-tv, KSAN-fm (four songs only), San Francisco
For the New Year's Eve 1970 show, the Grateful Dead tried a more modest broadcast approach. The Grateful Dead set on New Year's Eve was actually broadcast live on KQED-tv, but only the first four songs were broadcast live and in stereo on KSAN. There was no quadrophonic broadcast on a second station.

It may seem strange that the show was broadcast on TV and yet not on FM radio, but the idea of broadcasting concerts in their entirety was still in its infancy, and the Dead had not yet figured out the optimal way to broadcast themselves. No other band was even close to doing such things, so the Dead were on their own as far as TV and FM broadcasts went. As far as I know, there is no surviving trace of the KQED-tv New Year's Eve broadcast. Given the mania for YouTube clips, it may be surprising that there are not even any memories of the broadcast (that I am aware of), but its important to remember the technology of the time. Televison, circa 1970, had tinny sound on little grainy screens, and many or most people watched on black-and-white sets. A live Grateful Dead broadcast doesn't seem that great in that context, certainly not without FM stereo accompaniment.

The driver for the TV only New Year's show was the economics underlying KQED. Back in those days, public television stations were well funded and selected their own programming. Big city stations like KQED also produced their own shows. A pre-soundboard FM from the KQED show preserved the music, so we can at least discern a little bit about the timing. Since (per Deadlists) the KQED station ID occurs mid-set, right before "Sugar Magnolia," it seems that the Dead came onstage around 11:00pm and played until 1:00am or so. On New Year's Eve, particularly in 1970, KQED would not have had a big night, so broadcasting a rock show from Winterland was a reasonable proposition. Obviously, someone in senior management at KQED was sympathetic to the Grateful Dead, since they broadcast them three times in 1970.

KSAN only broadcast the first four songs, about twenty minutes or so of music. Twenty minutes was a typical set between ads in those days, so KSAN would not have needed to be compensated for any lost ad time. By the next year, Warner Brothers and the Grateful Dead had a plan for promoting the band with live FM broadcasts, and it would have a significant affect on the Dead's career and the music industry in general, but that was still 10 months away.

In many ways, the Dead's interesting yet tentative broadcast efforts on New Year's Eve in 1970 were typical of that year's show in general. As I have discussed elsewhere, the circumstances leading up to the Dead's New Year's Eve were peculiar, as Bill Graham had temporarily lost his lease on Winterland, and at the same time the band had not yet figured out a format for New Year's. Throughout the 1970s the band pieced together what became the "traditional" Grateful Dead New Years, but it did not become fixed more or less in stone until the end of the decade.

Crypt clarifies the situation a little further:

The 12/31/70 show was also an attempt at a quadrophonic broadcast, with KSAN and KQED both participating. At that point, remote broadcasts required phone line connections between the broadcast studio and the venue, and these went terribly wrong right at the start of the Dead's set. The first few minutes of Truckin' were broadcast clearly, and then cut out. When I was at home taping, I frantically switched between the two stations, as KQED had a lower quality version of the feed for awhile, and then cut out. Since the audio was such a disaster, the radio stations bailed after Big RR Blues. Hot Tuna played earlier, and their set was broadcast, with a few audio glitches. As noted, the Dead's set was broadcast in its entirety on KQED-TV, and I got verification from David Lemieux at one point that neither the 10/4/70 nor the 12/31/70 video remains in either the GD or KQED vaults.

Recap
In 1970, the Grateful Dead tried a number of different approaches to live performance broadcasts of their shows, none of which were actually repeated. They broadcast an entire "Evening With The Grateful Dead" on a tape-delay basis, they did a casual radio special, they did a 30-minute TV special, they did a multi-band Quadraphonic-with-TV show, a few of them played acoustic in the dj booth and finally they did a live TV broadcast with a brief FM teaser. It seems plain in retrospect, and probably even at the time, that a live broadcast of a complete show in FM stereo on the city's leading rock station was the preferred solution, but that cost money and the Dead didn't have any. However, by the end of the year, the Dead had released a couple of albums that had started to sell, and Warner Brothers was beginning to think of them as something other than hip loss leaders. 1971 would be the year when the Grateful Dead set the template for live FM rock broadcasts, when Warners was looking to promote their live album, and that story will be the subject of the next installment.

"Reflections" Reflections (Round Records RX-107)

Jerry Garcias's solo album Reflections, released in February 1976 on Round Records

Jerry Garcia's third solo album Reflections was released on Round Records in February 1976. The album was well received when it was released, and on the rare occasions when I hear any of it, it still sounds pretty good. The album featured four songs recorded by the Grateful Dead and four recorded by what was the Jerry Garcia Band at the time, featuring Nicky Hopkins on piano, along with John Kahn and Ron Tutt. While a few connected people had some tapes in those days, most people didn't, and Jerry Garcia tapes were even rarer, so Reflections gave a contemporary picture of Jerry Garcia's music at the end of 1975 that wasn't available otherwise.

Of course, even at the time I knew that some of the songs had been floating around for a while. I  owned a bootleg Grateful Dead  lp with "Comes A Time" on it, and I knew "They Love Each Other" and "It Must Have Been The Roses" from live shows. Still, the recordings on Reflections were very well done, and they wouldn't have fit on Blues For Allah. There were two new songs as well, namely "Might As Well" and "Mission In The Rain," and they were pretty good. The three cover versions were excellent choices but suitably obscure ("Catfish John," "I'll Take A Melody" and "Tore Up Over You"), and the configuration of the record was typical of solo albums at the time. A few tracks with the parent group, some originals and some hip-but-obtuse covers--Reflections was an excellent specimen of a typical mid-70s solo album by the front man of a major group.

Reflections was released in February, 1976. Nicky Hopkins had already left the Jerry Garcia Band by that time, but the group had continued on with Keith and Donna Godchaux on board. Over the years, the genesis of the album has been described  by Bob Weir, John Kahn and others as a compromise. Kahn, quoted in Blair Jackson's book, said "the album was supposed to be a Jerry Garcia Band album, but it sort of fell apart in the middle, so it ended up being half that and half Grateful Dead" (Jackson, p. 270). Given Nicky Hopkins personal and health problems in the Fall of 1975, it makes a plausible story. And yet, an analysis of the recording information provided on the All Good Things box set leads us to some unexpected conclusions. I think the Grateful Dead were working on another album, and that work got sidetracked into a Jerry Garcia album out of financial necessity.

Reflections Sessions
According to the excellent Deaddisc site, the recording history of Reflections looks like this [my emphasis]

1. Might As Well (Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter)
2. Mission In The Rain (Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter)
3. They Love Each Other (Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter)
4. I'll Take A Melody (Allen Toussaint)
5. It Must Have Been The Roses (Robert Hunter)
6. Tore Up Over You (Hank Ballard)
7. Catfish John (Bob McDill / Allen Reynolds)
8. Comes A Time (Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter) 

(Tracks 1, 3, 5 and 8 recorded with the Grateful Dead, and the other tracks were recorded by the Jerry Garcia Band)

• Engineer (tracks 1, 3, 5 and 8) - Dan Healy
• Second engineer (tracks 1, 3, 5 and 8) - Rob Taylor
• Engineer and mix-down engineer (tracks 2, 4, 6 and 7) - Smiggy
• Second engineers (tracks 2, 4, 6 and 7) - Willi Deenihan, Joel Edelstein
• Production assistants - Steve Brown, Kidd, Ramrod, Steve Parrish
• Cover - Mike Steirnagle
• Art direction - Ria Lewerke
• Mastering - George Horn
• Special thanks to - Elliott Mazer, John Kahn, Zippy
• Tracks 1, 3, 5 and 8 recorded at Ace's Studio in August and September 1975
• Tracks 2, 4, 6 and 7 recorded at His Master's Wheels in October and November 1975
• Mixed at His Master's Wheels
• Mastered at Columbia Recorders

Kahn's description of the history of the album seems to be contradicted by the session history. The Grateful Dead recorded four songs in Bob Weir's studio (Ace's) in August and September 1975, before the Jerry Garcia Band was even formed. The studio sessions with Nicky Hopkins and Larry Knechtel (on electric piano, mostly) happened later. How did the Jerry Garcia Band sessions "fall apart," if the Jerry Garcia Band did not yet exist?

It's possible that the session listings are incorrect. However, a comment from Garcia seems to confirm the timeline, if somewhat implicitly (quote via Deaddisc):

A lot of the energy from that record [Reflections] is really a continuation of the Blues For Allah groove that we got into. We sort of continued the same energy because we were having a lot of fun doing it.

The work at Ace's on Blues For Allah had lasted from January through June. So it seems like the August sessions were following on the earlier Blues For Allah album. So what was the Garcia album that "fell apart?" Like many Grateful Dead stories, it has been repeated so often that even the principals seem to accept it. Yet the evidence doesn't appear to support it. What could really have been happening?

Some Considerations
Without additional information, I can only speculate on the actual dynamics underlying the recording of Reflections. Of course, speculation is my specialty, but even I am unable to rank any of these factors in order of importance. It is up to the reader to decide which factors may have been the most important. So, in no particular order:

A listing from the Fremont Argus of August 18, 1975, for the "Jerry Garcia Band" at the Great American Music Hall. In fact, Garcia played with the Keith And Donna Band (note Les Paul the next two nights)

Consider: Garcia Had No Band
In July, Garcia had stopped playing with Merl Saunders. This was quite a surprise to Merl, apparently, and John Kahn was deputized to deliver the bad news to his friend. Was there a planned Garcia album with Merl that got stifled? It's interesting to consider that in August 1975, Garcia was playing shows with the Keith and Donna Godchaux band while recording what would become Reflections with the Grateful Dead. It certainly causes me to re-think the timing of Garcia's dismissal of Merl Saunders, because if an album was imminent, I don't know what to make of it. If Garcia was planning a solo album, he must have had a greater urgency to dump Merl than he ever admitted. However, whatever Garcia's frustration with Saunders, I don't think he was thinking about a solo album in the Summer.

Consider: Round Records Had Dire Cash Flow Problems
McNally describes the difficult situation that Grateful Dead Records had fallen into in mid-1975. The band had spent a lot of money on the Wall Of Sound and the Grateful Dead movie, and they had stopped touring. The Dead had borrowed a lot of money from the Bank Of Boston, so Ron Rakow had gotten a cash infusion by signing a distribution deal with United Artists, along with an international distribution deal with Atlantic. However, the Grateful Dead had no income and they owed money all over the place. I have written at some length about how cash flow problems defined the history of Round Records.

Consider: Recording At Ace's Was Cheap
While recording in Bob Weir's garage was not completely free--there were expenses--there were no studio fees and the band did not need to be paid. Recording in a San Francisco studio with professional musicians would have meant laying out cash that the Dead didn't have. So if Round Records needed Jerry Garcia "product" to sell, recording with the Dead at Ace's was the quickest and cheapest way to go. Three of the four songs the band recorded already had established arrangements, so the recordings must have come easily.

The confusing part of my semi-hypothesis is the apparent conclusion: why did Jerry Garcia only record half a solo album with the Grateful Dead? Bob Weir had already recorded a solo album with the Dead as backing musicians, so it wasn't as if the band was ashamed of the concept. Sure, the restless Garcia was always anxious to do something different, but Round Records was a business. If Garcia had recorded half an album with the Dead, why couldn't he finish it up with them? Or do a few songs acoustic, and play with David Grisman or something? There were four original songs, which was plenty for a solo album that could be filled out with hip cover versions. If Round Records needed money, couldn't Garcia just knock out a musically superior collection of songs, and sell a few records? The next year he could focus on something special. Why would Garcia have recorded half an album at Ace's?

The Jerry Garcia Band At His Master's Wheels
The Jerry Garcia Band with Nicky Hopkins debuted at Sophie's in Palo Alto on September 18, 1975. A few shows had been billed at Keystone Berkeley as "Jerry Garcia" or "Jerry Garcia Band" for August, but those shows were played by Garcia and the Keith And Donna band. Whether this was a scheduling problem with Hopkins or had some other motive is uncertain to me. It is still interesting to note that while Garcia was playing the Keystone with Keith and Donna in August and rehearsing Hopkins for the band in September, he was recording with the Dead at Ace's.

His Master's Wheels was in San Francisco at 60 Brady Street, just behind the Fillmore West. It had previously been Alembic Studios, and prior to that it had been Pacific High Recorders. In 1974, Alembic sold the studio to producer Elliot Mazer. It appears that the Jerry Garcia Band went into His Master's Wheels in October 1975 to begin recording Reflections. The exact dates for recording are uncertain, but its easy to bracket the time frame. The JGB had played four dates in September, and they played about six dates in October between October 8 and October 22, when the band began an extended tour of the Eastern seaboard. So the recordings must have been done in the first half of October, in between the various shows in the Bay Area.

The Eastern tour ended November 1 in Washington, DC. The JGB began a Midwestern tour in Chicago on November 21, so it seems clear that the second sessions were in the first three weeks of November, interrupted by a few Keystone Berkeley shows. Outtakes from circulating tapes and the All Good Things box set show the Jerry Garcia Band trying out many of the rock songs associated with him, even if some of them hadn't been played in a few years, like "You Win Again" and "Hey Bo Diddley." Yet on some of the outtake tracks, the grand piano isn't played by Nicky Hopkins but by Los Angeles studio legend Larry Knechtel (check out Knechtel's discography).

Knechtel plays some electric piano in support of Hopkins on Reflections, possibly overdubbed to give more texture to the tracks. However, although participants seem reluctant to disclose details, it appears that Hopkins was not available for some or all of the November sessions, and Knechtel had to fill in. There's even a whiff that Knechtel did some overdubbing of Hopkins' piano parts. Hopkins was a studio legend, and rightly so, and thus it would have seemed that the environment would have brought out the best in him, but apparently the opposite was the case. Hopkins was a very nice man, so no one liked speaking ill of him, but he had serious health problems separate from his preference for drugs and drinking, and he seems to have simply failed to answer the bell.

Knechtel was a fine player, but obviously the opportunity to take advantage of Hopkins' live experience with Garcia was lost. Apparently, when Blair Jackson asked Knechtel about playing with Garcia, Knechtel didn't recall it. Knechtel had played with everybody, so I wouldn't read too much into that, but it does suggest that Knechtel's role was after the fact, cleaning up what Hopkins had muffed, possibly with just John Kahn in the studio.

Presumably, if Hopkins' health prevented his appearance, or if he was unable to deliver the goods in the studio, Garcia must have needed to fall back to a Plan B. Whatever exactly Rakow had promised United Artists, they plainly had to release something. Thus Garcia must have taken the four tracks with the Dead and the best four tracks with Hopkins, and made a pretty good album out of them. It looks like a few overdubs were done near the end of the process, with harmony vocals from Weir and Donna Godchaux, and a little percussion from Hart, as well as possible overdubs by Knechtel. Reflections was released in February 1976, and the Kingfish album was released in March, so UA got their Garcia and Weir albums.

What Was Plan A?
In retrospect, Kahn's overview of Reflections makes sense: "the album was supposed to be a Jerry Garcia Band album, but it sort of fell apart in the middle, so it ended up being half that and half Grateful Dead." Garcia, Kahn and Tutt seem to have gotten Nicky Hopkins in order to form the Jerry Garcia Band, and they had plans to make a Jerry Garcia solo album at His Master's Wheels. Garcia knew Hopkins from his Quicksilver Messenger Service days, and he was a living legend--The Kinks had written a song about Hopkins called "Session Man" 9 years earlier--so it seemed like a good plan. Yet Hopkins let them down, due to some combination of circumstances. As a result, 4 tracks were salvaged from those sessions, and four tracks from Grateful Dead sessions were used as well.

Yet why had the Grateful Dead been recording at Ace's in August and September? Garcia had a plan in place for his own solo album, so why were the Dead recording Garcia/Hunter songs? I think the Grateful Dead were actually beginning work on their next album, and the tracks got borrowed by Garcia. Although Rakow's words always have to be taken with a grain of salt, he told McNally that UA had been promised 4 Grateful Dead albums along with solo albums by Garcia and Weir. The band had the '74 Winterland shows in the can, although it would later turn out that those tapes were in poor shape.  

Blues For Allah would have been the first UA album, and the Winterland tapes would have accounted for two more (according to the contractual orthodoxy of the time, double albums could count as two albums). Weir was already working with Kingfish, and they had some original material. Garcia and Kahn had plans for the Jerry Garcia Band. That would still leave one album unaccounted for.

I think the August and September 1975 sessions at Ace's were meant for a forthcoming Grateful Dead album. "Might As Well" was a new song, but the other three had never been released by the Dead. Obviously, we'll never know what else might have been recorded had they continued. The increasing stress of record company business had made the Dead's own situation more precarious. According to Rakow, he threatened UA with bankrupting the Grateful Dead in order to get out of the contract if they did not receive more money. Whether or not Rakow actually voiced that threat to UA--he certainly could have--it was a sign of desperation. By December of 1975, when Garcia had returned from touring with Hopkins, Garcia would have needed to take over the songs for his own album, and any possible plans for a subsequent album were pushed aside.

update
Scholar and regular Commenter Light Into Ashes has a relevant quote from Garcia at the time, and an intriguing counter-narrative

Garcia had a bit more to say about the Dead sessions that ended up on Reflections. "It was a continuation of what we were doing with Blues for Allah. We were having fun in the studio is what it boils down to, and that's pretty rare for us. The energy was there, and I thought, 'I've got a solo album coming up. Let's cut these tracks with the Grateful Dead. I've already taught them the tunes.'" (Jackson p.271)

So by Garcia's account, the Dead-recorded tunes were meant for his next solo album all along. What Garcia doesn't mention is that he didn't have his own band when they started recording in August/September. So using the Dead would have been a necessary step, if he wanted to start recording right away. 

But the Nicky Hopkins JGB formed in mid-September - it seems no coincidence that the Dead stopped recording then, and the JGB sessions picked up where they left off almost immediately, in October.

I am not certain why the JGB had to head to His Master's Wheels when the much cheaper Ace's was available - except, perhaps it wasn't. Weir & Kingfish rehearsed & recorded their album at Ace's, probably around the same time (this should be checked), so the JGB would have had to find another studio.

There's also the unspoken issue that the Dead had already spent half the year in the studio recording Blues for Allah. As "fun" as Garcia says the sessions were - this was a guy who habitually spent months in the studio working on albums - I suspect that some of the other Dead members were probably getting burned-out by September and were happy to relinquish the sessions to the new JGB.

I would take Garcia's word that he was planning another solo album in mid-'75, right after finishing Allah. Weir would probably have been able to scrape up enough songs for half a Dead album, but I doubt anyone expected the Dead to record two albums in a row. Rather, Rakow would likely have been nudging Garcia for another solo album for Round, since a Garcia album would do well.

So on one hand, perhaps Garcia intended a solo album all along, which makes the timing of his firing of Merl Saunders even more significant. Of course, Garcia could have been making up a plausible story as to why Reflections was recorded the way it was. One point I would make about late 1975 would be to remember that the Dead weren't touring that year--why wouldn't they record a second album in a year? What else were they going to do? In any case, LIA's comments give us yet another angle to consider.

Maybe I'm overreaching by constructing a narrative of a lost Grateful Dead album from some fragmentary, after-the-fact interviews. But if my hypothesis is incorrect, what's the alternative explanation? The timeline doesn't particularly make sense. Now, it's possible that initially Round Records' finances were so dire that Garcia thought he would have to make his whole solo album with the Dead, and discovered he had a budget halfway through. Even so, it makes for a strange series of events that has been glossed over with an easy-to-digest explanation. For now, until someone can peel off another layer of the onion, I'm going to say that there were plans afoot for another studio Grateful Dead album in the Fall of 1975, and they slipped away with Nicky Hopkins' health and a hefty debt owed to the Bank Of Boston. 

Grateful Dead Performances At Race Tracks 1969-88

The poster for the New Orleans Pop Festival, on August 31-September 1 1969, held at the Baton Rouge Speedway in Prairieville, LA

The Grateful Dead were pioneers in moving rock concerts into new spaces. Rock concerts in the 1960s moved beyond buildings formally designated for performance into wide-open spaces. The Grateful Dead were at the forefront, as the first of the major Fillmore bands to start playing regularly for free in public parks in order to promote their music. When multi-act, multi-day rock shows moved beyond County Fairgrounds to empty farms, the Grateful Dead were at the major early events.

However, the immediate and vast popularity of rock festivals posed a very specific land-use problem. Places like Indian Reservations and farms were not really viable for major, multi-day events, since too many things could go wrong. Equally importantly, despite or because of the increasing crowds, it was all but inevitable that rock festivals would become "free concerts." Liberating as this may have seemed at the time, it insured that the events could not make enough money to provide a safe, repeatable event for bands, patrons and host communities. The financial opportunities of rock festivals were huge, however, and since nothing says "rock and roll" like "land use," over the years there was a concerted effort in the concert industry to find spaces that could successfully and profitably host occasional, loud outdoor events with giant crowds.

One of the intriguing solutions for hosting giant rock festivals was to use facilities designed for auto racing. Race tracks were usually somewhat removed from urban areas while still being near enough to civilization to attract a crowd. Auto races themselves were noisy, and major race events tended to occur just a few times a year and last an entire weekend, just like a rock festival. Since race tracks were permanent facilities, they generally had fences, bathrooms, water, power and parking, so in many ways they would seem like ideal venues for huge rock events. Indeed, some of the major rock events of the 1970s were held at race tracks, and the Grateful Dead's performances at race tracks from 1969 to 1988 offer a useful snapshot of the evolving rock concert market.

This post will review all of the Grateful Dead's scheduled performances at permanent facilities designed for auto racing. The most notorious of these events, the December 6, 1969 show at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, CA, was probably instrumental in insuring that race track operators were leery of rock concerts. Ironically enough, the concert at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Course in New York on July 28, 1973, showed how well race tracks could work. However, the economic evolution of the rock concert and auto racing industries veered in opposite directions, and the possibilities of rock concerts at race tracks was replaced by baseball stadiums and then custom built facilities like Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Jim Hall's legendary 1970 Chaparral 2J, the "Sucker Car," driven by English rallying legend Vic ("Quick Vic") Elford

A Thumbnail History Of American Auto Racing After World War 2
In order to properly frame the different facilities that the Grateful Dead played, I will provide a brief history of the different types of Postwar auto racing. Automotively knowledgeable readers will have to forgive my simplistic categories. Generally speaking, while auto racing had been popular since the invention of the automobile, horse racing had been hugely popular in cities and county fairs throughout the United States, long before cars were invented. However, after WW2, when the GIs returned and economy boomed, America moved from its rural roots to a more urban and suburban universe, and the automobile became a more important part of everyone's life. A national boom in the popularity of auto racing corresponded with a slow decline in the popularity of horse racing.

There were three major forms of auto racing in the United States. One was sports car racing, which emphasized European or European-inspired cars driving on something resembling real roads. Initially sports car races were held on closed public roads, but by the mid-50s the cars had become too fast, and sports car races tended to move to custom-built road racing facilities. Sports car racing was most popular on the East and West coasts. California and the New York region led the way, with famous tracks like Riverside (in Southern California) and Bridgehampton (in Long Island).

A second popular form was drag racing. Drag racing tended to be more urban and suburban, since the facilities were smaller and fit more easily into the landscape. Needless to say, drag racing evolved from illicit automotive fun, usually at night on empty roads, into a serious competitive sport. Drag racing was hugely popular nationwide, and was culturally influential, but the tracks and events tended to more local or regional. The best known drag racers barnstormed across the country in local meets, with some sorts of similarities to touring rock bands. As a more urban phenomenon, drag racing had both a more working-class audience and was less exclusively white.

The third popular form of auto racing was oval track racing. Initially these speedways, as they were called, were less than a mile long--sometimes only a 1/4 mile--and often not even paved. The hard clay of the Midwest and the South was particularly conducive to this kind of auto racing. Speedways proliferated throughout the country, but oval tack racing was biggest in the Midwest and South. In the Midwest, with the inspiration of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, emphasized custom-built specials. The South, with its tradition of moonshining and bootlegging, emphasized modified versions of production cars. NASCAR (The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing) was financed in 1947 by many local bootleggers, and some of the principal early drivers had been well-schooled in building and driving "stock" looking cars that were anything but.

To some extent, all types of auto racing were prevalent all over the country, particularly in heavily populated regions like California and the industrial Midwest. However, the basic distinction of the three types of auto racing had some association with their different regions. Sports Car racing was the province of the coasts, drag racing was an urban and suburban pastime, and oval track racing was king in the Midwest and South, particularly in more rural counties. Just as the 1960s were a time in music when legends were born and everything seemed possible, the 60s was just as much a time of excitement and wonder in all forms of auto racing as well.

The increasing popularity of auto racing in America, in all of its forms, meant that from the end of the World War 2 to the birth of the Grateful Dead, numerous race tracks had been built up around America. When rock concerts got too large for indoor arenas, race tracks seemed to provide an answer. Rock concerts were loud, not always popular with the community, and the bands roamed from place to place. In that respect, race tracks seemed to provide pre-existing spaces that could be used for large scale concerts. It was no surprise that the rock festival industry came to that conclusion, too.

Lots of great bands played the Labor Day New Orleans Pop Festival, and there was a Custom Bike show and a "Heavy Fireworks Display."

September 1, 1969 Baton Rouge Speedway, Prairieville, LA New Orleans Pop Festival
The Summer of 1969 was the Summer of rock festivals. Woodstock is the most famous, of course, but from May to December, there were huge outdoor festivals all over the United States and Canada. Many if not most North American rock fans were in range of a major outdoor festival sometime that year, even if their parents would not let them go to it. To name just a few events, these included The Big Rock Pow-Wow in Florida (May 23-25), Sky River 2 Festival (outside of Seattle, July 25-27), The Atlantic City Pop Festival (August 1-3) and of course Woodstock itself (August 15-17). All of these events featured a slew of major bands. All of them had various successes and failures, but in general they all struggled with accommodating giant crowds in a comfortable manner while still retaining economic viability. Woodstock, for example, was a financial disaster, only rescued by the extraordinarily popular film.

The festival promoters were learning as they went, however. Some of the most successful rock festivals occurred at the end of the summer. The Atlanta International Pop Festival was held on the weekend of July 4 (July 4-6), at the Atlanta International Speedway. Promoter Alex Cooley held a similar event two months later in Texas, on Labor Day weekend (August 30-September 1). The Texas event was held in Lewisville, TX, outside of Dallas, at the Dallas Motor Speedway. The Atlanta International Speedway, in Hampton, GA was built in 1960 as a 1.5 mile Superspeedway and remains an active NASCAR track today. The Dallas Motor Speedway was mainly a dragstrip, but it had a 1/2 mile oval and a 2.5 mile road course as well. The Texas facility ran into financial trouble immediately and closed in 1973.

The 1969 Texas and Atlanta events both had crowds of 100,000+, and both ran safely and on schedule. Other than the melting Southern heat, there were no real problems, and the events are fondly remembered by fans. The Atlanta event was profitable, and the indications are that the Texas event was too, or at least could have been. These two events seemed to be the first major rock events that suggested that auto racing tracks were a good place to hold a big rock concert. One of the biggest problems at both events, however, was that the surrounding communities were not comfortable with the "hippie invasion," even if every convenience store, motel and gas station were sold out for miles around. The cultural gap between hippie rock fans and the rural South was still very large in 1969.

That same Labor Day weekend of 1969, the Grateful Dead played their first rock festival at a racetrack. The New Orleans rock festival was held at a tiny oval track outside of Baton Rouge. Prairieville, LA is actually 60 miles West of New Orleans, most of the way to Baton Rouge (which is another 26 miles to the Northwest of Prairieville). Besides lots of great bands, like Santana, Janis Joplin and Canned Heat, the poster advertised a "Custom Bike Show," a whiff of the motorsports aura. The festival was fairly successful, but the tiny facility was no superspeedway. It had only been built around 1966, under dubious circumstances perhaps unique to Louisiana.

This 1971 aerial photo of the Baton Rouge Speedway in Prairieville, LA, seems to be the only photograph of the site

A forum on old racing cars and tracks has uncovered what little information there is about the Baton Rouge Speedway in Prairieville (as opposed to the current Baton Rouge Speedway, in a different location):

There is very little info on this track out there, same with pictures.
It was known as Baton Rouge Int'l Speedway, and also Pelican Int'l Speedway.
You picture of the track is taken looking south; the track ran east/west, and the pit area was on the south side. The track was advertised as a 5/8ths mile, but in reality was almost 3/4 mile through the racing groove.

The track has a very checkered history; it was originally built by a man named Ed Grady; he was a teamsters boss. The track is rumored to have been built by the Louisiana Highway Department using taxpayer-bought material, under orders of the LA governor at that time. Not saying it happened that way, but it was never denied...

The governor had a kid who wanted to race, and they had the track built to give him a place to race. The kid was sponsored in part by the LA Tourism Bureau. Funny that, he hardly ever left LA to race, spent the tourism dollars in his his home state. And he could'nt drive a tricycle down a sidewalk, thankfully, he didn't last long.The governor, whose name I can't recall, and the kid both later did time; nothing unusual down there.

The track initially ran friday nights so as not to compete with Houston, Jackson and Mobile, all half mile tracks within 3-4 hours. The friday was an issue, as the traffic from the east around slidell hampered getting to the place. Track promotion was itself it's own nightmare story. I only got there once, in 1979; last time it ran.

It was originally built about 1966, and was off and on until 1978. The 79 race was the only event that year, twin 50 lap races won by Georgia Hotshoe Ronnie Sanders. The first event raced at the track was won by David Pearson.

The location is long gone, replaced by housing. If you go on Bing Maps, the location is easy to find. If you follow Hwy 73, aka Old Jefferson Highway southeast out of Baton Rouge, look for where it intersects Hwy 42, just North of Prarieville. You will actually be in Oak Grove. Just south of the intersection of 42/73, you will find Charleston Road running east. That was the track entrance. On your original pic, the road that makes a curve south of the track is the now Charleston road. Just North of Charleston is a road called Race Track road; that runs through the middle of the track footprint. 

As Labor Day weekend ended in 1969, however, it did seem like racetracks made pretty good facilities for rock festivals. Atlanta had been a big success, Texas had worked and New Orleans hadn't failed. Most people perceived Woodstock as a sort of lucky break--the festival got completely out of hand, but it all worked out anyway. The next to last rock festival of 1969 was a three day event in Palm Beach, Florida, at a sports car track and dragstrip (now the Palm Beach International Raceway). The November 28-30, 1969 Palm Beach International Pop Festival was headlined by no less than the Rolling Stones. So since the Rolling Stones were planning to headline a huge, free outdoor concert in San Francisco the very next week, doing it at a racetrack seemed like a pretty good idea.

December 6, 1969 Sears Point International Raceway, Sonoma, CA Rolling Stones/Grateful Dead/others (canceled)

The restored Penske Racing Chevy Camaro with which Mark Donohue won the inaugural race at Sears Point, a round of the Trans-Am championship on September 21, 1969 (photo: Meccas Of Speed)

Sports car racing was hugely popular worldwide in the 1960s, and Northern California was prime sports car country. Road racing was hugely popular as well, and by a peculiar accident the best road track in Northern California was rarely available. Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey was a beautiful, exciting track in a resort area, but unfortunately it was located on the grounds of Fort Ord, a U.S. Army base. Thus Laguna Seca was only available for a limited number of events. The Sports Car Club Of America's SF Region had given up on using temporary facilities--I saw the last race in the Candlestick Park parking lot in 1965, when the cars were simply too fast and two drivers died--so they looked to create their own custom built race track.

Sears Point International Raceway in Sonoma was in a nature preserve, far from any housing, yet it was still only an hour from San Francisco and the East Bay. The exciting, twisty course had 11 turns and many elevation changes, and it first opened in late 1968. The track had some financial problems, and by mid-1969 it was owned by Filmways, a movie studio. Although the race track was finished, the facility had not been fully built out by 1969. Nonetheless, the first major professional race was held there on September 21, 1969. At the time, the SCCA Trans-Am series had a half-dozen factory teams and numerous famous drivers, like Parnelli Jones, Dan Gurney and race winner Mark Donohue. I attended the race, and even I could tell that the facility was unfinished, but it was a beautiful setting with great sightlines.

Although this photo is from a motorcycle race in 1985, it gives a pretty good idea of the panoramic vistas of Sears Point that made it appealing to Sam Cutler as a concert site. The "natural bowl" that Cutler refers to was probably off to the right of the photo (I think this is above Turn 6), but you can still get a feel for the site

Sam Cutler was no race fan, particularly, but he had been intimately involved in the Rolling Stones' search for a site for their promised free concert in the Bay Area on December 6. In his book You Can't Always Get What You Want (ECW Press, 2010), Cutler describes turning down various unacceptable sites offered by people who did not fathom the practical matters of over 100,000 people crammed into one space. Yet Cutler was suitably impressed with Sears Point as a prospective concert venue. He said (p.127)

[We] borrowed a car and [went] to see the site at Sears Point. We drove North [from Marin] for about half an hour, through rolling hills, and arrived at an isolated site. It seemed ideal. It had good access to the main north-south highway [CA37] and enough parking spaces for 100,000 cars. To one side of the racetrack there was a huge natural amphitheater. I walked around its perimeter to a point on its ridge where a stage could be erected. 

I could see for half a mile, in an arc of 180 degrees. It was a perfect spot for a concert

Concert preparations got underway at Sears Point, a stage was constructed and a giant sound system was put together. As we all know, however, negotiations stalled at the last minute and the concert was moved to the tiny Altamont Speedway. The name "Altamont" has been synonymous with everything wrong with outdoor rock festivals ever since. Its worth thinking, however, how a successful concert at Sears Point might have changed not only the rock concert landscape but the auto racing business as well.

What kept the Rolling Stones from playing Sears Point was the film rights. Sears Point Raceway was owned by Filmways, probably as a tax shelter, and while they could have cared less about racing,  film rights to an historic rock concert was something the corporation understood. They pushed too hard, however, and the stage and sound system were moved to Altamont in about 24 hours. Yet what if the concert had come off? Sears Point Raceway could handle the cars, and the sightlines were great. If people had had a relatively good time, Sears Point could have remade itself as a concert venue. Cutler was right--it was a perfect concert venue, and perfectly located. Even today, the same people who still see the Rolling Stones in California would be very happy to do it in Sonoma.

Yet Altamont was a disaster. The auto racing industry, which had to have quietly noticed the successes at Atlanta and Dallas, would have wanted nothing to do with rock after Altamont. Compared to the South, the Bay Area was a lot more hippie friendly, and Sears Point could have been Shoreline Amphitheater twenty years before its time. Nor would it have interfered with Sears Point's history and potential as a race track. It could still be holding the annual NASCAR road race and all its other events, while sparing a few weekends for some big outdoor rock shows.

Filmways Corporation ran into serious financial difficulties in 1970, and Sears Point Raceway remained closed until 1973. There were not even any road races at Sears Point, much less rock concerts, until then. In any case, thanks to Altamont, outdoor rock concerts at a race track would be haunted by the specter of Altamont until the 1980s. Everyone was the worse for it. I saw a great Trans-Am race on a glorious day at Sears Point in 1981 (George Follmer spun out in the opening lap, and came from last to third by the end). If only the Grateful Dead had played when the race was over...but a failed negotiation over film rights erased that possibility.

December 6, 1969 Altamont Speedway, Livermore, CA Rolling Stones/Grateful Dead/others (Grateful Dead did not play)

Donnie Epperson and Gary Allbritian racing at Altamont Speedway sometime in the 1970s

The unfortunate story of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, has been told so many times, I won't re-tell it here. Suffice to say, the Altamont pass was a windy, desolate area in a mountain range at the Eastern edge of Alameda County. The little speedway had no neighbors to bother, with the nearest residents in the then-tiny town of Tracy, but the truth was the tiny oval had never been a success. The track had opened in 1966, but it was really too far for fans and drivers who wanted to enjoy the kind of casual, fun minor league racing that thrived on tiny half-mile ovals.

The owner of Altamont Speedway offered up the track in the hopes of providing some publicity for the struggling little track. He got the publicity all right, but the wrong kind. After the December concert, Altamont Speedway remained closed until 1973. It re-opened various times and was mostly operative, but never successful, and it finally closed for good in 2008. Tiny Altamont, which should never have hosted a major rock concert in the first place, much less a giant free event by the Rolling Stones, must have made race track operators shudder at the thought of a rock concert. If the Stones had played Sears Point, things might have been very different.

[update 20230613]: Thanks to Episode 7, Series 7 of the "Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast", produced by the stellar team of Jesse Jarnow and Rich Mahan, we know that the Iowa State Fair Grandstand was a racetrack as well as a concert venue. The Grateful Dead played the Grandstand on May 13, 1973 and June 16, 1974. The half-mile dirt track had first hosted auto races as early as 1907. While the racing was regional, big stars such as Bobby Allison had raced there. There were regular country concerts, and later rock concerts, every July, starting in 1970.

The Grateful Dead sound system was far more advanced than anything used for the country events, and the Dead crowds were much bigger than any of the previous country shows, so the Dead were definitely expanding the venue horizons. Per the Deadcast, while the Grateful Dead played Sunday, May 13, 1973, the stage could not be constructed until the stock car races were completed Saturday night. The entire Grateful Dead and crew apparently enjoyed the races from the stands.

July 28, 1973 Watkins Glen Grand Prix Racecourse, Watkins Glen, NY Allman Brothers Band/Grateful Dead/The Band

The great Ronnie Peterson in the pits at Watkins Glen at the US Grand Prix on October 7, 1973. Peterson would go on to win the race in his Lotus 72-Cosworth, just edging out James Hunt (photo source: Sports Car Digest)

The Allman Brothers/Grateful Dead/Band concert at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Racecourse in upstate New York on July 28, 1973 was the largest single day rock concert up until that time. The crowd was estimated at 600,000. It is generally believed to be the largest rock concert ever, although I don't know exactly how that would be calculated. In any case, it was a major event, fondly remembered by everybody who went, profitable enough for the promoters and the bands and generally went off without serious incident.

Indeed, the only problem was that the show was so well attended that the huge crowd overwhelmed the roads and made everyone nervous about what would have happened if something had gone wrong, so once again any plans for future rock concerts at the Glen or similar facilities were shot down.  Yet the logistical success of the Watkins Glen show was one of the key reasons that I think a 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Sears Point might have come off fairly well. Although the Glen was somewhat larger than Sears Point, with a longer 3.2 mile layout rather than the tighter configuration at Sears Point, the basic idea of the tracks were the same. The tracks follow the elevation changes of the sites, and so there were natural sight lines for a large number of people, along with access, water, power and parking.

Watkins Glen, NY, about five hours Northwest of Manhattan, had been one of the centers of postwar East Coast road racing. There had been races as early as 1948 using closed public roads, but increasing speeds made this unsafe. The permanent course was built in 1956. From 1961 to 1980, "The Glen" was home to the Formula One United States Grand Prix, the most prestigious road racing event on the US racing calendar. The Glen also hosted a famous international sports car event, the Six Hours Of Watkins Glen, and races in all the important series, such as Can-Am, Trans-Am and so on.

Ironically enough, if the Grateful Dead had just played Watkins Glen by themselves, or with the New Riders and the Sons instead of the Allmans and The Band, they would have drawn about 50,000 people. That sounds like a lot, but Watkins Glen could have absorbed that crowd easily, and then it could have been an annual event. Yet the spectacular success of the Watkins Glen Grand Prix course insured that it would not be used as a concert venue again. Once again, race track operators must have taken note and decided that they did not want several hundred thousand people at their facilities, even if things went well. The Glen proved Sam Cutler right, more or less, but it still didn't start a trend. Watkins Glen has continued to thrive as a track, particularly for its annual NASCAR race, but save for a single 2011 Phish concert, rock bands have not been seen there.

August 24, 1975 Trenton Speedway, Hamilton, NJ Aerosmith/Poco/Kingfish/Slade/others

Bobby Unser takes the checkered flag at an Indycar race at Trenton Speedway in 1966

Just an hour or so from Manhattan was the Trenton Speedway, actually located in Hamilton, NJ, just outside of Trenton. The 1-mile oval was part of the New Jersey State Fairgrounds. There had been racing at the Fairgrounds from 1912-1941, and a new one mile dirt oval was built in 1946. The track was paved in 1957. In 1968, the track was expanded to a 1.5 mile "Kidney Bean" oval. The race track was active until 1979. Although an old, unassuming facility, it was the biggest oval track near New York city, so Trenton Speedway hosted major races on the Indy Car and NASCAR circuits for much of its postwar history. Richard Petty won The Northern 300 three times there (in 1967, 70 and 71), and AJ Foyt won Indy Car races twelve times at Trenton, racing against Mario Andretti, the Unser brothers and all the other great Indy car racers of the era.

There were a few rock concerts held at the Trenton Speedway in the early 70s. A show headlined by the Allman Brothers in 1973 was overwhelmed by people trying to get in for free, and the Fairgounds had been very uneasy about a repeat episode. Kingfish's first Eastern appearance was at the next attempt at a show at Trenton Speedway, on August 24, 1975 as they opened for Aerosmith. Things went OK, apparently, but not so OK that I am aware of another concert there.

The fate of Trenton Speedway was the fate of many popular post war racetracks. While many racetracks became too unsafe as cars continued to get faster, even the fast, successful tracks were no match for suburbanization. Hamilton, NJ was once fairly far out in "the sticks," but no more. Now Hamilton is considered well with commuting range of Manhattan and Philadelphia, and it is a well-to-do community.

Racetracks are noisy, and they are never popular when they are encroached on by new housing. The New Jersey State Fairgounds, and Trenton Speedway, are now a UPS Shipping Facility, a housing development called Hamilton Lakes, and a museum called Grounds For Sculpture. Grounds For Sculpture is a custom designed outdoor facility for housing sculptures, financed by the Johnson And Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. The evolution from noisy racecars to a quiet museum epitomizes the transition of postwar suburban communities throughout America.

Pictures from the 1977 drag racing season at Raceway Park in Englishtown, with highly modified "Funny Cars"

September 3, 1977 Raceway Park, Englishtown, NJ Grateful Dead/Marshal Tucker Band/NRPS
The Grateful Dead's concert at Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ on September 3, 1977, was one of their most legendary events. It was a form of coming out party on the East Coast, the first large East Coast concert for the band after Terrapin Station was released. It was labor day weekend, and every Deadhead on the Eastern Seaboard seems to have not only gone to the show, but brought their brother, their girlfriend and their roommate, too. The crowd was estimated at well over 100,000, so the show was a huge success for promoter John Scher, cementing his solid reputation with the band.

Raceway Park had been founded in 1965, and it was primarily a dragstrip. New Jersey had been a manufacturing area for much of the first half of the 20th century, since it was near to seaports, New York and Philadelphia. As such, there had been various auto factories in New Jersey over the years, so there was a strong gearhead tradition throughout the state. In order for drag racing to succeed, it needed a local fanbase who likes popping the hood and tinkering with the engine, and New Jersey had a huge number of those people. When Bruce Springsteen wrote, "some guys get home from work and wash up/And go racing in the streets," he wasn't imagining it, as any late night trip on US9 will tell you.

Unlike many dragstrips, however, due to its proximity to New York and Philadelphia, Raceway Park was equipped for a much larger crowd than a local place. In its current configuration, Raceway Park can hold 85,000 people in the stands. I don't know if that was the configuration for the Grateful Dead concert, but at least its an indicator of the size of the venue. Originally built on 330 acres, by now it has expanded to over 500 acres, so there was plenty of room both to park all the cars and absorb all the people.

Despite the success of the Englishtown show, however, the Grateful Dead never returned, nor am I aware of another major concert at Raceway Park. Many racetracks, closed in the mid-70s, either victims of the recession or unable to afford safety improvements for ever-faster cars, but Englishtown has continued to thrive and expand ever since, and it is still thriving today. 

However, for those racetracks that made it through the late 70s, one result has been that they are often in use for every weekend, much of the year. Since there are fewer racetracks, and almost no temporary facilities (like old Air Force bases), those that remain are heavily used. New Jersey itself has become considerably more prosperous, so a track like Englishtown is appeals not only to race fans but to well-to-do hobbyists who need to a place to exercise their expensive toys or let their kids race go-karts. I doubt Englishtown has had a free Labor Day since 1977, even if the Grateful Dead or anyone else had been available. Rock concerts never became a regular part of racetrack scheduling, so there was never really any room for them.

Part of the 300,00+ PAID attendance at Cal Jam II, Ontario Motor Speedway, March 18, 1978

California Jam and Cal Jam II at the Ontario Motor Speedway, Ontario, CA  
California Jam
April 6, 1974 Ontario Motor Speedway, Ontario, CA Emerson, Lake & Palmer/Deep Purple/Black Sabbath/Black Oak Arkansas/Seals & Crofts/The Eagles/Earth, Wind & Fire/Rare Earth
Cal Jam II
March 18, 1978 Ontario Motor Speedway, Ontario, CA Aerosmith/Foreigner/Santana/Dave Mason/Ted Nugent/Heart/Bob Welch with Stevie Nicks/Mahogany Rush/Rubicon
The Grateful Dead played at neither of the two rock concerts held at the Ontario Motor Speedway, 40 miles East of Los Angeles. While both shows featured the typical 70s touring bands that played baseball stadiums during that era, the two Ontario Speedway shows stand out not for the 300,000 plus who attended both events. Rather, they stand out for having the highest paid attendance of any rock concerts ever, numbers of great interests to promoters and band managers. The two Cal Jam events prove that the unique architecture of race tracks could easily be repurposed to high capacity rock concerts.

[update: Commenter runonguinness points out that a Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers show was scheduled for Ontario Motor Speedway on May 27, 1973:

The Dead almost played Ontario Motor Speedway on 1973-05-27 with the Allmans and Waylon Jennings. Randy Tuten produced a poster for Bill Graham based on David Byrd's Nassau "He's Truckin' She's Posin'", it's on his website rtuten.com

http://preview.tinyurl.com/oycdn6y

It was also advertised in Deadhead's newsletter 9 for April 1973 but as the next day, 1973-05-28 with Waylon and NRPS.

So the Grateful Dead could have had Watkins Glen at Ontario, but it was yet another woulda-coulda in this counter-history]

A Correspondent sends the long lost handbill of what might have been

A long lost handbill for an almost-happened Dead/Allmans show at Ontario Motor Speedway, East of Los Angeles proper. This would have been two months prior to Watkins Glen, and everyone would have paid...

and for those of you who have forgotten your long ago LA geography

Here's the back of the Ontario May 27 '73 handbill

At the same time, the increasing suburbanization of America meant that land that had once been far enough from any city for a noisy racetrack was now extremely valuable to real estate developers. The Ontario Motor Speedway, in Southern California, had opened in 1970 in Ontario , as a facility for Indy Cars, NASCAR and road racing. It was fairly successful as a racing venue, though not spectacularly so. Yet the land underneath the track was too valuable, and the bonds were foreclosed on by the Chevron Land Corporation. The track was torn down in 1980, and to be replaced by a Hilton Hotel and a shopping mall (you can still see traces of Turn 3, however). Ontario Speedway could have been a prime venue for major rock concerts in Southern California, but instead it is now a mall  an office park and a hockey arena.

Jun 30, 1979 Portland International Raceway, Portland, OR Grateful Dead/McGuinn, Clark and Hillman/David Bromberg Band

Gianpiero Moretti's Porsche 935 Turbo at the Portland 100 IMSA GT race on May 8, 1979 (photo: Brent Martin from RacingSportsCars)

Automobiles represent prosperity, and auto racing rarely thrives when the economy is weak. Thus racing in the United States was in a holding pattern for much of the late 70s and early 80s. From the point of view of land-use, however, road racing was hit particularly hard. For various reasons, sports car racing had been extremely popular throughout the world in the 1960s, heavily supported by manufacturers in a variety of series. In the 1970s, that interest shifted somewhat to Formula One, which was not popular in the United States, and to Indianapolis-style cars ("Indy Cars") and NASCAR, both of which favored oval tracks. Road racing venues suffered as a result.

Many fine road racing venues faded away in the 70s and 80s, often swallowed up by eager housing developers. Those tracks that survived often had some peculiar reason that they were preserved and could not be developed. One such track was Portland International Raceway, on the outskirts of Portland, OR. The history of Portland International Raceway was even intimately tied up with the history of the Grateful Dead.

During World War 2, Kaiser Industries had huge shipyards on both sides of the Columbia River, in Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA. In 1943 they constructed the housing development of Vanport City for the workers, which ultimately had a population of 40,000 by war's end. 40% of the population was African-American. After the war, the shipbuilding jobs ended, and the population dropped, but Vanport City had became a home for many returning veterans. One of those veterans was Robert Hunter's father, and Hunter ended up in Vanport in 1948, when he was 7 years old. By that time, the town had a population of just 18,500, and it was not a well-off community.

Vanport City was built on land that had been reclaimed from the banks of the Columbia River, and thus was very vulnerable to flooding. There was a system of dikes in place, but there were a series of heavy rains throughout May of 1948. At 4:17 p.m on May 30, 1948--Memorial Day--the dike burst, and a 10-foot wall of water rushed through the town. It took half an hour to reach the houses, giving many a chance to get away. Many more were saved because they were at Memorial Day celebrations. Fortunately, only 15 died, but Vanport City was lost, and the people who lived there lost everything. After weeks of rain, the sun finally came out, and Hunter has said that the lyrics to "Here Comes Sunshine" recall his relief at the sunshine after the Vanport flood.

The land for Vanport City could not be used for housing or industry, so it became a protected city park in Portland. In 1961, as part of the Portland Rose Festival, some sports car enthusiasts organized some races through the paved streets of the deserted Vanport City. Over time, the dangerous street track was converted to a formally constructed road racing course in 1970. Since the racetrack is part of a city park that cannot be developed for other uses, Portland International Raceway is never in danger of being swallowed up by hungry real estate interests. PIR does not hold as many events as other full time facilities, but as a result it could be used for the occasional rock concert. The Grateful Dead have only been extraordinarily popular in Oregon, on a per-population basis, so PIR made a good facility for them. However, the weather in Oregon is always iffy, so an outdoor venue always carry some risk. In later years, the band played the football stadium in Eugene (an hour South), so the Dead never played PIR again.

May 9-10, 1987 Laguna Seca International Raceway, Monterey, CA Grateful Dead/Bruce Hornsby/Ry Cooder

The Group 44 Jaguar XJR7 at Laguna Seca on March 5, 1987, driven by Hurley Haywood and John Morton, which finished 4th in the IMSA GT race (photo by Kenneth Barton, from RacingSportsCars)

By the mid-1980, rock concerts were  big business. Nobody benefited more from that than the Grateful Dead, and rightly so, since the Dead had done so much back in the 60s to carve out the circuit in the first place. More and more basketball arenas were designed as multi-use concert facilities, so there were more venues than ever before. Yet the big movement in concert venues was towards what were known as "Sheds" in the industry, like Shoreline Amphitheatre. Modeled on classical musical venues, with a covered stage and premium seats, surrounded by a grassy bowl, the custom built shed has grown to dominate the concert industry.

However, in the mid-80s, there still weren't that many sheds nationwide. Thus, forward looking promoters like Bill Graham and John Scher were still looking for venues that could be repurposed for larger concerts. Although auto racing was booming, too, and most race tracks were also custom built facilities that did not have a place for non-automotive events, a few old racetracks got a look before America was fully shedded up.

Laguna Seca Raceway, between Monterey and Salinas, was constructed in 1957. There had been a series of popular sports car races that had moved from Golden Gate Park--I kid you not--to the streets of wealthy Pebble Beach, but by the mid-50s sports cars had simply become too fast to race safely on public roads, even closed ones. The land for Laguna Seca originally belonged to Fort Ord, the local army base. in 1974, with the Army downsizing, the land for Laguna Seca was deeded over to the Monterey Parks Department. As a paradoxical compromise, the land handed over by Fort Ord was marked as a Nature Preserve, so there can be no development around Laguna Seca. The track is popular with racers and fans, and famously picturesque. It is familiar from many commercials, and apparently it is quite popular as a backdrop for video games.

Laguna Seca Raceway could not have been used as a concert site in the 60s, or up until 1974, since it was still on an Army base. Military police used to direct the traffic out of the track--I doubt that would have been comfortable with a Grateful Dead crowd. After 1974, the juju of Sears Point and Altamont must have hung over any thoughts of collaboration, and in any case there was no meaningful intersection between the auto racing and rock and roll communities, so I assume the idea never really came up.

By 1987, however, a two-day Grateful Dead concert at Laguna Seca seemed like a great idea. The track could absorb a huge crowd, it had power, water and bathrooms, and it already allowed camping. At one time, seeing a Grateful Dead concert at Laguna Seca would have been the perfect merger between my childhood and adolescence, and to see Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh where I had seen Jim Hall and John Surtees would have been a perfect convergence. By 1987, however, for a variety of reasons having to do with work, attending the Laguna Seca Dead shows was extraordinarily difficult for me and I did not do so. Every account I have ever heard about it, however, was fulsome in praise, and I am not surprised. Even if the moment had passed, a road racing track like Laguna Seca was perfect for the Grateful Dead, and at the end of the line it was finally proven.

July 2-3, 1988 Oxford Plains Speedway, Oxford, ME Grateful Dead/Little Feat

The layout of the Oxford Plains Speedway in Oxford, ME

Auto racing venues shift in importance for a variety of reasons, some related to the local area and some related to promoters and racing organizations. The Oxford Plains Speedway, in Oxford, ME, was established in 1950. Originally a half-mile oval, it was shortened to a 3/8 mile track at some point. Over the decades, it had been a regular stop for the second-tier NASCAR races, such as the Nationwide Series (and such predecessors as the Busch Grand National or Late Model Sportsman series). The seated capacity of the track is apparently, 14,000, which is large for a small oval.

In 1988, with the Grateful Dead looking for larger venues throughout the country, and without a shed in every region, they put on a weekend of shows at Oxford Plains Speedway. The speedway had put on a Monsters Of Rock heavy metal show earlier that summer (June 24, 1988), but I do not know whether the track was used as a concert venue much at any other time. From what I know of reading about the show in old editions of Deadbase, the site and shows were fondly remembered by New Englanders. In terms of physical layout, Oxford Plains was similar to Altamont, so a little oval could work fine for a Dead concert, as long as no one invited the Rolling Stones and made it a free concert.

However, whatever exactly happened, by 1988 the Grateful Dead were growing out of such venues, and into the bigger sheds in major venues. They never returned to Oxford Speedway. Oxford Speedway ultimately lost its Nationwide race--I won't bore you with the NASCAR politics associated with this--but the track continues to host smaller races every Summer.

July 29-30, 1988 Laguna Seca International Raceway, Monterey, CA Grateful Dead/Los Lobos/David Lindley and El-Rayo X

The crowd at the Grateful Dead show at Laguna Seca in 1988. It appears that the stage is just in front of Turn 5, which used to be Turn 3 (before the track was lengthened)

The Grateful Dead returned to Laguna Seca for another weekend in 1988. Once again, by all accounts, it was a fun, profitable, mellow event. By this time, auto racing was a big, specialized business, just like rock concerts, and there was little room for collaboration. The Grateful Dead had an interesting role in the history of rock concerts, in that they often tried out things before other bands. The Dead were adventurous, their fans were easygoing, and Deadheads were going to come to the concert anyway, so promoters could take a chance with a new venue or a new setup.

Yet the Dead's high profile opportunities at race tracks had been scuttled by other events. A potentially glorious event at Sears Point in 1969 had turned into a nightmare at tiny Altamont. The Watkins Glen event was so large that its very success must have frightened race track operators and local communities. Throughout the country, many classic race tracks closed, so there was no chance to demonstrate how good it could have been. Finally, at the very end, with two weekends at Laguna Seca and one at Maine, they Dead showed how well racetracks could work for as an outdoor venue, before they too traveled on up the ladder.

Appendix: Other Venues

Although large outdoor rock concerts are now annual events in Golden Gate Park, I do not believe we will ever see high speed sports car races though the park ever again. This track map is from the 1952-54 races. The race moved to the streets of Pebble Beach from 1955-57, and finally to a permanent site at Laguna Seca Raceway.

This post was written from the perspective of the concert history of the Grateful Dead. I'm aware that I dramatically simplified some aspects of the history of auto racing after World War 2, but I had to draw the line somewhere. My goal here was to write about land use, and my specific interest was in Grateful Dead concerts at facilities custom-built for auto racing. I'm aware of some places the band played where auto races were held, but they didn't fit my paradigm. However, for completeness, let me list them here:

• Sports Car races were held on the paved roads of Golden Gate Park from 1952-54 (they were later moved to Pebble Beach, and then to Laguna Seca)
• Midget auto races were held at Soldier Field in the 1950s (the Grateful Dead played there in the 1990s)
• On September 22, 1968, the Grateful Dead played at an ostrich racing track (yes) in Del Mar, CA, that was later turned into a race track (Del Mar Raceway). However, from a land use point of view, it wasn't a race track at the time the Dead played there
• The Grateful Dead played a number of county fairgrounds sites where auto races were held, but the band did not play on the race tracks themselves, to my knowledge. To name one example, the Dead played the Watsonville County Fairgrounds in 1983, but they played at main arena (probably the old horse race track), not the speedway.
• I'm also aware that sometime around the 1990s, a promoter tried to tie in Trans-Am races with rock concerts, but I don't know such events were actually held. In the 1970s or 80s, that would have been unforgettable for me, though of course it would never have happened, but by the 1990s it was not a viable concept.

If any Deadhead racing fans see something I missed, please Comment or email me, and I will include it in the post.