Talk From The Rock Room: Put the Boot In: Grateful Dead - January 8, 1966 Fillmore Auditorium 'Electric Dixieland'

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Put the Boot In: Grateful Dead - January 8, 1966 Fillmore Auditorium 'Electric Dixieland'


Spinning today in the 'rock room' is the earliest circulating live recording of the Grateful Dead. While the group played their first live show in May of 1965, here we find the first recorded documentation of a 'Primal Dead' show. Taking place at the 'Fillmore Auditorium' in San Francisco on January 8, 1966 we find the 'Dead' as the house band for an early acid test. The tapes of the groups earliest show’s sometimes feel like turning the key in a car that been put up in the barn for the winter. There is some grinding, some strange noises and maybe even a strange fluid leaking out from a crack somewhere. But once that engine warms up and everything starts to mesh at an optimal level you can start to discern an unique rock and blues band.

The quintessential quintet, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Bob Weir and Ron 'Pig Pen' McKernan made up phase one of this Grateful Dead. In spite of the virtuosic talents of Garcia, Lesh and Kreutzmann, these guys were really amateurs on electric instruments. The band’s eventual second sight and learned ability to play off one another was born of learning how to play their instruments with each other. Hard months of practice during the winter of 1966 paid dividends in the available circulating recording we are playing today.

These guys worked hard at developing their craft. This is an under appreciated aspect of the ‘Warlocks/Grateful Dead journey. These moments of captured on stage musical clairvoyance were the result of hours of musical discussion and off stage practice. The available practice tapes recorded in January and February 1966 show a band willing to talk a out and a stern  Camaraderie in turn bred a stern accountability as can be heard on the recordings. Lesh has already asserted himself into a leadership role and aligned himself Garcia’s co-visionary at this early juncture. 

Youth, drugs, enthusiasm and an internal drive to develop a unique musical expression united the group in a common vision. Garcia came from a bluegrass background, Lesh classical (and had never touched a bass), Pigpen the blues and Bill and Bob, 'rockers' for lack of a better term. Vibrato was king and folks can liken the band's aesthetic during 1966  to a charged alien surf band.

As previously stated this first audio documentation that we have of the ‘Grateful Dead’ hails from January 8th, 1966 at the Fillmore Acid Test. Show lists and various documentation show that the band played sonically undocumented shows at the Matrix in the week leading up to this performance. This soundboard line recording throws us into the deep end right into a heady brew of Prankster chaos. This is the first available documentation of the live concert experience that would define the band’s next 30 plus careers together. Prior to the 'Dead' taping all of their shows, the Pranksters took it upon themselves to do so. Thanks Kesey!

Additional handfuls of concert and rehearsal tapes of tapes circulate of the Grateful Dead in 1966. That being said, many more live recordings than most any other bands of the era.  Many are dated poorly or not at all, many have cuts missing songs and missing reels. The sonics emanating from the January 8th Fillmore tape sound like florescent ectoplasm, an electronic wasteland peppered with calls for stage power and an annoyed ‘Pig’. “Stop babbling and fix the microphone” he shouts to Ken Babbs. The recording is littered with LSD inspired chaos. The alchemy of the 'Grateful Dead' and the acid tests is the organic looseness and lack of any sort of order. This freedom allowed the 'Dead' Looking through the multicolored mists of an acid dream we are dropped straight into a loping ‘King Bee’ on the recording. As we will find, a highlight of these early shows, Bill the drummer is extraordinary at galloping along with the white boy blues, but this band is about Garcia and Pig.

                                      

It's obvious by looking at the setlists of the available recordings ‘King Bee’ was a focus of the early Grateful Dead performances. Probably one of the first songs learned collaboratively the Slim Harpo number played to the band's strengths at this point in time.. These guys were the 'Pigpen Blues Band' at this early juncture. The song was a straight blues in which they could stretch their legs as well as developing a sympatico with one another. In the song's framework there was ample opportunity for exploring the song's changes, eliciting call and response moments as well as sharpening their blues chops. 'King Bee' skips on Bill the drummers nimble snare work. Already a stellar rock drummer, the tapes bear out that he was already on par with the much more practiced Garcia.

Lesh plays a loopy legato slide, playing much nearer to the root that usual. Pig lays down gritty harp, but once Garcia comes in for his first solo, flashing images of the future Grateful Dead flitter in the atmosphere. Pig screams soulfully in the background as Lesh and Garcia probe the 12 bar for clandestine doorways to new avenues of expression. Here the 'Dead' dig into a basic blues, but played with a unique renegade attitude. 

Amidst the charged atmospherics of the recording, the tape then cuts in with the band playing ‘Hog For you Baby’, a Leiber and Stoller hailing classic from Pig’s fathers record collection I’m sure. This reading contains all of the groovy hallmarks of later Dead covers such as 'Walkin' the Dog' and 'Big Boy Pete' This one sways like a go go girl's behind, with a delectable groove and ‘Pigpen’ with both hands on the wheel and in full control of the band. Garcia’s soloing is scattershot, excitable and glittery. In the solo break Garcia lays down a strip of candied dots across the percolating strobing grooves. Grateful Dead dance band at your service. Even at this early juncture the group is definitely practiced, abundantly eager, yet garage basic.

A highlight of the tape and a discernable distant gleam can be witnessed though what is one of the band’s first collaborative original songs and their first improvisational pieces, ‘Caution (Do Not Step On Tracks)’. Obviously influenced by the song, 'Gypsy Eyes' off of 'Them's' 1965 debut The Angry Young Them, the jam is a clanging of rail joints and squats as the train rounds the bend. Based around an amphetamine 'Bo Diddley' groove, the 'Dead' peeled their arrangement from Van Morrison's blueprints.  

A studio recording of the song is available as it was attempted during the ‘Warlocks’ debut visit to the recording studio in 1965. Even in the confines of the sterile studio the song contained a certain amount of ‘it’. This introductory live concert version cuts in during an already bubbling jam heavy with attitude and wining Pig harp. The band is frothing with energy. Garcia enters with brash prickly scrubs as the band passes the ball around the room before meeting the middle and hitting on an agreed up lick.

Weir’s guitar is somewhat inaudible, but Lesh and Bill continue propelling the jam forward. The group is pulsing while some off mic yelling can be discerned, I’m sure we can’t even begin to imagine what is taking place around the stage among the hipsters, tripsters, and real cool chicks. The band disseminates some ‘Yardbird’ like adolescent ‘rave ups’ with plentiful Mississippi saxophone by ‘Pig’. There is no doubt that at this juncture, that ‘Pigpen’ was in full control of the band, but something outside of jug band and rock and blues realm is observing from the peripheral. 

The genealogy of  these early ‘Caution’ jams  is an important focus when listening to the initial concert excursions of ‘Grateful Dead’. As Pig drives the intensity higher Garcia responds encouraging the band into a whirling dervish of sound. Around three minutes Weir gets into it with some slashing excitable rhythms. Garcia soon let's loose with the recognizable 'Caution' siren that signals the music to drop and Pig  to let the assembled crowd know 'what they need'. Following Pig's lyrics an eager jam follows with Pig and Jerry trading twisted blues quotes while the audience cheers them on initiating an additional Pig diatribe.

Closing the available recording from January 8, is our first available rendition of Reverend Gary Davis’s ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’, a idol of many if not all of the folkies , soon come rockers around the San Francisco scene. This is not definitely not party music, but this is an early example of the ‘Grateful Dead’ taking delicate concert attendees to the precipices of Yin and Yang. On the available recording as Garcia hits the ascending opening lick into the song you can here Babbs close by the mic let out a laugh, obviously tickled deep by Garcia's sonic jab. The song jumps the tracks out of 'Caution' and surpasses nine minutes. 

Highlighted by Pig's horror show organ and Garcia's youthful and invested vocals, 'Death Don't' is just the dose of musical reality the band would become famous for administering. Screams of delight come from the crowd as the group rises and falls with Garcia's almost unbelievable screaming of the verses. Wobbly chorused notes pour from Garcia's vessel as Lesh and Kreutzmann bring the groove down low. The mood shifts to introspective for Garcia's second trip around the cemetery lot. Lesh shadows him, supports his patient riffing before landing at the appropriate place at the perfect time together.

The available tape ends with additional Prankster madness while they clear the house. Kesey, Weir and others make the exit of the 'test' a most interesting way of leaving. Weir asks Jerry if they should play 'On the Road Again' to get everyone on the road. The rest of the reel is quite discombobulating with mindless chaos, liquid verbalizations, hallucinations and concluding with a demonic reading of the 'Star Spangled Banner'. 

This recording reveals the early aural tentacles of the Grateful Dead reaching out and making critical connections. It acts as proof of the band’s first developmental steps in helping to understand their connections as artists and disseminators of some greater musical cosmic truth. Always reaching for an unknowable golden ring that when caught can lift both artist and receptor to storying heights. The band was beginning to understand what powers their talents and collaborative strengths provided them and how they could use them for the greater good.

By July, the formative foundations hailing from all of the five members shared performing experiences would begin to pay dividends in ways beyond their wildest dreams. Based on my analysis, within just weeks the band would take their stiff blues aesthetic and elasticize it to far reaching corners of multifarious genres and cosmic sonics not yet curated by a normal rock and roll band. This was only the beginning. 

Grateful Dead January 8, 1966


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