February 1969 finds the Grateful Dead deep in the psychedelic trenches of their earliest and most exploratory phase. Pigpen — Ron McKernan — is a full and commanding presence in the band at this point, sharing frontman duties and giving the group an earthy, blues-drenched counterweight to the more cosmic inclinations of Garcia and Lesh. The band had released their self-titled debut in 1967 and Anthem of the Sun in 1968, and they were still several months away from Aoxomoxoa. This was a working band in the truest sense, gigging constantly up and down the West Coast and beyond, road-testing ideas that wouldn't see studio light for years. The Dead of early 1969 play with a rawness and physical intensity that later, more refined lineups would smooth away — and that roughness is a feature, not a bug. The Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh is one of those grand old movie palaces that doubled as a rock venue in the late sixties and early seventies, a cavernous but intimate room with the kind of acoustics that could make a loud band sound enormous. Pittsburgh in 1969 was a working-class city with a hungry audience for underground rock, and the Dead were still the kind of act that drew the adventurous and the curious rather than the stadium crowds that would follow a decade later. There's something fitting about this particular band in this particular room — both a little rough around the edges, both capable of something genuinely transcendent.
The one song we have documented from this night is "Turn On Your Lovelight," and that tells you something about the spirit of the evening. In this era, Lovelight was Pigpen's showpiece, a slow-burning R&B invocation that he could stretch to fifteen, twenty, even thirty minutes depending on his mood and the room's energy. These performances weren't songs so much as séances — Pigpen rapping, cajoling, teasing the crowd, while the band locked into a deep groove that Garcia and Lesh could push into genuinely strange territory. A great Lovelight from 1969 is one of the more hypnotic things the Dead ever committed to tape, and the faithful seek these versions out with good reason. The recording circulating from this show is an audience tape, so expect the warmth and limitations that come with that territory — but don't let that stop you. The energy of a Pigpen-led Lovelight in a room like the Stanley is the kind of thing that bleeds through even a scratchy tape. Put on your headphones and let it breathe.