By the summer of 1969, the Grateful Dead were a band in rapid, fascinating flux. The debut album was already behind them, Anthem of the Sun had pushed their psychedelic collage aesthetic to its furthest edge, and Aoxomoxoa — recorded in tortured, expensive sessions that nearly bankrupted them — had just hit shelves that very month. Pigpen was still a central presence, lending the band a raw, roadhouse soul that would begin to recede as the decade turned. Garcia, Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart — who had joined the previous year, giving the Dead their famous two-drummer thunder — were playing with the looseness and danger of a band that had absorbed the San Francisco acid scene into its bones and was now taking it out on the road, night after night, to audiences hungry for exactly this kind of organized chaos. The Fillmore East was sacred ground. Bill Graham had opened the New York room in March of 1968 as a sister venue to his Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and it quickly became the premier rock concert hall on the East Coast — a converted movie theater on Second Avenue in the East Village with beautiful acoustics, an intimate balcony, and a crowd that came to listen as much as to be transported. The Dead had a particular chemistry with the room and with New York audiences, who tended to be passionate and attentive in equal measure.
Playing the Fillmore East meant something; it was a genuine test of a band's mettle. The one song from this show in our database is Ol' Slewfoot, a raucous traditional number — sometimes credited to Howard "Harlan" Howard — that the Dead dipped into occasionally during this period, usually as a showcase for Pigpen's gruff, swaggering delivery. It's a bear-hunting song that becomes something else entirely in the Dead's hands: barn-burning and loose-limbed, with the kind of good-natured menace that Pigpen brought to everything he touched. It doesn't appear with great frequency in the archive, which makes any surviving version worth seeking out. The recording quality of early Fillmore East shows varies considerably — audience tapes from 1969 can range from murky to surprisingly vivid depending on the taper and the room's natural reverb. Whatever the source, what you're listening for here is a band at the edge of their first great leap forward, still rough, still searching, and absolutely electric. Press play and hear them becoming.