By the summer of 1969, the Grateful Dead were a band in full transformation. The Aoxomoxoa album had arrived just a month earlier in June, and the group was navigating a musical identity that stretched from psychedelic studio experimentation to something rawer and more feral on stage. Pigpen — Ron McKernan — was still very much the soul and swagger of the live show, and the band around him was tightening into the unit that would soon record Live/Dead. Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart (who had joined the previous fall) were finding their footing as a two-drummer outfit, and the results in concert were increasingly explosive. This was a band that could stretch a single song into a thirty-minute voyage or lock into a groove that felt like it could level a building. The NY State Pavilion at Flushing Meadows Park was a striking and unusual venue — the modernist tensile structure designed by Philip Johnson for the 1964-65 World's Fair, sitting in the sprawling Queens park that had hosted two World's Fairs and would later appear in Men in Black. By 1969 it had become a concert venue, and the Dead playing there speaks to the eclecticism of the late-'60s booking circuit, where you might find the band in a ballroom one night and a former World's Fair pavilion the next.
There's something fitting about the Dead — a band obsessed with the psychedelic and the futuristic — occupying a structure built to evoke tomorrow. The one song we have confirmed from this show is "Turn On Your Lovelight," and if you know anything about the Dead circa 1969, you know that's not a small thing. This was Pigpen's vehicle, a blues-gospel war cry drawn from Bobby "Blue" Bland, and the Dead turned it into an open-ended ritual. At this point in the band's history, Lovelight could run anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour, with Pigpen working the crowd like a revival preacher while the band churned and surged behind him. A great Lovelight from this era is less a song than an event — listen for Pigpen's ad-libs escalating, the way Garcia's lines coil around the rhythm section, and the crowd responding in kind. Recording quality from outdoor shows in 1969 can be variable, and this one should be approached as a historical document as much as a hi-fi listening experience. But that rawness is part of the appeal — press play and hear what it sounded like to be there.