By the dawn of 1970, the Grateful Dead were deep in one of the most creatively fertile stretches of their career. The classic five-piece lineup — Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann, with Mickey Hart having joined the drum kit in late 1967 — was now a fully road-hardened unit, and the band had just released their landmark live album "Live/Dead" in November of 1969. That record had announced to the world what the Dead faithful already knew: this was a band capable of sustained improvisational flight unlike anything else happening in rock and roll. The songs were getting longer, the jams were getting deeper, and the interplay between Garcia's fluid lead work and Lesh's harmonically adventurous bass was reaching new heights. The counterculture was still in full idealistic bloom, and the Dead were very much its house band. The Fillmore East was already one of the most storied rooms in American rock. Bill Graham's East Coast counterpart to the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the old theater on Second Avenue in Manhattan's East Village was a home away from home for the Dead, a place where a sympathetic audience and exceptional acoustics conspired to bring out the band's best. New York audiences in this era were sophisticated and hungry, and the Dead responded in kind.
A late show on January 2nd would have been exactly the kind of loose, late-night setting where the band could stretch out and take risks. The two songs we have documented from this show offer a compelling window into the Dead's musical world at this moment. "I Know You Rider" was already a cornerstone of the live repertoire, a traditional tune the Dead had thoroughly absorbed and made their own, its concluding chord sequence a reliable vehicle for Garcia's soaring, bittersweet guitar work. "St. Stephen," freshly minted from "Aoxomoxoa" and still in regular rotation, was one of the era's most exciting vehicles for collective improvisation — a song that could unspool into vast open spaces before snapping back to its propulsive central riff. Together they paint a picture of a band moving fluidly between folk tradition and psychedelic exploration. Recording information for early Fillmore East shows can vary, but tapes from this venue and era have a reputation for solid fidelity, and any surviving documentation of the Dead in this room during this pivotal winter is worth seeking out. Put on your headphones, let the band find their footing in the opening minutes, and trust that the late show on Second Avenue had something special in store.