January 10, 1970 finds the Grateful Dead deep in one of their most creatively fertile periods — a band in full transformation, shedding their acid-rock skin and growing into something rawer and more Americana-rooted. The *Live/Dead* album had just hit shelves in November 1969, capturing the ferocious improvisational peak of the old electric lineup, but by early 1970 the Dead were already pointing in a new direction. *Workingman's Dead* was just weeks away from being recorded, and the influence of country, folk, and acoustic balladry was seeping into everything they touched. The core lineup of Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart was intact and firing — a band in genuine dialogue with itself, exploratory and unselfconscious in equal measure. The Community Concourse in San Diego is not among the Dead's storied rooms — no mythology attaches to it the way it does to the Fillmore or Winterland — but that's part of what makes early 1970 Southern California dates interesting. These were working shows, road-worn and loose, played before crowds who were discovering the band rather than venerating them. There's an intimacy and immediacy to these settings that the arena years would eventually swallow whole. What we have documented from this show is *Black Peter*, and that alone makes it worth your time. The song had only just entered the repertoire, debuted just months earlier in 1969, and in early 1970 performances Garcia was still finding his way into it — which is precisely what makes these early versions so compelling.
The tune, a gentle and devastating meditation on death drawn from Robert Hunter's plain-spoken poetry, had not yet settled into its familiar shape. Garcia's guitar work in these early outings tends to be more tentative, more searching, the phrasing slightly uncertain in that beautiful way of a musician feeling out new emotional territory. When it locks in — and it does — the restraint is remarkable. Pigpen is still very much a presence in the band at this point, and the ensemble feel around *Black Peter* in this era carries a warmth that suits the material perfectly. Recording information for this show is limited, and listeners should approach with appropriate expectations for early 1970 archive material — likely an audience tape of variable fidelity, where the music speaks louder than the sonics. Don't let that stop you. A searching early *Black Peter* from a band on the edge of reinventing itself is exactly the kind of document the archive was made to preserve.