Grateful Dead - 1969-08-23 - St. Helen's, OR (SBD)

Grateful Dead  

1969-08-23

Pellitier Farm

St. Helen's, OR

Soundboard Recording

320 kbps

Artwork Included

01. Hard to Handle 

02. Mama Tried >

03. High Time

04. Casey Jones 

05. Easy Wind

06. Sittin' On Top of the World

07. Tuning

08. Dark Star >

09. St. Stephen > 

10. The Eleven >

11. Turn on Your Lovelight

12. We Bid You Good Night 

Grateful Dead - 1969-08-23 - St. Helen's, OR (SBD)

As part of our tribute to Jerry Garcia this month, we want to take you back to 1969, a year in which the Grateful Dead closed out the "Psychedelic 60's" with live music that embodied everything that nickname symbolized, and then some. Their concerts at The Fillmore West in late February/early March that year, from which the album Live Dead was culled (and more recently a 9 disc box set of the entire run) found the band exploring the depths of space on tunes such as Dark Star, St. Stephen and That's It For The Other One. At the same time, with Pigpen at the helm on vocals, they could produce powerful down and dirty blues numbers such as Alligator or Turn On Your Lovelight. When the Live Dead disc was released in late 1969, it marked the first time the band had released a live performance on disc. At the time, Robert Christgau wrote that side two of the album "contains the finest rock improvisation ever recorded." This soundboard recording captures the Dead during that incredible year in Oregon on August 23, 1969, 51 years ago today.