Grateful Dead—Electric Theatre, Chicago, IL, April 26, 1969
w/The Velvet Underground
A few years back—while knee-deep in a ’69 listening trip—I stumbled onto a very interesting Grateful Dead tape. The show, recorded a few months after the Live Dead material, is absolutely brimming with energy. The weekend performances are part of the handful of gigs the Dead performed with the VU that year, including two remarkable outings at Pittsburg's Stanley Theatre in early February.
The Velvets and the Dead may seem like a weird pairing to some but, in truth, the two bands derived from many of the same philosophical and musical iterations. In his fine Velvet Underground chronology, White Light White Heat, Richie Unterberger wrote “Both were once known as the Warlocks; both have made their music heavily associated with the ingestion of drugs; and both were prone to performing lengthy improvisations onstage that are comparable to those of few other bands.” And if the SF/New York pairing of the Dead and the VU wasn’t enough, SRC was a famous powerhouse Detroit band, if lesser known, so three great bands from three great scenes were represented.
Bear said of the Electric Theater "It was one of the odder ones we played in those days…we generally did psychedelics on a Saturday, but I do not remember for sure if that was true this night, but chances are it was." As for his take on the musicianship on this evening, he describes the Chicago show as being "…in the familiar mode for almost the whole career of the band, in which the group started off a bit rough around the edges, [would] slowly warm up, and by the second set was flying.”
The Dead were armed and ready for night two of the formerly-the-Warlocks battle, and the opening set is loaded with riches. After a cursory run through Dupree’s Diamond Blues, they get down to business with a 21-minute Mountains of the Moon > China Cat Sunflower > Doin’ that Rag combination. It’s the only taped instance of an acoustic/electric transition after Mountains into anything besides Dark Star and it really works. After a few solid Pig tunes, we arrive at the next jam suite of the early show with Cryptical Envelopment > Other One > The Eleven > Other One > It’s a Sin. This sequence has some extra punch, especially the Other One. Morning Dew appears next on the horizon, and it’s a beauty. Garcia gets everything out of his Gibson on tonight’s take and the vocals compliment his elegant riffs. Winding down the first set, the band rocks out a couple of traditional numbers—Sittin’ on Top of the World and New Minglewood Blues—before closing out the frame with the debut performance of Silver Threads & Golden Needles.
Weir’s oracular “This is the home stretch for us—on account of we’re going home” announces the second set, which opens with a nice version of It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. From here, the boys turn it up with a ripping St. Stephen that, minus the William Tell bridge, segues into a half hour of Turn On Your Lovelight, with Pig doing his usual crowd work. The night concludes with a wild, 40-minute Viola Lee Blues > What’s Become of the Baby > And We Bid You Goodnight Encore. Viola Lee has a fierce Caution Jam as its last peak before morphing into feedback, with the studio What’s Become of the Baby layered on top. The closing sequence is breathtakingly psychedelic.
Much has been written about this weekend at the Electric Theatre and it’s taken on a kind of legendary status given how much the two bands disliked each other. Listening to the tapes of both nights, it’s clear that the Dead were inspired by the VU’s disdain for their scene. Accordingly, when The Velvets rolled out an hour-long Sister Ray for their early Saturday set, the Dead answered with a Brobdingnagian performance. In a nutshell, a flaming peregrination that stood the VU noise/drone experiment right on its head.
In a post-show interview, an audience member shared, “I believe the Velvet Underground played first…then the Grateful Dead came out and played ‘til about 2 or 3 in the morning. And, literally, the only people left in attendance when the Dead were through playing were people who were lying on the floor. Eighty percent of the crowd had gone, and the Dead just kept on playing.” Listening to this Owsley soundboard, I must assert that hanging in there to the bitter end on this night seems incontestably warranted.