4/6/69: avalon ballroom, san francisco.

the dead headline one of the earliest live remote FM broadcasts, sharing the bill with the flying burrito brothers and wayne ceballos's power trio, AUM. thanks to the KPFA broadcast and the owsley-recorded gram parsons with the flying burrito brothers live at the avalon ballroom 1969 release (amoeba records 2007), we have a very good idea what the burritos sounded like when they opened for the dead. jerry was a huge fan of the first burritos album, the gilded palace of sin; what garcia got from listening to the burrito’s steel player sneaky pete kleinow was a sound, and he heard the possibilities of the sound through kleinow's fuzzboxes and Leslie speakers. jerry could have stuck with the electric guitar in the new riders format which would have sounded great, but the idea of an amplified pedal steel through bear's speaker set-up was too tempting, necessitating the purchase of his zand beck double 10 a few weeks later in lakewood, CO.

anyway, the dead did play a very fine set on this evening and their electric performance is one of the owsley recordings from 1969 that i return to again and again. highlights include a downright nasty cryptical suite, stellar takes on it’s all over now baby blue & death don’t have no mercy, and a solid turn on your lovelight with all the customary mckernan trimmings. after a bit of tuning, viola lee blues closes things out. the version is smoking hot, even with a power outage that forces the boys to sing the last few bars a cappella.

https://archive.org/details/gd69-04-06.sbd.fm.cotsman.9492.sbeok.shnf

And here's a new 2021 upload of the whole tamale via the KPFA broadcast. Right on.

https://archive.org/details/avalon-1967-grateful-dead-flying-burritos-aum-kpfa