Fifty years ago today, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan played their first show under the moniker of The Grateful Dead. This date also coincides with the first public Acid Test the Dead and the Merry Pranksters ever put on. The location of this first gig was essentially a house party, hosted by one of Ken Kesey’s friends.
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As the story goes, the Rolling Stones were in town that same night and efforts were made to get Mick Jagger or Keith Richards to the party. Needless to say, neither Mick or Keith showed up, but what did occur was one of the most significant performances of the Dead’s career. In Bill Kreutzmann’s 2015 biography/memoir Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead, written by Kreutzmann and Benjy Eisen, Kreutzmann explains the acid test as such:
The Acid Tests were the physical manifestation of what goes on in your mind during an acid trip. Things don’t always make sense. Some sounds are noises, some noises are music, music is being played, but not everything being played is music. Some things you hear over the loudspeaker are snippets from a conversation you had earlier on in the night with a friend of yours. Did you really say that aloud? You must’ve because now it was being looped over the PA system, along with weird announcements and proclamations. And you can’t trust anything you see because you’re seeing things that just can’t be. Or can they? It was a psychedelic circus and everyone was the sideshow and everyone was the main event, but was there even any main event at all? Nobody could say for sure.
Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner was also at the show that night and interviewed Garcia later in 1972, and asked about the first Acid Tests. Garcia recalls that “They had film and endless kind of weird tape recorder hook ups and mystery speaker trips and all…just all sorts of really strange…it always seemed as though the equipment was able to respond in its own way, I mean it…there were always magical things happening. Voices coming out of things that weren’t plugged in and, God…it was just totally mind boggling to wander around this maze of wires and stuff like that. Sometimes they were like writhing and squirming. Truly amazing.”
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And although there’s no recording of the show that night, as the first Dead tape seems to have been recorded in January of 1966, the first Acid Test show opened the flood gates for 30 years of righteous tunes. Now, 50 years later, Deadheads are able to revel in the many recordings of one of, if not the most important band in American music history.
To celebrate the Dead’s 50 year anniversary, stream 30 Trips Around The Sun:The Definitive Story (1965-1995) via Spotify below:
[Photo via Rolling Stone]