The Grateful Dead actually played a couple of shows on this day in 1967 – a performance at the Fillmore Auditorium on a bill with Junior Wells and the Doors (that must have been some night, but, unfortunately, no tape exists on the Archive) and this, a few songs during the Human Be-In, one of the seminal events of the 60s.
The Human Be-In is often called the lead up to the Summer of Love, and this description is accurate in the sense that thousands of young people gathered together in a park in San Francisco to listen to poetry and music and take LSD. Unlike the Summer of Love, however, the Human Be-In was an “organized” event that was at least partially planned in advance. There didn’t appear to be much of an agenda (in fact, the whole “point” of the event was simply to “be-in”), but the typical luminaries of the San Francisco hippie scene were present and accounted for: Ginsburg, the Hells Angels, the Diggers, and, of course, the Grateful Dead.
In Grateful Dead history, this date is important not just because of the Be-In itself – after all, the Dead played at a lot of these kind of gatherings – but because today marks the debut of Morning Dew, a classic Grateful Dead song that the band would perform in every year of its existence (except the 1975 hiatus) from here until the very end.
There’s only one problem. The version of Morning Dew that is attached to this recording on the Archive is almost certainly not the Morning Dew that the band played on January 14, 1967. If you’d like to participate in the full debate, there are plenty of comments on this show on the Archive to delve into. For my part, I’ll say that the recording tone is completely different on Morning Dew than on the following two songs and it sure sounds like they’ve got two drummers up there, one of whom is playing a gong, something Mickey Hart was apt to do (Mickey wasn’t in the Dead in January, 1967). Whatever the origins of this particular recording, it’s a good one and should be enjoyed on the day when Morning Dew made its first appearance. I just don’t want you to think that you’re listening to the actual article when, in all likelihood, you aren’t.
Then we come to Viola Lee Blues. Now this recording, and the Good Morning Little Schoolgirl that follows it, is of the right vintage. You can tell right away that the people performing here are not completely tethered to the earth (almost no one at the Be-In was) and the sound is basic. That being said, this version of Viola Lee is tons of fun, and if you had been at the Be-In that day, it would have turned your shoes inside out while you were wearing them. It still holds up well today.
Schoolgirl, on the other hand, is what you’d expect would happen when the Dead add in Charles Lloyd on the flute and then let him improvise vocals for five minutes while, probably, tripping on high-test Owsley LSD. It’s everything the Human Be-In was designed to be: collaborative, experimental and way, way out there. It just isn’t good music.
So here you have the Dead, in a park on a sunny afternoon in San Francisco, playing a show that would trigger a mass gathering of young people to move to San Francisco and pursue peace, love and their version of the American dream. What could be better than that?
Listen here: https://archive.org/details/gd67-01-14.sbd.vernon.9108.sbeok.shnf
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