The Grateful Dead’s 6/6/1969 show was the second of a four night run at the Fillmore West. The show clocks in at a little over an hour and sixteen minutes, which is the shortest amount of music recorded from any of the four nights.
There are some interesting aspects to this show including blues guitarist Elvin Bishop and Wayne Ceballos sitting in with the band for most of the show excluding Turn On Your Lovelight and Garcia having only played on the Lovelight (supposedly). Also, the set closes with a 47 minute Lovelight, which is the longest recorded version of the song and may have been the longest Lovelight ever played by the Dead.
One point of note, according to some Grateful Dead setlist websites, there is some confusion as to whether performances of certain songs actually came from a different night of the run. An example is this 47 minute Lovelight may have been played on 6/8/1969 and the Lovelight on that night may have actually been played two days prior. The reason for this confusion is the aforementioned band members sitting out a set as the Lovelight on 6/8/1969 does not feature Garcia or Pigpen who sat out on 6/6/1969.
In Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip he writes that at one of these four shows the band and audience were heavily dosed by an amount of LSD which may have been valued upwards of $50,000. From the book: “…there was probably a full gram of crystal LSD in the juice…Lesh said later that one could taste the LSD in the juice. When it came time to play, he was so ecstatically zonked that he politely declined when Mickey told him it was time to go to work.”
Phil had to be helped with his bass and stated “The strings were all snaky, but beautiful colors, kind of fish or reptile scales.” McNally quotes Phil further as saying, the music was “the strangest polyphonic blues ever” and Elvin Bishop was invited to play along with them through this.
6/6/1969 notes
Smokestack Lighting shows off the blues side to the Dead with Elvin Bishop playing lead. The band admits they are “sadly depleted” without Garcia. Green, Green Grass of Home is straight Bakersfield. Me and My Uncle. Checkin’ Up On My Baby is a Bishop number. Beat It Down The Line has vocals with Bishop and Weir.
Lovelight starts out like any other of the era. Pig gives relationship advice to the audience about eleven minutes in. He’s a good problem solver and maybe one of the first improvisational rappers. To be honest, I can’t tell whatsoever whether Bishop or Garcia plays guitar on this one though the Lovelight jam sounds a lot like Garcia but being that the song is steeped in the blues, I can’t be sure. Also, though Lovelight is long, there is not much jamming as Pig pretty much dominates the song vocally throughout.
This is a weird show. Besides Lovelight, it is too short a show to really get into and Lovelight is so long that it becomes the main attraction. The Dead led by a different slinger is cool to hear and Bishop’s playing is fun to listen to but the band wasn’t working it as well as normal so perhaps this is the Dose show.
6/6/1969 can be streamed here.
