Grateful Dead

I don't recall if I attended Friday or Saturday. Thee Image was a stripped out bowling alley across the street from the beach. The lanes had been removed along with the other furniture etc and the former pool table room was now the "Meditation Room". It was a concrete floor with the typical low, drop ceiling of a bowling alley so the stage had to be very low with no separation from the crowd. It was like watching a garage band at a high school dance. It was a very small crowd with I think less than 200 people and you either sat on the concrete or stood since there were no seats. There could have been as many as three hundred drifting in an out but certainly no more than that. I have never seen a set list but from the best we can recall the first set was stuff like the Grateful Dead album and the second set was Anthem of the Sun material. We definitely recall Alligator complete with drum interlude. There was also plenty of feedback to end at least one of the sets - probably the second set. I don't recall anything like Dark Star or Saint Stephen being played. According to Lesh's book this was the first stop of an east coast tour to promote Anthem of the Sun. It was all overwhelming to me but I do remember it being a great show with Jerry standing right on the edge of stage lost in what he was doing. The acoustics were terrible but the percussion and lead guitar stood out. The organ was really buried in the noise. The Blues Image was the intro and break band.

I can't say if I ever saw any of these shows but we use to go to this place almost every weekend and its hard to imagine that we didn't see at least one of these shows. The main problem was, we were soooooo stoned most of the time and we saw sooooooo many early super groups at this venue, that they all just blur together into a psychedelic soup. It's that old saying, "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there."