Jim, I enjoy knowing that Jerry had been playing acoustic (guitar and banjo) around the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto only a coupla years before I started playing at that school’s frat parties in ’68. Those frat boys know how to party, and have the money to do it.
I saw The Dead live in the Summer of ’67, performing on a flatbed truck in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park (along with The Airplane and Country Joe & The Fish). At that time they sounded like a Garage/Biker Band, and a real good one. They didn’t yet display the effects of LSD in their music (extended improvisation), sounding more like they were drinking and taking little white pills. 😉 And you would never know Jerry had been playing acoustic music only a few years earlier. It wasn’t until the Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty albums (both released in 1970) that their music reflected Jerry’s acoustic roots.
In ’68 Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album came out (actually in December of ’67), as did The Band’s Music From Big Pink, The Byrds Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart Of The Rodeo (two albums in one year, six months apart!), The Beau Brummel’s Bradley’s Barn, Dillard & Clark’s The Fantastic Expedition Of, The Everly Brothers’ Roots album, Buffalo Springfield’s Last Time Around, and Neil Young’s s/t debut. Those albums led the charge against the prevailing winds in Rock music: Psychedelia and Blues-based music (Cream, Hendrix, etc.), and showed the way forward. At least amongst my peers and I. And The Grateful Dead, if only temporarily.