There’s a bottle of Ripple wine on the cover, representing the era. It was sweet fortified wine with artificial flavors. A Wall Street Journal article at the time said that young drinkers liked to get stoned and watch the bubbles. Gallo stopped the carbonation at some point to avoid taxes. Wikipedia said it’s been off the market for 40 years. I know I drank a bottle on September 5, 1976, because I can remember the hangover.
This is a legally made recording, not a bootleg, yet not approved by the Dead either. It was an artifact of an agreement for a record of Bay area bands. That record never came out, but whoever had the rights put this out later. It is widely held (in Bill Kreutzmann’s memoirs and a biography of Mike Bloomfield, for example) that the Grateful Dead wasn’t very good in 1966. This record proves it. It’s standard bar-band material: I Know You Rider; It Hurts Me Too; It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; Dancing in the Street; and a painful 18-minute version of In the Midnight Hour. I say there must have been 1,000 bar bands that could have done it better.
The Grateful Dead were quick learners—their next record (named The Grateful Dead) in 1967 is incomparably better.
converselyspeaking 