Here is a rather unusual concert. I am interested whenever possible to post full concerts from the 1960s or early 1970s, because there aren't a lot of those. When I say "full concerts," I mean the headliner act and all of the opening acts. This is a kind of unusual case because we have most everything BUT the headliner act. The headliners were Canned Heat. Unfortunately, I could only find one song from their set. If anyone else has more, please let me know and I'll add it in. But the opening acts are very interesting: Tarantula, Lee Michaels, Santana, and the Grateful Dead. Furthermore, it's especially interesting how Santana and the Grateful Dead jammed together on a few songs at the end of the Dead's set.
This recording is from a local radio broadcast. It was extremely unusual to have full concerts on the radio in 1969, and even more unusual to have concerts with all of the opening acts. So I consider this important in terms of the recorded legacy of concerts from that era. The Grateful Dead portion of this concert has gotten around quite a lot, Since Deadheads obsessively collect so much of their live music. The rest seems to have been much more obscure. I found it on the Internet, but not on any of the usual bootleg sharing sites.
As I mentioned above, Canned Heat was the headliner and final act. But since I only have the first song of their set, I moved that song to just before the Grateful Dead set. So for this recording, the Dead play the role of the headliner.
The concert started with just one full song by Tarantula. I think it's a good guess that they played more songs, but this is all that managed to be recorded and survived. If you have never heard of them, don't feel bad. They are so obscure that they don't even have a Wikipedia page as I write this in 2026. However, they do have a page at the rateyourmusic site. That shows that they only released one album in 1969, which was self titled, before they broke up. Here is a link to their rateyourmusic webpage:
The next musical act was Lee Michaels. He is reasonably well known today, because he had a Top Ten hit in the U.S. in 1971 with the song "Do You Know What I Mean." But that was two years after from this concert. He was relatively unknown in 1969, though he was slowly building up a following. He released his third solo album that year, and it almost made the Top Forty albums chart. He had an unusual sound because he played Hammond organ and sang lead vocals, but he often was only backed by a drummer. One can hear that that was the case in this concert.
Here is his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more:
I don't have to say much about the next act, Santana, because I've posted several different concerts by them already. But note that while Santana became very famous later on, at the time of this concert, they were not well known. Their big break would come a few months later, at the famous Woodstock concert in August. At this point, they had been playing a lot in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1968, but their first album hadn't been released yet.
As I mentioned above, I could only find one song from the Canned Heat set, and I moved it to after the Santana set.
That just leaves the Grateful Dead set. At this point, they weren't very well known either. Like Santana, they had built up a Bay Area following due to playing a lot of concerts there. But this concert was in San Diego, so I'm guessing they weren't as well known there. But at least they had already released two studio albums. They would release a third album, "Aoxomoxoa," just one month after this concert, but none of the songs from that album were performed here.
There were a lot of issues with this recording. Even though it was a radio broadcast, it probably got passed through different tape recordings along the way, and some sound quality was lost, and some bits and pieces of music were lost. Three songs have "[Edit]" in their titles, because I had to make some significant edits on those. I believe there might have been a couple of other songs that I didn't include because there were only small parts that remained.
Another issue is that, for whatever reason, very, very little of the audience applause has made it onto this recording. Usually, I try to fix that by patching in bits of the applause that did survive to parts lacking applause. But in this case, there was so very little that I didn't have enough to work with. So I just left the applause as is. The music sounds pretty good, considering the era, and there even is some occasional banter. But don't expect applause between songs.
As I mentioned above, I am especially interested in posting concert recordings from this era that include the opening acts. If you know of other recordings like that with worthy sound quality, please let me know, and I will make an effort to try to post those as well.
This album is two hours and 38 minutes long.
01 talk (Tarantula)
02 You - Drum Solo (Tarantula)
03 talk by emcee (Tarantula)
04 My Friends - Drum Solo (Lee Michaels)
05 Heighty Hi (Lee Michaels)
06 Hello (Lee Michaels)
07 Call It Stormy Monday (Lee Michaels)
08 The War [Edit] (Lee Michaels)
09 Evil Ways [Edit] (Santana)
10 Fried Neck Bones and Some Home Fries (Santana)
11 Persuasion (Santana)
12 Savor [Instrumental] (Santana)
13 Soul Sacrifice [Instrumental] [Edit] (Santana)
14 talk (Canned Heat)
15 I'm Her Man (Canned Heat)
16 talk by emcee (Grateful Dead)
17 Morning Dew (Grateful Dead)
18 Cryptical Envelopment (Grateful Dead)
19 Drums [Instrumental] (Grateful Dead)
20 That's It for the Other One (Grateful Dead)
21 Cryptical Envelopment (Grateful Dead)
22 Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl (Grateful Dead)
23 Me and My Uncle (Grateful Dead)
24 Alligator (Grateful Dead)
25 Drums [Instrumental] (Grateful Dead & Santana)
26 Jam [Instrumental] (Grateful Dead & Santana)
27 Drums [Instrumental] (Grateful Dead & Santana)
28 Turn On Your Lovelight (Grateful Dead & Santana)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/XPxe7STV
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/b8MFZPEBoFFw4hk/file
The cover image is the poster used to promote this exact concert. However, that poster, like most posters, is rectangular. I made big edits in Photoshop to move all the parts I wanted to keep to a square shape instead.
Thank you
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