Remembering the first Grateful Dead show.

Managed to find a spot with reasonably unrestricted sight lines. The blonde was our MC, I didn't catch her name. She does an eight hour show each day on one of the news talk radio stations "on the eights", which means at x:08, x:18, x:28, etc. she's speaking on the air about traffic, weather, or whatever it is. The first speaker she introduced was San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

Unfortunately, he didn't speak long. Mainly thanked us for coming to this event and made a Deadhead joke or two to prove he was on the team.

I didn't have time to zone in on what the camera needed as far as holding it still etc. before he was done. Sorry Mayor! I'll try and do better next time.

MC reminded us that the Grateful Dead often opened their shows by having the local Native-Americans bless the event and say a few words. In that spirit she introduced the Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Land Acknowledgment.

The Tribal Chairwoman started her remarks by saying "It's incredibly funny that my mother's name is Gerry Garcia." Then she did a nice spiritual invocation in English and Ohlone to gather us into the moment. She followed that with a bit of tribal history, ending with "There are about 600 of us in the area to this day. But for broken treaties we would still own all this land and it wouldn't be as used up as it is now."

This is the City Councilwoman who got the city to agree to host the plaque. She said it wasn't hard to do because a lot of the Council knew the work of the Dead to be a major global phenomenon.

The guy from San Jose Rocks explained that San Jose has had a major role in what you listen to today. It isn't just bands like the Grateful Dead, Doobie Brothers and Smash Mouth. He listed off some of the companies old and new that had something to do with what you hear that are local. Ampex, Apple, Google, Memorex, RCA, and many more. San Jose Rocks is all about spreading understanding of these ideas and their implications."

Purdy invited us to travel back in time to this exact spot sixty years ago. Over there coming around the corner is a brightly painted yellow school bus bringing Ken Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, coming all the way from La Honda. He gestures the other way up the street. "Look it's the band with all their equipment." A couple of hours later the Merry Pranksters are over at the Rolling Stone concert handing out fliers inviting people to the acid test. After the rolling stones concert wrapped up the crowd at the house started to get hopping. Among the Merry Pranksters were some passing out LSD. LSD was legal at that time. He brought us back into the present. There are many different stories about what happened that night, but all agree the band was the Grateful Dead.

Ira Meltzer was one of the guys living in the house at the time. He explained that he agreed to host the party for a dollar or so from each guest for rent money. The Pranksters picked the area to have a party because the Rolling Stones would be ending a show at San Jose Civic Center and it would be the perfect afterparty. One of the Merry Pranksters was Neil Cassidy, and everybody at the party knew that he was Moriarity from Jack Keroak's On The Road. He was glad that the band's amplifiers weren't big enough to blow the fuses. He's not sure what happened to other people, but he "SAW GOD!" that night.

Trixie Garcia was Jerry Garcia's daughter, and is now on the board for the Rex Foundation. She tells people that are new to the Dead "Don't be intimidated by the skeletons. It's good music." Then she invited us to check out the super moon that had been coming up behind us.