The Grateful Dead played the Kinetic Playground in Chicago on July 4, 1969.

The room was the Midwest's answer to the San Francisco ballrooms, at 4812 North Clark Street in Uptown, in a 1928 building that had housed the Rainbo Gardens dance hall and skating complex. Aaron Russo — then in his twenties, later a film producer — had opened it in April 1968 as the Electric Theater and renamed it that summer after the owners of New York's Electric Circus sued him over the name. Under both names he booked the national circuit: the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, the Who, with a light show elaborate enough to be part of the draw.

Its ending was abrupt. A fire after the first night of a three-night Iron Butterfly booking in November 1969 cancelled the rest and effectively finished the original operation. It reopened without the light show in 1972 and closed again the next year over neighbour complaints and code violations; the building came down in 2003.

The Dead in July 1969 were between *Aoxomoxoa* and *Live/Dead* — the studio record that had nearly bankrupted them and the live one that finally caught what they did.