Saturday, August 30, 1969 closed the Grateful Dead's two-night stand at the Family Dog on the Great Highway, with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody and the Rubber Duck Company.

The New Riders at this point were effectively a Grateful Dead side project — Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel behind John Dawson and David Nelson — and putting both bands on one card is the clearest sign of where the Dead were heading in 1969, toward the country-inflected records they made the following year. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen brought western swing and rockabilly to the same bill. The whole card is a long way from 1967.

The room was Chet Helms's last. He had lost the Avalon at the end of 1968 and reopened in June 1969 at 660 Great Highway, out at Ocean Beach in a building from the old Playland amusement complex — as far west as it is possible to go and still be in San Francisco. It lasted about sixteen months.

One catalog note that matters: FD-690829 covers this night and the one before it, but **the same catalog covers a night they did not play**. August 31 at the same hall was a local-bands night — Gravity, Transatlantic Railroad, Devil's Kitchen and the S.F. Radical Lab's Moog Synthesizer. Reading the catalog as the run would put the Dead on a stage they were not on.