Saturday, August 31, 1968 was night two of the Grateful Dead with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Sons of Champlin at the Fillmore West, on the back half of Lee Conklin's BG-134.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band on this card is the detail that should stop anyone reading quickly. They were New Orleans traditional-jazz musicians, several well into their seventies, playing a repertoire they had been performing since the 1920s — on a psychedelic ballroom stage, beneath the Grateful Dead, under a poster whose lion would become a Santana album cover within the year. Preservation Hall had opened in the French Quarter in 1961 specifically to keep that music from disappearing; by 1968 its touring band was carrying it to rooms full of people with no memory of it.

The Dead were in the worst stretch of their career and playing some of their best music. *Anthem of the Sun* had consumed an extraordinary amount of Warner Brothers' studio time and money, the band was deep in debt and playing extraordinarily, and within weeks they would briefly fire two of their own members. Both facts were true at once for most of that year.