Sunday, September 1, 1968 closed Lee Conklin's BG-134 — six nights and two headline bills after it opened with Steppenwolf. The Grateful Dead finished it with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Sons of Champlin.

The middle of that bill is the part worth stopping on. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band were New Orleans traditional-jazz players, several of them well into their seventies, performing the repertoire they had been playing since the 1920s — on a psychedelic ballroom stage, beneath the Grateful Dead, under a poster whose lion would shortly become a Santana album cover. Preservation Hall itself had opened in the French Quarter in 1961 specifically to keep that music alive; by 1968 its touring band was carrying it to audiences with no memory of it at all.

For the Dead, this closing night falls in the hardest stretch of their career. *Anthem of the Sun* had cost Warner Brothers a small fortune in studio time, the band was deep in debt, and within weeks they would briefly fire two of their own members. The playing was extraordinary and the business was a catastrophe, and both were true simultaneously for most of that year.