I sat front row center at this show. I was only fourteen, with short hair, Army surplus shirt, beads, bells, bellbottoms–even so, I was there to see the Dead, not Iron Butterfly (who, at the time, I considered somewhat ‘plastic’). Before the music started, surrounded by primarily college-aged freaks, I felt acutely self-conscious, like some little flower punk crashing an older peoples’ scene (which, indeed, I was). But then The Dead burst into Love Light, Jerry Garcia only several feet before me. At one point he caught my eye and nodded to me, like one does when one sees a fellow countryman or traveler, inviting me to enter into the music, at which all my self-consciousness instantly evaporated–Jerry had SEEN me, and in nodding his head showed that he didn’t see just some little kid with short hair, none of that superficial stuff matter to him, he saw and acknowledged another member of the tribe. Up until then, no adult or older freak had treated me with such respect, and I would remain grateful for the rest of my life. As for the set: in retrospect, I wonder if The Dead, trying to figure out how they could possibly provide a Dead experience within the confines of a warm-up band space, just decided, ‘fuck it, we’ll just pretend we’ve been playing for a couple of hours, and give them one of our encores/end-shows.’