music friday: fillmore west, january 3, 1969

The Fillmore West, 51 years ago today. Opening was Spirit, who had just released their second album, which included this, their greatest hit:

Blood, Sweat & Tears were also touring behind their second album, but they might as well have been a new group with a debut record. After their classic Child Is Father to the Man, Al Kooper and two others left the group. The most important replacement was singer David Clayton-Thomas, who wrote "Spinning Wheel" among others. Some of us lost interest after Kooper left, but with Clayton-Thomas, BS&T became one of the biggest hit makers around.

The Grateful Dead also had two albums out, the most recent of which, Anthem of the Sun, was more psychedelic than their debut. (Their third album, Aoxomoxoa, took this several steps further.) A couple of weeks after this gig, they appeared on Hugh Hefner's TV series Playboy After Dark. We'll let Bill Kreutzmann tell the story: