THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Seven months after changing their name from The Warlocks, Grateful Dead were a scuffling, unsigned band searching for an identity when they played Bill Graham’s Independence Ball on July 3, 1966. That show — making its vinyl debut exactly 60 years later — captures the transformative energy of a band moving almost too fast to catch.

The performance captured on Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) was originally recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and produced for this release by Grateful Dead legacy manager and archivist Dave Lemieux. It was mastered by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering with speed correction and tape restoration by Plangent Processes.

While the Dead’s archive is legendary for its depth, complete high-fidelity documents of the band’s first year are rare. The July 3 recording — which debuted in 2015 as part of the 50th-anniversary boxed set 30 Trips Around The Sun — stands as a primary exception. It captures the group in the midst of a radical mutation, a charged R&B dance band already moving toward new musical terrain in the star-spangled ether of the Independence Ball. At the time, the band featured Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir.

The performance includes the earliest known live recordings of several songs, including rare originals like Tastebud, You Don’t Have To Ask and Cardboard Cowboy. These tracks, along with a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s Gangster Of Love, would largely vanish from the band’s repertoire by the end of the summer. One of the staples that would survive, Cold Rain and Snow, possesses a raw urgency that wouldn’t settle into its more familiar, laid-back arrangement for several years. Says Lemieux: “One of the Grateful Dead’s longest-tenured songs in their repertoire, Cold Rain & Snow was around from 1965 to 1995, played every year of the Dead’s performing career aside from 1968 and 1975. This was played when it was still in its peppier arrangement.”

“Grateful Dead are a profoundly young band on the recording of the Independence Ball,” writes Jesse Jarnow (co-host of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast and author of Heads) in the album’s liner notes. “There’s a round of applause after every song, but rarely cheers. It’s only been 14 months since The Warlocks made their live debut, and they sound it — sometimes raw, but always thrilling. And, honestly, maybe a little jittery, too… As alien as they sound from the present, the miracle of the Dead tapes from 1966 is that they’re not from alternate timelines at all, but realities that manifested into ours for the briefest of flashes.”