Grateful Dead at MIT - 1970

Super-rare poster from an epic era for the Dead as they toured colleges in the Northeast. The Dead pulled into Cambridge the day before this show and on May 6th, they played a free, performance outside the student union in support of the nation-wide student strike that took place in the days after the May 4th Kent State shootings.

During the 1969-70 academic year, student unrest about the Vietnam War was at a peak. Just three days before the scheduled MIT Spring Concert, the Kent State massacre occurred. On the same day, according to The Tech, "Well over 1,500 members of the MIT community, most of them students, voted overwhelmingly to strike 'in solidarity with the national university strike.'" The next day, the faculty met to affirm the community's desire for a strike. The ~700 professors at the faculty meeting voted (again) overwhelmingly to cancel classes.

Wednesday, May 6th was the first day of canceled classes -- the strike -- at MIT. With the Grateful Dead already in Boston, they came to MIT a day early to perform a free outdoor concert, joining in the student protest (although, cheekily, the "schedule of events" listing in that day's special issue of The Tech said: "2 pm - There will not be a free concert by the Grateful Dead today."). The band set up on the Student Center steps, with the crowd all across Kresge Oval. 

Future Grateful Dead quasi-member Ned Lagin helped bring the Dead to MIT’s campus for this show which was opened by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And Ned spent the next three days hanging with the boys, playing the world’s first video game on the university mainframe with Jerry and Phil, showing them around the labs and studios at MIT, and talking a ton about computers, electronics, and music. The Dead also attended a Ned Lagin performance in the school’s chapel.

Jerry Garcia said about the May 1970 timeframe:

“We’re going through some transitions. Our music is not what it was: it’s continually changing. What we’ve been doing in the States lately is having like ‘an evening with the Grateful Dead.’ We start off with acoustic music with Bobby and I playing guitars, light Drums and very quiet electric bass. Pigpen plays the organ. Then we have a band we’ve been travelling with, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, where I play pedal steel, not guitar, Mickey plays Drums, and three of our friends from the coast, musicians that we’ve known for a long time, are fronting the band. So we start off with acoustic muisc and then The New Riders of the Purple Sage — it’s like very snappy electric country-rock; it’s kinda hard to describe — and then we come on with the electric Dead, so it keeps us all really interesting, and it’s six hours of this whole development thing. By the end of the night it’s very high.”