Welcome to Dead Notes #9. In early 1969 we find our bohemian freaks spaced out on STP and nitrous oxide, holed up behind a 16-track recording console working on their palindromic 3rd album, Aoxomoxoa. The sessions are described as "a little weird to very weird" and the blossoming partnership between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter results in lyrics so obscure and far-out that the resulting album is split between fan favorites and inaccessible cuts that only the deepest heads could fully appreciate. In the middle of January the band are guests on Hugh Hefner’s short-lived, yet too-corny-to-be-cool, program Playboy After Dark. With their merry band of rogues in tow, including acid king and benefactor-cum-soundman Owsley Stanley - who made it his personal mission to dose Hugh Hefner’s Pepsi - the party goers loosen their ties and tops while Garcia strums the lysergic chords of “Mountains of the Moon”. Days later the band’s crew is stumbling up the steep stairs of the Avalon Ballroom, arms filled with equipment, to begin a month’s worth of recording for their seminal release Live/Dead.
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