The Independence Ball was Bill Graham's three-night stand over July 1-3, 1966, and its poster -- BG-14, by Wes Wilson, in the early formative run that was teaching San Francisco what a rock poster could be -- is one of the few early Fillmore images never reprinted. July 3 belonged to the Grateful Dead, Love, and a placeholder billed only as "Group B." On the poster the Dead sat on top, but the truth of the night is the inversion the chronicle exists to record: Love was the bigger draw. Arthur Lee's band was Elektra's first rock signing, their debut album out that March, "My Little Red Book" a charting single one month before the show. The Grateful Dead were still unsigned -- they would not sign to Warner Bros. until later in 1966, their own debut still nine months away. The future colossus of American music was, that night, effectively opening for a band history now files under "cult."

What makes July 3, 1966 extraordinary is that it was recorded. Owsley "Bear" Stanley taped the Dead's set -- the classic five-piece of Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Lesh, and Kreutzmann, before Mickey Hart, before the fame -- and it stands among the earliest surviving live Grateful Dead recordings. Tracks have surfaced over the decades on Rare Cuts and Oddities 1966 and the 30 Trips Around the Sun box, and the full recording is being issued as a standalone 60th-anniversary release dated to July 3, 2026. The band has always dated the tape to this night.