On Monday, July 7, 1969, the Grateful Dead played a free concert in Piedmont Park in Atlanta -- their first-ever show in the city. It was a thank-you: Alex Cooley and the organizers of the first Atlanta International Pop Festival, held three days earlier, staged a free concert in the park for the acts and fans who had stayed in town, in what Cooley later described as "simple hippie guilt at making a few-thousand-dollar profit." The Grateful Dead had not played the festival itself, which made their appearance in the park a genuine event. Chicago Transit Authority, Delaney & Bonnie, Spirit, and the Atlanta locals the Allman Brothers Band were all in the park that long day, which ran from afternoon into night through a thunderstorm and a power outage.

The Dead's surviving soundboard runs about a hundred and thirteen minutes and carries one of their great 1969 sequences -- Morning Dew; Mama Tried into High Time into Casey Jones; and then a Dark Star into St. Stephen into The Eleven into Lovelight suite of some eighty-five minutes. It is a foundational document of the band's arrival in a Southern city that would become important to them.

There is a legend attached to this night: that Gregg and Duane Allman sat in with the Dead on "Lovelight," making it the first meeting of the two bands. The most rigorous Deadhead scholarship rejects it -- the surviving tape does not bear it out, and the story appears to be a back-formation from a genuine, well-documented Dead-Allmans jam at the Fillmore East in May 1970. What is true, and evocative enough on its own, is that both bands were in the same Atlanta park on the same day for the first time.