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1 Show Found

02/12/66
Youth Opportunities Center - Compton, CA

The setlist for this show is unknown. If you have a setlist for 1966-02-12, please add setlist or e-mail It.

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Comments:

I surprised no person, or fan GD fan for that matter, has commented on this being highlighted in "electric kool aid acid test". The chapter is a great attempt to provide all who care to venture, an opportunity to be part of the tests, with the unfortunateness of not being there. Born in the wrong era .... Pick up Tom Wolfe's book and gather a profound understanding of how the GD became an integral fabric of our cultural.
- (09/09/2011)


thanx bro.After that turn someone on to the wonders of nature.down by the Dancnbears ty dyesriverside.
- (02/20/2016)


WHO CAAAARRRREEEESSSSSS!!!!!!!!
-Anonymous (05/12/2016)


At the Youth Opportunities Center in Compton (near Watts), Los Angeles. This was a former automobile repair garage. Several Pranksters each dosed the Kool Aid unbeknowst to one another, leading to abnormally large doses; the "Who Cares?" woman dominates the night; Pigpen and Wavy Gravy save the day. Even the Dead were too high to play at times.
-Anonymous (05/12/2016)


Description from The Acid Test Files (http://www.nii.net/~obie1/deadcd/acid_test_files.htm), based on Wolfe and other sources: The acid test went on and soon it got to Los Angeles, where it became the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Some Pranksters, - Hugh Romney - decided to put the LSD in big Kool Aid containers, playing with the homey, innocuous drink of middle America. ... the night of the Acid Test in Watts. Imagine Watts, only a few months after the riots, on acid. All us crazy-looking middle class white kids all dressed up in weird things with goony eyes. I remember the black people in the neighborhood standing out there laughing. They found it hilarious. There was a general air of good feeling. Take a couple hundred or so freaked-out people in Watts and a a bunch of freaked-out hippies and you wouldn't know what to expect, but it was very nice. [Law: 23] The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or a new world view. [Wolfe:250] The young, and at the time cool, Tom Wolfe evokes the Los Angeles Acid Tests through the words and memories of some woman, Clair, who went there and did acid unknowingly for the first time in her life: ... [the next] was set up for Watts, on Lincoln's birthday, February 12th 1966. Watts! The very Watts where hardly five months before the freaking revolution of the blacks had broken out, the symbol of all that was catastrophic and hopeless in American life[...] politics of taking such a party into the recently stricken neighborhood, as a friendship-thing; also a humorous - ironical? site for such carryings-on. The building was a warehouse, part of a Youth Opportunities center, but still vacant[...] It was legally leased for 24 or 48 hours by Kesey's group[...] around 200 people were in attendance. When i arrived, nothing had started... people were clustered in small groups, sitting on mats and blankets around the walls. The room, the main room was huge... [50 by 25 feet]. There was also a smaller room to the east and a bathroom to the west, and the large room had a corridor running along the south wall which had open windows waist high without glass... through which the scene inside could be observed[...] Shortly there was an announcement [by Neal Cassady] that the evening would begin. Films were projected on the south wall, with a commentary... films of Furthur, the bus, the people in the bus[...] then a large trash can, plastic, was carried to the middle of the room, and all were invited to help themselves to the Kool-Aid it contained... Actually there were two cans. Romney took the microphone and said, "This one over here is for the little folk and this one over here is for the big folk. This one over here is for the kittens and this one over here for the tigers..." Then Clair drank a couple of paper cups of the Electric Kool-Aid, and suddenly dancing under a strobe light she starts laughing crazy, uncontrollably... "i looked around and people's faces were distorted... lights were flashing everywhere... the screen [sheets] at the end of the room had three or four different films at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been... the band, the Grateful Dead, was playing but i couldn't hear the music... people were dancing[...] I was afraid, because i honestly thought that it was all in my mind, and that i had finally flipped out."... At that moment with the help of some insiders she was told what was going on and she started enjoying it, the different rooms, and lights, her own perception of them... "Mostly i'd call the Acid Test a master production. Everything was carefully meshed and calculated to produce the LSD effect, so that i have no idea where the production stopped and my own head took over... I great flash of insight came to me... N can tell it is coming, the magic [eighth] hour, and Hassler gets up in a blue pageboy costume and does a funny beautiful slow dance that is just perfect... and Page is working behind him with the projectors, the film projectors and the slide projectors... and the Pranksters sit amazed and delighted and he makes slow changes, abstract patterns and projections from slides and... it all fits together... everything... About 6 am, more cops, narcos now, six in plainclothes - and one of the diehard three o'clock discoverers walks up to them and announces with a look of total acid-stoned glistening sincerity: "Listen, I've got more Awareness, more... Awareness, in my little fingernail... My Awareness is so superior to yours that... uh...", and so his face falls back in a sweet sincere look, slightly played out, and he says; "How about getting us some cigarettes? We're all out." Strangely, one of them did and returned very quickly... The L.A. sun is up, the good spades of Watts are going to work... and the Pranksters troop back into the L.A. sunlight... [Wolfe: 271-282] [283-284] The Watts Test in L.A., coming on top of the Trip Festival in San Francisco, had caused the fast-rising psychedelic thing to explode right out of the underground in a way nobody had dreamed of... This new san Francisco-L.A. LSD thing with wacked-out kids and delirious rock'n'roll, made it seem like the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among the youth - which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters."
-Anonymous (05/12/2016)


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Band Configuration
(12/04/65 - 09/24/67)

Lead Guitar: Jerry Garcia
Rhythm Guitar: Bob Weir
Bass: Phil Lesh
Keyboards: Ron "Pigpen" McKernan
Drums: Bill Kreutzmann

Note: Band configuration is across specified time period. Configuration for particular show may have differed.

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