What’s that, you ask? Did Miles Davis open for the Grate­ful Dead at the Fill­more West? In what world could such a thing hap­pen? In the world of the late sixties/early sev­en­ties, when jazz fused with acid rock, acid rock with coun­try, and pop cul­ture took a long strange trip. The “inspired pair­ing” of the Dead with Davis’ elec­tric band on April 9–12, 1970, “rep­re­sent­ed one of [pro­mot­er] Bill Graham’s most leg­endary book­ings,” writes the blog Cryp­ti­cal Devel­op­ments. I’ll say. Davis had just released the ground­break­ing dou­ble-LP Bitch­es Brew and was “at some­what of an artis­tic and com­mer­cial cross­roads,” exper­i­ment­ing with new, more flu­id com­po­si­tions.

Aggres­sive and dom­i­nat­ed by rock rhythms and elec­tric instru­ments, the album became Davis’ best sell­er and brought him before young, white audi­ences in a way his ear­li­er work had not.  The band that Davis brought into the Fill­more West, com­pris­ing [Chick] Corea, [Dave] Hol­land, sopra­no sax play­er Steve Gross­man, drum­mer Jack Dejohnette, and per­cus­sion­ist Air­to Mor­eira, was ful­ly versed in this new music, and stood the Fill­more West audi­ences on their ears.

I can only imag­ine what it would have been like to see that per­for­mance live. But we don’t have to imag­ine what it sound­ed like. You can hear Davis’s set below.

In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Davis described it as “an eye-open­ing con­cert for me.” “The place was packed with these real spa­cy, high white peo­ple,” he wrote, “and when we first start­ed play­ing, peo­ple were walk­ing around and talk­ing.” Once the band got into the Bitch­es Brew mate­r­i­al, though, “that real­ly blew them out. After that con­cert, every time I would play out there in San Fran­cis­co, a lot of young white peo­ple showed up at the gigs.”

Did the Dead become a crossover hit with jazz fans? Not exact­ly, but Davis real­ly hit it off with them, espe­cial­ly with Jer­ry Gar­cia. “I think we all learned some­thing,” Davis wrote: “Jer­ry Gar­cia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been lis­ten­ing to it for a long time.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the Dead’s Phil Lesh remem­bered hav­ing his mind blown by Davis and band: “As I lis­tened, lean­ing over the amps with my jaw hang­ing agape, try­ing to com­pre­hend the forces that Miles was unleash­ing onstage, I was think­ing What’s the use. How can we pos­si­bly play after this? […] With this band, Miles lit­er­al­ly invent­ed fusion music. In some ways it was sim­i­lar to what we were try­ing to do in our free jam­ming, but ever so much more dense with ideas – and seem­ing­ly con­trolled with an iron fist, even at its most alarm­ing­ly intense moments.” You can stream the Dead­’s full per­for­mance from that night below. Think what must have been run­ning through their minds as they took the stage after watch­ing Miles Davis invent a new form of music right before their eyes.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Miles Davis Plays Music from Kind of Blue Live in 1959, Intro­duc­ing a Com­plete­ly New Style of Jazz

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Nowa­days musi­cians can reach hun­dreds, thou­sands, some­times mil­lions of lis­ten­ers with a few, usu­al­ly free, online ser­vices and a min­i­mal grasp of tech­nol­o­gy. That’s not to say there aren’t still eco­nom­ic bar­ri­ers aplen­ty for the strug­gling artist, but true inde­pen­dence is not an impos­si­ble prospect.

In the 1950s and 60s, on the oth­er hand, as pop­u­lar music attained new­found com­mer­cial val­ue, musi­cians found them­selves com­plete­ly behold­en to record com­pa­nies and radio sta­tions in order to have their music heard by near­ly any­one. And those enti­ties schemed togeth­er to pro­mote cer­tain record­ings and ignore or mar­gin­al­ize oth­ers. Pay­ola, in a word, ruled the day.

In the UK, a dif­fer­ent but no less impreg­nable order pre­sent­ed itself to the aspir­ing obscu­ri­ty. Rather than cor­po­rate inter­ests and well-bribed DJs, the BBC and British gov­ern­ment, writes the Modesto Radio Muse­um, “were increas­ing­ly hos­tile toward any com­pe­ti­tion for their radio monop­oly.” (After WWII, the British Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice main­tained a monop­oly on radio, and lat­er tele­vi­sion, broad­cast­ing in the UK.) Enter the pirates.

While the phrase now denotes a class of free­boot­ers who work from their ter­mi­nals, the orig­i­nal music pirates actu­al­ly took to the seas. The first, Radio Mer­cur, “estab­lished by a group of Dan­ish busi­ness­men” in 1958, “trans­mit­ted from a small ship anchored off Copen­hagen, Den­mark.” Mer­cur inspired Radio Nord in 1960, anchored off the Swedish Coast, then the Dutch Radio Veron­i­ca that same year.

Then, in 1962, Irish man­ag­er Ronan O’Rahilly met Aus­tralian busi­ness­man Allan Craw­ford. O’Rahilly had pre­vi­ous­ly attempt­ed to launch the career of musi­cian Georgie Fame, but to no avail. Record com­pa­nies would­n’t record him, and when O’Rahilly fund­ed an album, the BBC refused to play it—he wasn’t on their favored labels, EMI and Dec­ca. So O’Rahilly and Craw­ford con­spired to cre­ate their own pirate sta­tion, Radio Car­o­line (named after the daugh­ter of John F. Kennedy).

They pur­chased their first ship, the MV Mi Ami­go, in 1963, then set about secur­ing funds and rig­ging up the ves­sel with two 10 Kilo­watt AM trans­mit­ters and a 13-ton, 165 foot anten­na mast. Broad­cast­ing from 6am to 6pm dai­ly, Radio Car­o­line man­aged to break the BBC monop­oly (and launch Georgie Fame to… well actu­al, chart-top­ping fame). In 1965, a British Pathé film crew vis­it­ed the ship, not­ing in their nar­ra­tion that “for over a year,” Radio Car­o­line had “giv­en pop music to some­thing like 20 mil­lion lis­ten­ers,” chang­ing British pop cul­ture “with the con­nivance of almost every teenag­er in South­east Eng­land.”

The sta­tion kicked off their first broad­cast, which you can hear above, on East­er Sun­day, March 1964, with the announce­ment, “This is Radio Car­o­line on 199, your all day music sta­tion.” The very first tune they played was the Rolling Stones’ cov­er of Bud­dy Hol­ly’s “Not Fade Away” (one of the band’s first major hits). In the mid-60s pirate radio, par­tic­u­lar­ly Radio Car­o­line, helped break a num­ber of bands, intro­duc­ing eager young lis­ten­ers to The Who’s first four sin­gles, for exam­ple. (The band returned the favor by attempt­ing to give 1967’s The Who Sell Out the raw sound and feel of a pirate radio broad­cast.)

Learn more about Radio Caroline’s long and sto­ried exis­tence in the doc­u­men­tary seg­ment fur­ther up, Part 6 of DMC World’s com­pre­hen­sive The His­to­ry of DJ. The Modesto Radio Museum’s thor­ough, mul­ti­part essay series, com­plete with pho­tographs, offers a rich his­to­ry, as does Ray Clark’s book, Radio Car­o­line: The True Sto­ry of the Boat that Rocked. “The world’s most famous off­shore radio sta­tion,” is still on the air today (even though the orig­i­nal ship sank in 1980) or rather, on the web, with stream­ing pro­grams and “gad­gets and wid­gets” for Android devices, iPhones, iPads, and browsers.

It’s some­thing of an irony that they’ve end­ed up just one of hun­dreds of online stream­ing sta­tions vying for lis­ten­ers’ atten­tion, but it’s safe to say that with­out their exploits in the 60s and beyond, pop music as we know it—with all its legal and not-so-legal means of dissemination—may nev­er have spread and evolved into the myr­i­ad forms we now take for grant­ed.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Lis­ten to the Radio: The BBC’s 1930 Man­u­al for Using a New Tech­nol­o­gy

David Bowie Becomes a DJ on BBC Radio in 1979; Intro­duces Lis­ten­ers to The Vel­vet Under­ground, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie & More

“Joe Strummer’s Lon­don Call­ing”: All 8 Episodes of Strummer’s UK Radio Show Free Online

Jimi Hen­drix Wreaks Hav­oc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness