On multiple levels, Menlo Park is ahead of San Jose in terms of Grateful Dead history. However, it’s not too late for San Jose City Hall to assert itself and get its proper due.
While aimlessly drifting around Menlo Park last week, I discovered a plaque on the building formerly known as Magoo’s Pizza in the ’60s. Far as I knew, it was still a furniture store, but I was wrong. The building was empty. Freshly painted, the storefront was covered up and transforming into a new business.
To the left of the windows, a long-overdue plaque spilled the historical significance of 639 Santa Cruz Ave. It was there, in 1965, before I was even born, that a band called the Warlocks played their first gig. As the story goes, in May of that year, the band played every week. Flyers, newspaper ads and old grainy photos of the Magoo’s storefront have floated around for years.
During that era, some of the band members, especially Jerry Garcia, were known to frequent the nearby Kepler’s Books, an epicenter for vagrant intellectuals of the day. Their regular haunts also included a few long-gone music stores in Palo Alto.
Seven months later, the band changed its name to the Grateful Dead and played its first gig with that moniker at one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests, at a house party in downtown San Jose, right where City Hall now sits. In 1965, the address of the house was 43 S. Fifth Street. In 2005, as the new City Hall was being built, several of the houses along Fifth Street were relocated, including the one that originally hosted the infamous acid test 40 years earlier.
All of which is more than well documented and sourced. Mark Purdy of the Mercury-News unearthed the history of the house, put the puzzle together and wrote the original story 20 years ago. Many others, including myself, came to the narrative much later and have tried to spread the word and raise awareness ever since.
Yet because San Jose still isn’t a city with enough real name recognition—many throughout the Bay Area still dismiss it as “the burbs”—and since San Jose politicians never seem to take these kinds of stories seriously, the first Dead show at 43 S. Fifth Street has never been acknowledged. There’s been a lot of talk, a lot of lip service, but no real action toward installing a plaque.
Despite verification from books, other sources and even the band members, if one tries to tell this story anywhere else in the Bay Area, one is met with suspicion. Especially in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, people will just not believe anything amazing has ever happened in San Jose. Hell, most San Jose natives don’t believe anything amazing has ever happened in San Jose. So, for the usual reasons—suburban apathy and political indifference—the first Grateful Dead show has yet to be rightfully marked.
It’s not too late. If Menlo Park can do it, then so can San Jose.
Next year, 2025, a few notable anniversaries will emerge. It will be 60 years since that first Warlocks show. Then, December of 2025 will mark 60 years since the band’s first show as the Grateful Dead.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you worship the Grateful Dead (I don’t) or whether you even experienced the ’60s (I didn’t). San Jose has a lot of rocking history. That’s the point. If you go anywhere else in the world, any major city, you will find plaques and statues that mark these types of stories. That’s what grown-up cities tend to do.
If San Jose really wants to be known as the “epicenter of innovation,” a place where people think outside the box to overcome obstacles, or a place with real-city politicians that get stuff done rather than burying everything in the bureaucracy for ten months, then this project should be a no-brainer. No rational adult would possibly oppose it.
A plaque notating the first Grateful Dead show would get international press. I’m not just saying that. It really would.
So, stop the talking and start the action. Let it be done.
