On the evening of February 2, 1970, the Grateful Dead were in a pickle. They were due to play at the Fox Theatre in St Louis, Missouri, but the band’s soundman, Stanley “Acid King” Owsley, who doubled as an LSD merchant, had been thrown in jail and their equipment thrown in with him.
Scrambling around for an alternative, their frontman, Jerry Garcia, was given the number of a local music technician called Bob Heil, who ran a music store in the remote suburb of Marissa, Illinois. He had played the pipe organ at the Fox Theatre since the age of 14 and made a career designing live sound systems. “Man, what do you got?” said Garcia. “Macintosh amps, all A4 Altecs and multi-cell horns” was