The classic rock band Miles Davis blew off the stage in 1970: “Jaw hanging agape”
At the risk of sounding like an old professor desperately trying to relate to his students, jazz music was the original rock and roll; a grassroots scene born from hardship, rebellion, and musical innovation. Few figures of the 20th century encapsulated that fact better than Miles Davis, who could have given any rock star a run for their money.
Operating lightyears ahead of his time, Davis was already well-established within the jazz realm by the time that the beating rhythm of rock first crept over the airwaves during the late 1950s, and from his Birth of Cool era at the beginning of that decade to the wildly improvisational, psychedelic stylings of records like Bitches Brew years later, Davis never stopped evolving.
So, when the counterculture age emerged during the late 1960s, claiming to be revolutionising music and culture, it was nothing that Davis hadn’t seen before.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Miles Davis, along with fellow jazz heroes like Charles Mingus or John Coltrane, were among the few pre-established artists who were embraced by the era of hippiedom. With their own expansive, improvisational playing style, groups like the Grateful Dead, for instance, were endlessly indebted to the inspiration of Davis, and they certainly weren’t the only ones.
Such was their appreciation for the trumpeter, in fact, that the legendary San Francisco promoter Bill Graham quickly caught on, booking a series of shows that contrasted this jazz iconoclast with the newly-emerged world of hippie rock and roll. Most notably, he booked a Fillmore West show in April 1970, which saw the Grateful Dead perform on the same bill as Miles Davis.
A landmark gig which Davis himself fondly recalled as being “eye-opening” in his memoir Miles, adding that “the place was packed with these real spacy, high white people.”
Given that demographic, it was only natural that the trumpeter treat the crowd to some material from his Bitches Brew project, which invariably blew the minds of the tripped-out hippies that lay before him, many of whom had never previously been exposed to the transformative power of Davis’ performance. As the performer put it, “That really blew them out.”
Inevitably, then, the performance also blew the Grateful Dead out, and the acid-dripped band were left with the unenviable task of having to follow Miles Davis. “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage,” Dead bassist Phil Lesh recalled in Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, “I was thinking, ‘What’s the use? How can we possibly play after this?'”
Miles Davis tended to have that effect on his fellow performers: a mixture of awe and, pretty subsequently, anxiety. Such was the unbridled mastery of his performance that even the Grateful Dead, a band whose live shows were in a league entirely of their own, were forced to bow down to his obvious superiority on that particular date in 1970.
