Fifty years after the Grateful Dead played Knights Hall at what was then Bellarmine-Ursuline College, a communication professor is organizing an event to celebrate the show.
On Wednesday, February 27, Dr. Kyle Barnett will host DJ and music writer
Jesse Jarnow for a conversation about the December 7, 1968, show. The event is at 6 p.m. in Hilary’s,
on the middle level of Centro. [
campus map]
They’ll play
audio from the 1968 show and be joined by some Dead fans who were in Knights Hall that night. Attendees will receive a limited
quantity reissue of the original concert poster.
"We want to use it to open up a larger conversation about Bellarmine and Louisville’s cultural scene in the late 1960s,” said Barnett. “I think that the show and the era, even with its excesses, can point to what else we might do as
a campus and a city. What haven’t we imagined? What could we be? The show stands as a kind of a surprise in Bellarmine’s own history that reminds us that are these bits of our own history that allow us to imagine a different Bellarmine,
a different Louisville moving forward.”
Jarnow is a music writer who hosts a program on WFMU, an independent radio station broadcasting in New York. His work has appeared in The London Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, and other publications. He’s the author of “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic
America.”