One from the Vault is a live album by the Grateful Dead, recorded on August 13, 1975, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California, for a small audience of radio programmers. Three weeks later, the concert was broadcast nationwide on FM radio through Metromedia, after which the radio show was widely traded by fans on cassettes, and sold in bootleg LP versions under various titles including Make Believe Ballroom, becoming the most widely circulated Grateful Dead bootleg. The concert marked the first time that the album Blues for Allah was performed live in its entirety, along with eight other songs. Retrospectively, Rolling Stone magazine lists the concert as one of 20 "essential" live concerts by the Grateful Dead. A high quality version of the concert was released on April 15, 1991, on Grateful Dead Records, presented on two CDs. It was the first complete concert recording released commercially by the band. A remastered three-LP vinyl version was released in 2013. Background In 1974 and 1975, Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia played a dozen times at Great American Music Hall (GAMH) with Merl Saunders. The venue held 400 patrons, and was much smaller than the arenas or stadia at which the Grateful Dead usually appeared. In August 1975, the Dead had just finished recording the album Blues for Allah when they decided to perform it for a select audience in a live setting, a month before the LP was to be released. To promote the album, the band rented GAMH, and issued private invitations to radio industry people who were attending the Radio Programmers Forum, a convention hosted in San Francisco by Billboard magazine. This was only the third time the band had played in public in the last 18 months. Production A day ahead of the concert, the band's audio engineer Dan Healy hired a powerful sound system from McCune Sound Services to augment the house sound. Outside of GAMH, Wally Heider parked his remote recording truck, and prepared 16-track professional tape recorders to capture the music. As the band was setting up on stage for soundcheck on August 12, percussionist Mickey Hart requested that the chirping of live crickets should be heard during the final song. The only place where such a quiet sound could be separated from the band's loud performance was in the basement, so a box of live crickets was carried down, and