The Grateful Dead will forever be associated with San Francisco, the epicenter of the ’60s hippie movement in which the band did indeed play a prominent role during its less-than-two-year stay at 710 Ashbury St.

But the first official Grateful Dead show was actually performed some 65 miles south of Haight Ashbury in San Jose on Dec. 4, 1965. It’s a relatively little-known fact, which isn’t all that surprising given the amount of times that this legendary psychedelic rock group — which was actually born in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area — has been marketed as a “San Francisco band.”

That could change on Dec. 4 when City of San Jose officials plan to finally unveil a plaque at City Hall — 60 years after that historic first Grateful Dead concert took place — celebrating the connection between the Bay Area’s most populous city and the most-famous jam band of all time.

“This is about more than commemorating a concert — it’s about recognizing San Jose’s pivotal role in music history,” said Dan Orloff, founder and “chief rock officer” of San Jose Rocks, the nonprofit organization spearheading the plaque campaign. “This is where the Grateful Dead first played under that name, and this plaque will ensure that story lives on for generations.”

The ceremony, announced today, will see city officials place the plaque outside on the south-facing wall of the City Council Chambers building — near where the first Grateful Dead show went down in a home located at 38 S. Fifth Street. The dedication ceremony, which includes speakers and entertainment, begins at 4:45 p.m. and is open to the public. For more information, visit sanjoserocks.org.

The event has been a decade in the making by the San Jose Rocks team — namely, Orloff and fellow music lover Mark Purdy, a now-retired longtime Bay Area News Group sports columnist.

Purdy sees this project as another important step in helping people recognize the roles that cities not named San Francisco played in creating Bay Area music history.

“It’s amazing to me how much of San Francisco music didn’t start in San Francisco,” says Purdy, whom Orloff calls San Jose Rock’s “chief fact-finding officer.”

For instance, those beginnings include: Creedence Clearwater Revival (started in El Cerrito), the Doobie Brothers (San Jose), Jefferson Airplane (huge ties to San Jose, Santa Clara and Palo Alto), Sly and the Family Stone (Vallejo) and Moby Grape (ties to San Jose).

“I get it — San Francisco was the postcard city and where the bigger venues were located,” Purdy says. “But if you learn the history, certainly more than half of the bands — I would say 75 percent — started outside of San Francisco.”

And that’s certainly the case with the Grateful Dead, which can trace its origin back to a Palo Alto-based outfit known as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.

The Dead, as music fans would come to know it — with vocalist-guitarist Jerry Garcia, vocalist-guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, vocalist-keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and bassist Phil Lesh — really took flight in mid-1965, playing its first gig under the name of The Warlocks at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park.

Yet, Lesh — who did not attend that first show — soon discovered that there was already at least one other band named The Warlocks. (Interestingly, another future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act from the same era — the Velvet Underground — also got its start as The Warlocks).

So, the group chose a new name — the now iconic Grateful Dead moniker — just in time to play that Dec. 4 gig at a 19th-century Victorian house on a San Jose lot that is now home to City Hall.

The Dead debut doubled as the first real public “Acid Test,” a series of parties built around the collective use of the psychedelic drug LSD. These events — captured so vividly in the 1968 Tom Wolfe book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” — were hosted by “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey and his famed Merry Pranksters brigade.

They came to San Jose to host a large-scale public Acid Test, following a smaller debut event held about a week earlier at a home in Soquel. The hope was to capitalize on the foot traffic surrounding the two big Rolling Stones concerts happening just down the street at the San Jose Civic on Dec. 4.

“Think about that — you had the Grateful Dead’s first show on the same night when the Rolling Stones were playing five blocks away,” Purdy comments.

Kesey’s crew merrily handed out flyers asking, “Can you pass the acid test? — and directing people to 38 S. Fifth St. if they wanted to give it a try. (LSD was still legal at that point.) There is only one known surviving copy of that flyer, according to Orloff, and it will be on display at City Hall during the Dec. 4 event.

“We are going to return that (flyer) to where it was 60 years ago,” Orloff says.

The flyer may be there, but the house definitely won’t. That historic house that stood at 38 S. 5th St. — which was long thought to have been destroyed in a fire — was actually moved to 390 N. 4th St. to make room for the creation of the City Hall facility.

Yet, music lovers can now make plans to visit the site, and what they’ll soon see is a plaque commemorating one of the key moments in Bay Area music history.

“San Jose owns a very significant piece of the Grateful Dead’s story,” Purdy says. “This is the true and exact 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead. That’s very cool and worth celebrating.”

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