The band's soundman, Owsley "Bear" Stanley, asked electronics designer Ron Wickersham to invent a microphone splitter that fed both into the PA and the record inputs, with no loss in quality.

[3] "We're not performers, strictly speaking, and we can't manufacture intensity in a recording studio… we're musicians more than anything else" Unlike in later years, in early 1969 the contents of the Dead's set lists varied little.

They improvised the medley of "Dark Star"/"St. Stephen"/"The Eleven" several times a week, which enabled them to explore widely within the songs' simple frameworks.

The original Warner Bros. LP [#2WS 1830] included an 8.5" × 11" bi-fold insert with Celtic symbols and lyrics for "Saint Stephen", "The Eleven", and "Dark Star".

A six-and-a-half-minute edit of "Turn On Your Lovelight" was issued first on the Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders album The Big Ball in 1970, and later on Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead.

A two-and-a-half minute edit of "Dark Star" was released on the soundtrack album for Zabriskie Point, an Antonioni film for which Garcia created additional music.

[9][nb 1] In retrospect, AllMusic notes that "few recordings have ever represented the essence of an artist in performance as faithfully as Live/Dead",[5] while Grateful Dead scholar Blair Jackson regards it as the best psychedelic rock album of the 1960s.

[10] Engineer and author Michael Hageloh claims that with the album, the Dead "spontaneously create[d] the form now known as 'jam rock'" and became "legends with a generation-spanning cult following".