By April 1978, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the more underappreciated hot streaks of their career. The Keith and Donna Godchaux era was in full swing, and the band had spent the previous year road-testing material that would soon appear on *Shakedown Street*, their late-1978 studio release. Jerry Garcia's playing in this period has a particular looseness and confidence — the exploratory fire of 1977's celebrated spring run hadn't faded, and the band was still stretching out with real purpose. Phil Lesh was locked in, Bob Weir was sharpening his rhythm work into something genuinely adventurous, and Keith's piano gave the whole enterprise a rolling, gospel-inflected warmth that the band would lose when the Godchaux era ended in 1979. Spring 1978 shows tend to reward careful listening precisely because the band sounds comfortable but not complacent. Cassell Coliseum at Virginia Polytechnic — what's now known as Virginia Tech in Blacksburg — was the kind of mid-sized arena the Dead worked constantly in the late '70s. Not a legendary room in the way Cornell or Red Rocks would become, but exactly the sort of road stop where the band could sink into a groove without the pressure of a marquee event.
College town audiences in this era were reliably enthusiastic, and there's something to be said for the energy a school crowd brings to a Friday-night show — hungry, attentive, and ready to follow the band wherever they chose to go. Of the songs we have documented from this show, both speak to the character of this era. "Samson & Delilah," which Weir had been performing since 1976 as a fierce opener or set-opener, is one of the harder-rocking vehicles in the repertoire — a spiritual that Weir transforms into something almost menacing, with the rhythm section hammering underneath him. When it's cooking, it sets the room on fire immediately. "Me and My Uncle," meanwhile, is a perennial Weir staple and one of the most-played songs in Dead history — a tight, efficient cowboy story that the band could deliver in their sleep but often used to launch into interesting segues, the little arrow-shaped transition that could point anywhere. The recording available for this show should be approached with the standard caveat for a non-headline venue from this period — audience tape quality can vary — but even a decent capture of the Dead in spring '78 is worth your time. Pull this one up and let the band do the rest.