By May 1979, the Grateful Dead were settling into a new groove — literally. The Brent Mydland era had just begun, with the gregarious young keyboardist making his live debut earlier that spring after Keith and Donna Godchaux's quiet departure from the band. Brent brought a muscular, soulful energy to the keyboards that immediately changed the Dead's texture, and these early months of his tenure are fascinating documents of a band recalibrating its chemistry in real time. Jerry's playing in this period had a focused intensity to it, and the rhythm section of Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh was as locked-in as ever. This was a band in transition, but transitions with the Dead were always worth paying attention to. The Billerica Forum is not a room that shows up often in the canon — Billerica, a mid-sized town north of Boston in the Merrimack Valley, was not exactly a Dead stronghold the way Providence or Hartford could claim to be. But that relative obscurity is part of what makes a show like this interesting. The Dead played plenty of these smaller, off-the-beaten-path venues in the late seventies, and those shows often had an intimate energy that the larger arenas simply couldn't replicate. The crowd in a room like this knew they'd scored something special, and that feeling has a way of feeding back into the band's performance.
The three songs we have from this evening tell their own story. "Mama Tried" — Merle Haggard's country classic and a longtime Dead staple — was typically used as a peppy, good-natured set opener or early-set momentum builder, and by 1979 the band could rip through it with casual authority. The segue out of it into "Ship of Fools" is the real gem here: that beautiful, aching ballad, one of Jerry's most emotionally direct vehicles, arriving on the heels of a country romp creates a tonal whiplash that the Dead made look easy. "Ship of Fools" in this era could be transcendent when Jerry was in the mood, his voice carrying a weight that the song practically demands. And then there's "Space" — the drum-and-bass excursion into pure abstraction that served as a launching pad for second-set adventures throughout the band's career. Whatever came after Space on this night, you can be sure the band used it to push somewhere unexpected. Recording details for this one remain somewhat sparse, so temper your expectations accordingly — but sometimes an imperfect document of a special night is exactly what you need. Put on your headphones and let 1979 find you.