By the fall of 1979, the Grateful Dead had settled into a configuration and a groove that many fans consider one of their most consistently satisfying. Brent Mydland had joined earlier that year, replacing Keith Godchaux, and his Hammond B-3 and gospel-inflected vocals gave the band a harder, bluesier edge that suited the arenas they were increasingly playing. Jerry Garcia's guitar tone was deep and liquid, Phil Lesh was pushing the low end with authority, and the band as a whole was playing with a focused intensity that sometimes got overshadowed by the more celebrated peaks of '77 but deserves just as much attention. This November run found them in peak touring form, road-hardened and tight. The Spectrum in Philadelphia was one of the great Dead venues of the arena era — a hockey rink that the band returned to again and again throughout the late seventies and eighties. Philly crowds had a reputation for being loud, partisan, and deeply knowledgeable, and the room itself had decent acoustics for a big barn. Playing the Spectrum meant the Dead were operating in full arena mode, which in 1979 meant a polished but still adventurous show, capable of real moments of surprise within a format that had grown more structured since the freewheeling early seventies.
The fragments we have from this date are intriguing in themselves. "Deal" is one of the great Garcia showcase vehicles, a driving, confident romp through some of his best single-string lead work — when Garcia was on and the tempo was locked in, "Deal" could be absolutely electric. "Me and My Uncle" was a Dead perennial, a cowboy story in the Haggard-meets-Merle-Travis mold that the band used as a reliable opener or transition piece for years, and its clipped efficiency makes it a reliable indicator of how locked-in the rhythm section is on any given night. And then there is "Space" — the free-form percussion and sound exploration that Jerry and Mickey presided over, which in 1979 could range from genuinely cosmic to pleasantly disorienting. Brent's arrival changed the texture of Space considerably, adding new keyboard colors to the exploratory palette. Whether you are listening on soundboard or a good audience tape, pay attention to how Brent and Jerry interact — 1979 was still early in their partnership, and you can hear them figuring each other out in real time, which makes every show from this period a kind of document of a band in productive evolution. Worth your time.