By the spring of 1981, the Grateful Dead had settled into what longtime fans sometimes call the "early '80s workingman's period" — a deeply committed touring band that had shed some of the exploratory sprawl of the late '70s and was playing with a leaner, more focused intensity. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Brent Mydland — who had joined in 1979 following Keith Godchaux's departure — were now a fully broken-in unit, and Brent's Hammond B3 and muscular vocals were giving the band a harder, more keyboard-forward sound than the Garcia-dominated textures of earlier years. The band was deep into a busy spring tour, moving through arenas and civic centers across the country, and the energy on these nights could be remarkably focused for a room full of thousands of people. The Veterans' Memorial Coliseum in — most likely Jacksonville or New Haven, depending on the routing, though this configuration of venue name appears in multiple markets — was a standard mid-sized arena of the kind the Dead filled comfortably in this era: not an intimate theater, but not a stadium either. These rooms reward a band that knows how to fill space dynamically, and by 1981 the Dead had the arena show down cold. The songs logged from this date give us a tantalizing window into what was on offer. "Althea," drawn from 1980's Go to Heaven, was becoming one of Garcia's finest vocal showcases of the era — a meditation on wisdom and self-deception with a supple, rolling groove that the band could stretch or tighten depending on the night's mood.
When Garcia really digs into the solo on "Althea," the song lifts into something genuinely transcendent. "The Other One" is, of course, one of the band's great psychedelic warhorses — a Weir composition that dates back to 1967 and never stopped being a launching pad for collective improvisation. In 1981, "The Other One" still carried serious weight, and a strong performance could be the axis around which an entire second set pivots. Closing the night with "One More Saturday Night" — even on a Saturday in this case, and it happened to be a Saturday — is the Dead at their most unabashedly fun, a Weir rocker that sends the crowd home grinning. If a soundboard source exists for this date, the separation between Brent's keys and Garcia's leads will be particularly rewarding. Cue up "The Other One" and let it ride.