By the summer of 1982, the Grateful Dead had settled into a muscular, road-tested configuration that sometimes gets overshadowed by the towering reputation of the '77 peak or the later '80s arena boom — but this was a band firing on all cylinders in its own right. Brent Mydland had been in the fold for three years by this point, his Hammond organ and gospel-inflected voice adding a harder, bluesier edge to the sound than the Godchaux years had offered. Garcia's playing in this period had a certain searching, deliberate quality — less flashy than a few years prior, but often more emotionally direct. The Dead were deep into their summer touring cycle, playing sheds and outdoor amphitheaters across the country, and Red Rocks was one of the crown jewels on that circuit. Red Rocks needs no defense. The natural sandstone amphitheater carved into the Colorado Front Range, fifteen miles west of Denver, is arguably the most visually spectacular rock venue in the United States, and the Dead played it with a reverence the setting demanded. The altitude, the geology, the geography — they all conspire to make performances there feel elevated, in every sense. The crowd that showed up on July 27th would have been road-hardened Colorado heads, many of them veterans of the band's long relationship with the Rocky Mountain region, and that kind of audience pulls something extra out of the musicians.
The song fragments we have on record here are tantalizing. The Other One bookending a sequence is always a sign that the band was in exploratory mode — that churning, minor-key monster is one of the great containers in the Dead's catalog, capable of expanding to hold almost anything the band wants to push through it. The appearance of a Playing in the Band Jam in the mix suggests the second set was doing the kind of dissolving and rebuilding that defines the Dead at their best. I Know You Rider is a perennial crowd favorite, a brisk, joyful vehicle that Garcia seemed to sink into with particular ease in the early '80s, and Peggy O — one of the more tender moments in any setlist — offers a lovely contrast to the psychedelic sprawl around it. It Must Have Been the Roses is a quiet beauty that rewards close listening. Circulating sources from this run tend to be solid, and if you find a clean audience or matrix tape from this night, the natural acoustics of Red Rocks do remarkable things to the stereo image. Put on headphones, close your eyes, and let the rocks do their work.