By April 1983, the Grateful Dead were a band fully settled into their arena-rock identity, and the results were often more muscular and propulsive than the exploratory sprawl of earlier years. Brent Mydland had been in the fold since 1979, and his Hammond organ and piano work had by now become genuinely integrated into the band's vocabulary — adding a harder, more bluesy edge that suited the bigger rooms they were playing. Jerry Garcia's guitar tone in this period had a bright, cutting quality, and rhythm section anchors Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann (with Mickey Hart back in the fold since 1975) gave the band a physical heft that filled coliseums. This spring 1983 run captures a band that was tight, professional, and capable of some genuinely fiery moments when the night caught fire. Veterans' Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon was a reliable Pacific Northwest stop for the Dead throughout their arena years — a workmanlike concrete bowl that the Dead's loyal Oregon fanbase consistently filled with a passionate crowd. Portland never needed convincing when it came to the Grateful Dead, and the Coliseum, whatever its acoustic limitations, had a way of generating real electricity when the band was on.
The songs we have from this date tell an interesting story about where the evening went. "Samson and Delilah," the old Reverend Gary Davis spiritual the band adopted as a Bob Weir set-opener in the mid-'70s, is a natural crowd igniter — heavy, declarative, and built on a groove that lets the band lock in together right from the jump. The real centerpiece documented here, though, is the transition into the "Drums" and "Space" sequence, specifically the fragment of "Slipknot!" that appears before dissolving back into percussion. "Slipknot!" — the abstract, modular jam that grew out of "The Music Never Stopped" territory and became a gateway to "Franklin's Tower" in the classic '77 era — is a rarer and more treasured commodity by 1983, and any fragment of it is worth your attention. The way the band moves between rhythmic structure and pure atmospheric drift in the Drums > Space portion of any show from this era is a kind of Dead science unto itself, and Kreutzmann and Hart were still capable of genuinely hypnotic stretches. Recording information for this date is limited, but if you've found your way to this show, give it a spin for that "Slipknot!" glimpse alone — it's exactly the kind of buried gem that makes digging through the archive so rewarding.