By the fall of 1983, the Grateful Dead had settled into the muscular, keyboard-driven sound that defined their early arena era. Brent Mydland, now four years into his tenure as the band's keyboardist, had fully shed any newcomer awkwardness and was contributing some of his most assertive playing — his Hammond organ work lending a gospel-tinged weight to the band's improvisations that stood apart from anything Keith Godchaux had brought to the table. Jerry Garcia's tone during this period carried a certain dark, compressed urgency, and the rhythm section of Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart was locked in with the kind of road-hardened confidence that comes from two hundred nights a year on the bus. This was the Dead deep in their fall touring cycle, playing the mid-sized coliseums and arenas of the American South and East, the kind of workmanlike swing through secondary markets that produced some of the era's most underappreciated recordings. Richmond Coliseum was exactly that kind of room — a functional mid-capacity arena in Virginia's capital city, not the stuff of legend like Cornell's Barton Hall or San Francisco's Winterland, but a solid venue that the band visited periodically throughout the arena years. Richmond crowds tended to be enthusiastic regional faithful, and the Southeast corridor shows from this era have a warmth and looseness to them that rewards patient listening. The one song confirmed in our database from this night is Spoonful, and that alone is worth sitting up for.
The old Howlin' Wolf tune, filtered through the Dead's psychedelic blues sensibility, was a vehicle for deep, churning improvisation whenever it appeared — which wasn't often. Spoonful was never a setlist staple, which means its appearances carry extra weight, and a 1983 version with Brent at the keys has an almost swampy, menacing quality to it. Garcia's slide-inflected phrasing on the blues material in this era could be genuinely stunning, and Lesh's low-end presence in a song like Spoonful gives the whole thing a rumbling, subterranean feel. Listen for the way the band navigates the open space between verses — that's where the magic lives. Recording quality for Richmond Coliseum shows from this period varies, but there are listenable audience sources floating around the archive from this tour leg. Whatever you're working with, Spoonful alone makes the dig worthwhile. Press play and let the blues pull you under.