By the spring of 1984, the Grateful Dead had settled into a sturdy, if sometimes underappreciated, groove. Brent Mydland was five years into his tenure as keyboardist, and the band had developed a hard-driving arena rock sensibility that suited venues like Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, Connecticut — a mid-size hockey barn that the Dead visited periodically throughout the early-to-mid eighties as part of their reliable northeastern touring circuit. It wasn't a legendary room on the level of Cornell's Barton Hall or Madison Square Garden, but the Dead had a way of making these workmanlike coliseums feel like something more, and New Haven crowds were reliably loud and engaged. The 1984 touring year found the band playing tight, confident rock and roll, Brent's B-3 and synthesizer textures filling the spaces that Keith Godchaux's piano once occupied, with Garcia still in strong voice and clearly invested. The songs we have from this night tell an interesting story. "Around and Around," the old Chuck Berry chestnut, was a Dead staple that served as a pure shot of jubilant rock and roll energy — when it landed well, it was impossible not to feel the band grinning at each other across the stage. "Good Lovin'" in this era belonged entirely to Brent, who sang it with a gospel-inflected ferocity that made the song feel like an entirely different animal than Pigpen's more lumbering blues take.
His vocal chords and his organ lines seemed to push each other into a friendly frenzy, and the band always seemed to rise to meet him. "Cassidy," one of Bob Weir and John Barlow's most beloved compositions, brought a more reflective quality — that circling, yearning guitar figure and lyric about births and new beginnings hitting differently in the context of a Saturday night arena show. And the "Saint of Circumstance" tease or transition indicated Weir was firmly in command of a stretch of the set, that elliptical Caribbean-tinged rocker lending things a breezy momentum. Listeners should pay attention to the interplay between Garcia and Weir in the transitions, and to Brent's keyboard runs beneath "Good Lovin'" — that's where the 1984 Dead really lived. This one appears to circulate as an audience recording of reasonable quality, the kind of tape that rewards patience and rewards the listener who lets themselves settle into the room. New Haven, April 23rd — put it on and let the night do the rest.