By the summer of 1984, the Grateful Dead were deep into one of the more underappreciated stretches of their career. Brent Mydland had by this point fully settled into his role behind the keys — no longer the new guy filling Keith Godchaux's shoes, but a full-throated, muscular presence who brought a bluesy urgency to the band's sound. Garcia's playing retained its exploratory quality while the rhythm section of Lesh, Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann locked into a tighter, harder-hitting groove than the liquid looseness of the late '70s. The Dead were playing arenas regularly now, but they still took occasional detours into more intimate or unusual settings, and City Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was exactly that kind of outlier — an outdoor venue tucked along the Susquehanna River that gave shows here a distinct, slightly surreal character. Playing an island venue in the middle of summer carries its own vibe: the air, the geography, the sense of being slightly removed from the ordinary world. That's always been good Dead territory. The three songs we have documented from this date tell an interesting story on their own. Around and Around — Chuck Berry's storming rocker that the Dead claimed as their own going back to the earliest Haight days — is always a crowd-pleaser when Weir gets his teeth into it, and by 1984 it had become a reliable engine for first-set momentum, the kind of song that gets a crowd moving before they know what hit them.
Black Peter, Garcia's slow and devastating meditation on mortality from Workingman's Dead, is a different animal entirely. A well-executed Black Peter requires patience and commitment — it lives or dies on whether Garcia lets the verses breathe and whether the band resists the urge to rush the tempo. When they get it right, few songs in the catalog hit harder emotionally. And then there's Peggy O, the gorgeous traditional ballad that Garcia sang with a kind of aching simplicity that made it feel genuinely ancient, like a song that had always existed and the Dead had simply rediscovered it. Recording information for this show is limited, and listeners may be working with an audience tape of variable quality — worth tempering expectations accordingly while still appreciating the document for what it is. But whatever the source, the interplay between Garcia and Brent on a song like Black Peter is worth seeking out, and the energy that Around and Around generates in a warm outdoor summer setting is the kind of moment that reminds you why people kept following this band around. Press play and let the island take you.