By the summer of 1985, the Grateful Dead had settled into a configuration and a sound that would define them for the better part of the decade. Brent Mydland, now six years into his tenure as keyboardist, had fully grown into the role — no longer the newcomer filling Keith Godchaux's shoes but a legitimate voice in the ensemble, adding a muscular, bluesy edge that pushed the band's mid-period arena sound in compelling directions. Garcia was in relatively strong form this year compared to the troubles that would shadow him later in the decade, and the band was riding real momentum into a summer that would take them to some of their most beloved outdoor rooms. The Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley was one of those rooms — a stone amphitheater nestled in the hills above the East Bay, close enough to the band's Marin County home base that it always carried something of a hometown feel. Crowds at the Greek were knowledgeable, warm, and ready to settle in, and the natural acoustics of the hillside bowl gave open-air performances a sense of intimacy that larger sheds simply couldn't match. The songs we have documented from this show offer a nice cross-section of what the Dead were doing that summer. "China Cat Sunflower" is always worth your attention — a guaranteed crowd-pleaser that, in the mid-eighties, would typically segue into "I Know You Rider," and even a partial capture of its opening sequence reminds you why it's been beloved since the late sixties.
"Saint of Circumstance," one of Weir's more underrated contributions from the Go to Heaven era, was a reliable second-set engine by this point, capable of real intensity when the band locked in. "Friend of the Devil" in its slow, elongated acoustic-influenced arrangement — the Dead had long since moved away from the original tempo — rewards patient listeners with Garcia's understated melodicism at its most tender. And the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" as an opener is exactly the kind of loose, joyful choice the band loved for early-set rock and roll moments, a reminder that beneath all the cosmic improvisation, these guys genuinely loved a good stomp. Listen for the interplay between Garcia and Mydland throughout — 1985 was a year when their musical conversation was particularly fluent. Circulating recordings of the Greek from this era tend to be quite listenable, with audience sources benefiting from that natural hillside reverb. If you've never spent a summer evening at the Berkeley Greek with the Dead, this is as close as a recording gets.