By the summer of 1985, the Grateful Dead were deep into what longtime fans sometimes call the "Garcia recovery era" — a period following Jerry's diabetic coma in the fall of 1986... actually, let's be precise: in mid-1985, the band was operating in the thick of the arena-rock phase, with Brent Mydland now firmly established as the keyboard voice of the group after joining in 1979. Brent had shed the newcomer awkwardness of his early years and was playing with real authority — his Hammond B3 and grand piano work gave the band a harder, bluesier edge than the Keith Godchaux years. This was also a moment of renewed commercial visibility for the Dead; "Touch of Grey" was still two years off, but the Deadhead community was growing steadily, and summer tour was increasingly a pilgrimage-scale event. The Greek Theater at UC Berkeley is one of the great outdoor amphitheaters in the country — a genuine ancient-Greek-style stone bowl set into the Berkeley Hills, with redwoods framing the stage and the Bay Area's famously temperate evenings keeping the air just cool enough for a long night of music. The Dead had a deep relationship with this room, and the crowd that filled the terraced concrete seats for shows like this one was quintessentially Bay Area: seasoned listeners who expected the band to take chances, and who rewarded them when they did. The partial setlist we have from this night is genuinely tantalizing.
"The Other One" remains one of the most primally powerful vehicles in the entire Dead canon — a psychedelic freight train built around Bob Weir's churning rhythm work and Garcia's capacity to find the outer edges of a key and push right through them. A great "Other One" doesn't resolve so much as combust, and in 1985 the band could still summon that kind of reckless momentum. "Wharf Rat" trailing out of that sequence suggests someone in the band wanted to bring the room back down into something aching and human — it's one of Garcia's most emotionally exposed vocal performances in the catalog, a plea for grace dressed up as a character study. "Bertha" and "My Brother Esau" round out the picture of a band toggling between hard-driving rock and more reflective material. If you can track down a soundboard or matrix source for this one, the Greek's natural acoustics tend to translate beautifully — and the interplay between Garcia and Brent on a night like this is worth every minute of the search. Press play and let the hillside do its work.