By the fall of 1985, the Grateful Dead had settled into the muscular, arena-ready configuration that would carry them through the rest of the decade. Brent Mydland, now six years into the keyboard chair, had fully shed any trace of awkwardness and was pushing the band with a bluesy, Hammond-driven intensity that suited their increasingly hard-rocking direction. Jerry Garcia, despite the personal struggles that would soon catch up with him in a frightening way, was still capable of extraordinary nights, and the band as a whole was playing with a certain confidence born of long experience on the arena circuit. The fall '85 tour found them working through the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, reliable Dead country where audiences brought serious heat. Richmond Coliseum sits in Virginia's capital, a mid-sized arena that the Dead visited periodically through the '80s. It's not a legendary room the way Winterland or Cornell's Barton Hall are, but the Southeast and upper South were fertile ground for the Dead's touring operation by this point — crowds that had grown up on the music and came ready to dance. There's something to be said for a band playing a room that neither dwarfs them nor confines them, and the Coliseum sits comfortably in that zone.
The songs in the database here offer a compelling slice of what made mid-'80s Dead worth paying attention to. "Samson & Delilah" was a Garcia-era war horse drawn from the traditional gospel-blues well, the kind of opener that announced the band meant business — that shuffling, thunderous groove was Brent and Mickey and Bill locked in. "Stagger Lee" was a relatively recent addition to the canon at this point, a straight-up electric blues burner that gave Garcia room to dig in and get nasty. And "Little Red Rooster" — especially when preceded by a segue out of "Gimme Some Lovin'" — is exactly the kind of stop-time slow blues that the band could ride for days, with Garcia bending strings against Brent's churning organ in ways that recall the best moments of the Pigpen era filtered through a harder-edged sensibility. That "Gimme Some Lovin' >" segue in particular is worth zeroing in on: how the band navigates that transition tells you a lot about where their heads were that night. Recording quality on Richmond '85 shows varies, so check the source notes before diving in — but whatever you're working with, let the rhythm section pull you in and follow Garcia's lead. This is the Dead at a moment worth understanding.