By the spring of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the most unexpected commercial surges of their career. In the Wake of the Flood was long behind them, and the band that had nearly dissolved in the early '80s had instead found a second wind — a massive, devoted new audience was showing up to arenas across the country, and the Dead were filling rooms like the Spectrum in Philadelphia with regularity. Brent Mydland, eight years into his tenure as keyboardist by this point, had fully settled into the band's fabric, and his Hammond-drenched soulfulness was giving the group a harder, more muscular edge than the softer textures of the Keith and Donna years. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir were in solid form on the road this winter and spring, and while the era gets less reverential treatment than, say, 1977 or 1972, the '87 Dead were a well-oiled machine capable of genuinely transcendent moments on a good night. The Spectrum was a familiar and beloved stop on the Dead's East Coast circuit — a 17,000-seat arena in South Philadelphia that hosted some of the band's most beloved late-era runs. Philly crowds were notoriously passionate, and the Spectrum had an energy that the band responded to. It wasn't an intimate room, but the Dead knew how to fill it.
The fragments we have from this show give a tantalizing glimpse of the evening's emotional arc. "Iko Iko" is one of those breezy, percussion-driven numbers that the Dead wore like a comfortable shirt — loose, joyful, and capable of locking into a deep rhythmic groove when the band was feeling it. "Shakedown Street" from this era often carried a sleek, almost funky confidence, Garcia's guitar cutting clean lines through Brent's rolling chords. And then there's the sequence that really rewards close listening: the Drums and Space passage followed by "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." That Dylan cover was a vehicle for some of Garcia's most plaintive, searching playing, and when it lands on the back side of a deep Space journey, the contrast can be quietly devastating — the cosmos collapsing down into a single aching melody. Listeners should pay close attention to Garcia's phrasing in "Baby Blue" and the crowd's response as the song takes shape out of the void. Whatever the recording quality, that moment is worth finding. Press play and let the second set carry you somewhere.