By the spring of 1987, the Grateful Dead had fully settled into their late-era arena identity — a band no longer playing theaters and ballrooms but filling rooms like the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts with a devoted following that had grown substantially through the mid-decade MTV-adjacent cultural moment. Brent Mydland, now eight years into his tenure as keyboardist, had long shed any awkwardness and was playing with real authority alongside Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and the Hart-Kreutzmann drum tandem. This was a band with something to prove in a different way than the '77 peak years — less about crystalline improvisation and more about sheer communal power, and when they locked in, they could still summon something genuinely transcendent. The Centrum, which opened in 1982, was a mid-sized arena that the Dead returned to periodically through the late eighties and nineties. Worcester sits at a crossroads of New England — far enough from Boston to feel like its own thing, close enough to draw a dense regional crowd of dedicated Deadheads. These New England spring runs had a particular energy to them, crowds that had waited out the winter and arrived hungry. The songs we have from this show paint an interesting picture.
"Don't Ease Me In," the old Cannon jug band number that the Dead used as a first-set opener well into this era, is a reliable crowd-pleaser — deceptively simple, pleasantly rollicking, and a useful temperature-check for how loose and comfortable the band is feeling out of the gate. "It's All Over Now," the Bobby Womack tune Weir had been hauling around since the early days, has its own rough, roadhouse charm when played with conviction. "Not Fade Away" in this period could stretch into something hypnotic or sprint by efficiently — either way it functions as a kind of rhythmic anchor, Weir's strumming locking the whole thing down. And "Crazy Fingers," pulling from Blues for Allah, is the real treat of the fragments we have here: a song that rewards Brent's harmonic sensibility and Garcia's willingness to let a melody breathe and shimmer. "Big Railroad Blues" is a first-set workhorse that tends to get the floor moving. The recording circulating from this date is generally regarded as a solid source with decent fidelity — enough to give you a real feel for the room and the band's performance. If "Crazy Fingers" is as good as that song can be in '87, this one earns a place in your rotation.