By the spring of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding a wave of renewed cultural visibility that few could have predicted for a band already two decades into their run. "In the Dark" was taking shape in the studio and would drop that summer, bringing with it the unlikely Top 10 single "Touch of Grey" and a whole new audience pouring through the arena doors. Brent Mydland had by this point fully settled into the keyboard chair he'd occupied since 1979, and the band's sound reflected his bluesy, gospel-tinged presence — muscular and a bit harder-edged than the Keith Godchaux years, with Garcia's guitar finding a reliable foil in Brent's churning Hammond work. This was prime arena-era Dead: big rooms, big crowds, and a band that knew how to fill them. Meadowlands Arena in the New Jersey Meadowlands was exactly that kind of room — a cavernous 20,000-seat hockey barn that the Dead returned to repeatedly through the '80s and into the '90s. It sat just across the Hudson from New York City, which meant the crowd was reliably amped, East Coast energy dialed up to eleven. The Dead's New York-area runs always carried a particular electricity, drawing the dense Deadhead community from throughout the tri-state region, and the spring '87 stop at Meadowlands would have been no different.
From this show we have "Touch of Grey" and "Box of Rain" in the database — two songs that couldn't be more different in texture and emotional weight, yet both sit near the center of what the Dead were about. "Touch of Grey" was on the verge of becoming their signature song to a mainstream audience, but in the live setting it was already a rousing opener or set-closer, Garcia's voice carrying a hard-won optimism that only someone who'd survived what he had could deliver convincingly. "Box of Rain," Phil Lesh's gentle elegy written for his dying father, remained one of the most quietly devastating songs in the catalog — when it landed in a setlist, it tended to stop time. Recordings from Meadowlands in this era vary in quality, but the venue's size and the era's generally solid taping community mean there's a reasonable chance of a listenable audience or matrix source floating around. Whatever you can find, pay attention to Brent's fills and the crowd's response — this was a band on the edge of something, and you can feel it in the room. Press play and see if you don't agree.