By the spring of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding a remarkable wave. "In the Dark" was still months away from its July release, but the band had been road-testing new material and recalibrating their live presentation after years of fluctuating momentum. Brent Mydland, now firmly in his eighth year with the band, had grown into his role with a muscular confidence — his Hammond B3 and synth work giving the Dead a harder, more defined edge than the Donna Godchaux years, and his voice adding genuine grit to the ensemble harmonies. Garcia was engaged, Jerry Garcia Band activity was keeping his chops sharp, and this was, by most fan accounts, a period where the band could still summon genuine transcendence on any given night. The mid-'80s arena era had its skeptics, but the band was packing houses and delivering, and a spring run through the Midwest was exactly the kind of road work that kept them tight. The UIC Pavilion — on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago — was a mid-sized arena that the Dead returned to periodically throughout the '80s. Chicago was always a strong Dead market, a city with a devoted and loud fanbase that pushed the band and fed back into their energy onstage. The Pavilion holds somewhere around ten thousand people, intimate enough for the band to feel the room, large enough to generate the kind of communal roar that the Dead fed off of.
The songs we have from this show are well-chosen windows into the performance. "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" — one of the oldest pieces in the repertoire, with roots going back to the jug band days — was almost always a crowd-pleaser and a second-set vehicle for loosening things up before a closer. The arrow pointing to a transition suggests there's momentum coming off it, which is always a promising sign. And when the Dead rolled into "Sugar Magnolia" to close things out, you knew the crowd was going home happy. It's one of the great send-offs in rock and roll — Weir in full throttle, the band locked in, "Sunshine Daydream" floating in like a benediction. Whether you're coming to this one via a soundboard source or a well-placed audience tape, the thing to listen for is how the band navigates that "Goin' Down the Road" transition — what they reach for in those passing moments, and whether Garcia's tone is singing the way it could on a good Chicago night. Press play and find out.