By the spring of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the more unexpected surges of their career. "In the Dark" was just a few months away from release — it would drop that July and send "Touch of Grey" up the charts, transforming the band's cultural footprint almost overnight. But in May, they were still a touring band in the pre-arena-explosion moment, playing outdoor venues like Frost Amphitheatre on the Stanford campus with a kind of loose confidence that comes from knowing something good is building. Brent Mydland was fully embedded in the lineup by this point, his Hammond B3 and powerful voice adding a soulful muscularity to the sound that the band had been refining since he joined in 1979. Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and the Hart-Kreutzmann drum tandem were road-hardened and sharp. Frost Amphitheatre is a beloved venue among Bay Area Deadheads — a natural hillside bowl on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto that holds the crowd close to the stage and rewards a beautiful afternoon with equally beautiful sound. There's a warmth and intimacy to shows here that the bigger sheds couldn't replicate, and the crowd that came out for these local-ish Grateful Dead appearances tended to be attentive and knowledgeable. The band clearly appreciated playing it.
The fragments we have from this show give a nice cross-section of the late-'80s Dead. "Throwing Stones," which would anchor the second set as it evolved through this era, is a Weir-Barlow composition that the band had been developing since 1986 — equal parts political urgency and anthemic release, it often set the table for a first-set closer or a second-set peak. "Iko Iko" is a pure party injection, one of those infectious crowd pleasers where Brent and Bob would trade lines and the whole band seemed to loosen up in real time. "Black Peter" is a Garcia slow-burn masterpiece, a song that lives or dies on his ability to inhabit its quiet mortality — when he's fully present, it's devastating. "Not Fade Away" in this era was still a second-set workhorse capable of churning into something hypnotic, and the "Space" that precedes it here gives you a window into where the band was willing to go on a given night. If you're exploring 1987 Dead, this show offers a tight, pre-arena-boom snapshot of a band still playing like they had something to prove. Press play and pay attention to how they navigate the transition out of Space — that's where the night reveals its character.