By the summer of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the more unlikely commercial surges of their career. "Touch of Grey" was just weeks away from becoming their first Top 40 hit, and the impending release of *In the Dark* would soon transform the band's audience almost overnight. But in late June, they were still very much the same road-hardened outfit that had been grinding through arenas and sheds for years — Brent Mydland now firmly settled into the keyboard chair after nearly a decade with the band, his gospel-drenched Hammond style and full-throated harmonies giving the group a harder, more muscular edge than the Keith and Donna years. Jerry's playing in this period could be remarkably focused, and the rhythm section of Garcia, Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann had a well-oiled confidence that sometimes gets undersold in how fans remember the late '80s. Kingswood Music Theatre, nestled within Canada's Wonderland amusement park north of Toronto in Ontario, was one of the more distinctive stops on the summer shed circuit of this era. Playing an outdoor amphitheater inside a theme park gives the whole affair a slightly surreal quality that suits the Dead perfectly — there's something fitting about the most adventurous band in rock setting up shop in a place literally designed around fantasy and spectacle. The venue held around 15,000 and offered the kind of open-air summer evening atmosphere that the Dead's music was practically built for.
The fragments we have from this show give a nice little cross-section of the band's working repertoire. "Loser," one of Hunter and Garcia's most haunting character studies, is always worth tracking down — when Jerry was locked in, the song could take on a desperate, cinematic weight that stopped rooms cold. "Around and Around" flowing directly into "Don't Ease Me In" is a tidy bit of old-school rock and roll sequencing, the Chuck Berry cover giving way to a traditional tune the band had been playing since the Pigpen days, and the pairing speaks to the Dead's deep pleasure in their own roots. Even in a short stretch of songs, you can hear how comfortable and lived-in this band was. Recordings from Kingswood in this era vary in quality, but even a decent audience tape captures the outdoor warmth of summer Dead in a way that has its own charm. Settle in with this one for a clean look at the band on the eve of their unlikely second act — the moment just before everything changed.