By the summer of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the more unlikely commercial waves of their career. "Touch of Grey" was climbing the charts, *In the Dark* would be released just days after this show, and the band was drawing enormous festival-style crowds to outdoor sheds and stadiums across the country. Brent Mydland had been behind the keyboards for nearly a decade at this point, his bluesy, muscular playing having long since settled into the fabric of the band's sound. This is a Dead that could fill a stadium and often did — for better or worse, depending on who you ask. The tradeoff between the intimacy of the old ballroom years and the sheer power of a band playing to tens of thousands was never more present than in this era. Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts was the home of the New England Patriots at the time — a concrete bowl built for football, not exactly the most forgiving acoustic environment the Dead ever played. But there was something fitting about the Fourth of July in New England: the regional pride, the summer heat, the patriotic pageantry that the Dead could never quite resist embracing in their own oblique way.
The Boston-area fanbase was always passionate, and a holiday show in an outdoor stadium would have drawn a massive, celebratory crowd, the kind of audience whose energy could push the band into inspired territory or simply make the whole thing feel like a party. From what we have in the database, the Queen Jane Approximately and Wharf Rat fragment is enough to suggest where the emotional center of this show might have been. Queen Jane, the Dylan cover the Dead made their own through decades of performance, tends to bring out a reflective, yearning quality in Garcia's playing — when he's locked in, the song opens up into something genuinely searching. And Wharf Rat is the kind of centerpiece that can define an entire night. Garcia's reading of that battered, hopeful narrator — August West trying to make good — could hit with devastating force in the right moment, and a great Wharf Rat often signals that the band found something real in the second set. The recording quality for this show will depend on what source you're working from, and circulating tapes from stadium shows of this era vary considerably, but a good matrix or board source can capture the full dynamic range of the band even in a football stadium. Pull this one up if you're curious about the Dead at the peak of their late-'80s commercial moment — and stay for that Wharf Rat.