By the summer of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding a wave of unlikely mainstream success. "Touch of Grey" had become a genuine hit, *In the Dark* was climbing the charts, and suddenly the band that had spent two decades as a beloved cult phenomenon found themselves playing to audiences that stretched well beyond the Deadhead faithful. Brent Mydland had now been the band's keyboardist for nearly a decade, his bluesy power and soulful voice fully embedded in the fabric of the group, and Jerry Garcia — coming out the other side of his 1986 diabetic coma scare — was playing with a renewed focus that many fans noted throughout this period. This was a band that had every reason to feel alive. Town Park, in Telluride, Colorado, represents a certain kind of Grateful Dead experience that the arena years never quite replicated — an outdoor festival setting in the Colorado mountains, the kind of high-altitude, open-sky room where the music could breathe differently than it did in a shed or a stadium. Telluride had been drawing the band and its community for years, and there's something about that Rocky Mountain setting, the thin air and the natural amphitheater of the valley, that tends to bring a looseness and warmth to these shows. The song fragments we have from this date are a compelling little window into the evening.
Opening with "Touch of Grey" feels charged with irony and timing — this was the anthem of their commercial moment, but it was also a genuinely hard-won song, and hearing it in a smaller outdoor setting rather than a massive arena gives it a different emotional weight. The run through Drums and Space offers the kind of exploratory percussion and textural drift that rewarded patient listeners, Garcia and the band finding their way back from the percussive cosmos. The second encore of "Brokedown Palace" is always worth seeking out — a gentle, hymn-like closer that Garcia delivered with uncommon tenderness in this era. "Good Lovin'" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" round out what sounds like a loose, joyful night, the latter a song that Brent's organ voicings made particularly warm and inviting by this point in the band's life. Recording details for this show are somewhat limited, but even a good audience tape from Telluride carries the ambient magic of that setting. If you've been sleeping on the summer '87 run, this is a fine place to pull up a chair and listen.