By the fall of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding one of the more unlikely second winds in rock history. "Touch of Grey" had cracked the mainstream that summer, *In the Dark* was selling in numbers the band had never seen, and suddenly arenas that had been half-filled a few years earlier were packed to the rafters with a new generation of fans mixing in with the lifers. Brent Mydland was deep into his stride as the band's keyboardist — his bluesy, muscular playing lending a harder edge to the sound than the Keith Godchaux years — and Jerry Garcia, for all his well-documented personal struggles, was capable of nights of real fire during this period. The fall '87 tour caught the Dead at a fascinating pivot point: beloved by a devoted cult for two decades, now suddenly famous in a way that felt genuinely strange to everyone involved. The Providence Civic Center was a workmanlike New England arena that the Dead visited reliably during their northeastern swings. Providence itself has always been good Dead territory — a compact, scrappy city with a college-town energy that tended to produce engaged, knowledgeable crowds. This wasn't the mystique of a Barton Hall or the grandeur of Radio City, but the Civic Center had decent acoustics for an arena of its size and a crowd that knew what it was there for.
The fragments we have from this show hint at an interesting sequence. "Throwing Stones" leading directly into another number is classic late-era second-set architecture — Barlow's dystopian lyric building to Garcia's aching resolution before the band pivots somewhere unexpected. The "Mighty Quinn" cover (the old Bob Dylan number that the Dead adopted into their rotating bag of surprises) always signals a lighter moment, a crowd-pleasing breather, and tends to bring a certain looseness to the playing. "Gimme Some Lovin'" meanwhile — the Spencer Davis Group classic — was a Brent showcase in this era, and when Mydland dug into it, it could be genuinely electrifying, his voice rawer and more soulful than anything the Dead had brought to that kind of material before. What to listen for here: how the band navigates the tonal shift between the weighty political thunder of "Throwing Stones" and the more celebratory material that follows, and whether Brent's voice has that particular ragged authority on the big moments. A late-'80s arena show like this may not be your desert island pick, but on the right night Providence delivered — and this one is worth finding out for yourself.