By the fall of 1987, the Grateful Dead were riding an unlikely cultural wave. "Touch of Grey" had cracked MTV that summer, In the Dark had gone platinum, and suddenly the band that had been the underground's best-kept secret for two decades found themselves playing to vastly expanded audiences. Brent Mydland, now eight years into his tenure as keyboardist, had grown into the role with genuine authority — his Hammond organ and synth patches giving the band a harder, more muscular edge than the Keith Godchaux years, and his voice a powerful foil to Garcia and Weir's. The band was tight, well-rehearsed, and energized by the commercial breakthrough, even as longtime devotees braced for the parking lot to get a lot more crowded. Shoreline Amphitheatre had opened just the year before, in 1986, right in the Dead's Bay Area backyard in Mountain View. Built on a former landfill with sight lines to the Santa Cruz Mountains, it would become one of the band's most comfortable home-turf stages — a place where the crowd crackled with local devotion and the band could stretch out with the easy confidence of playing close to home. A fall run at Shoreline in 1987 carried the warmth of that familiarity.
The fragments we have from this October 3rd date give a nice cross-section of what the Dead were offering in this era. "Throwing Stones" leading off is quintessential late-'80s Dead — Weir's political broadside built for arenas, its churning groove a vehicle for Brent to get muscular before the set opens up. "Cumberland Blues" appearing twice in the data is interesting and may reflect a set-spanning reprise or a database quirk worth investigating when you pull the recording. "Hey Pocky Way," the Meters-derived second-set staple, is always worth hearing in this period — the band locked into its syncopated pocket with Mydland's organ weaving through Weir's rhythm work. And "Turn On Your Lovelight" as a set-closing blowout is a genuine treat: by '87 it had become a call-and-response carnival, Weir leading the crowd through its stop-time breakdowns while the band vamped with the looseness of musicians who'd been playing it for twenty years. "The Mighty Quinn" as a guest slot or encore oddity adds a touch of whimsy to round things out. If you can find a soundboard or matrix source for this one, settle in for the "Space" transition and whatever comes out of it — that's where the late-'80s Dead still had the capacity to genuinely surprise you.