By the spring of 1988, the Grateful Dead were deep into one of their most commercially successful and creatively underrated stretches. Brent Mydland had fully settled into the keyboard chair he'd occupied since 1979, and his soulful, sometimes stormy presence gave the band a harder rock edge than the Keith Godchaux years. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and the two drummers — Mickey Hart, newly returned to the fold after a long absence that ended in 1975, and Bill Kreutzmann — were playing large arenas with regularity, riding a late-career wave of popularity that would crest with the stadium shows just a year or two away. The *In the Dark* album had broken them back into mainstream consciousness in 1987, and the band was still riding that momentum into the new year, playing to packed houses of devoted fans who spanned the generational gap between original hippies and college kids discovering them fresh. Hampton Coliseum had already begun to earn its reputation as one of the Dead's most beloved venues. The room seats around 13,000 and sits just off Interstate 64 in Hampton, Virginia, close enough to the mid-Atlantic corridor to draw fans from Washington, Richmond, and the Carolinas in force. Something about its acoustics and layout seemed to inspire the band — Hampton shows consistently punch above their weight, and the venue would later become famous as the site of the 2009 Phish reunion, though Dead fans had known it as a special room for years before that.
The two songs represented in the database from this show are a fine lens through which to appreciate the evening. "The Music Never Stopped" — a Weir and Barlow composition first appearing on *Blues for Allah* — is a barn-burning crowd pleaser, a first-set rocket ship that tends to ignite coliseum crowds in exactly the right way. When Brent's organ hits those big chords and the rhythm section locks in behind Weir's percussive strumming, the energy in a room like Hampton can be electric. "Truckin'," meanwhile, is one of the band's great narrative anthems, a song that sounds different depending on where the Dead are in their lives — and by 1988, they were worn but resilient, and it showed in every rendition. If a soundboard source is available for this night, the tightness of the rhythm section will be immediately apparent. Either way, cue up "The Music Never Stopped" and let Hampton do the rest.