By the spring of 1988, the Grateful Dead were deep in what might fairly be called their arena-rock middle age — a band utterly comfortable in large rooms, drawing massive crowds on the strength of a fanbase that had been growing steadily throughout the decade. Brent Mydland was firmly settled into the keyboard chair he'd occupied since 1979, his bluesy, full-throated voice and churning organ adding a muscularity to the sound that distinguished this era sharply from the Keith Godchaux years. Garcia's guitar tone was warm and slightly compressed in the way it tended to be through the late '80s, and the rhythm section of Weir, Lesh, and the Hart/Kreutzmann drum tandem was a well-oiled machine capable of serious power on the right night. The band had released *In the Dark* the previous summer — their unexpected commercial breakthrough, complete with a genuine MTV hit in "Touch of Grey" — and the resulting surge in popularity had pushed them into some of the largest venues of their career. The Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was very much that kind of room. Sitting just across the Hudson from New York City, the Meadowlands was a cavernous sports and entertainment complex that the Dead played regularly throughout the '80s and into the '90s. It wasn't intimate, and it wasn't pretty, but it held an enormous and famously enthusiastic Tri-State crowd that brought serious energy to Dead shows.
A good night at the Meadowlands had a particular electricity to it — the parking lot scene alone was legendary — and by 1988 the band knew exactly how to work a room that size. From the songs in our database for this show, we have "Me and My Uncle," the John Phillips country-ish nugget that became one of the Dead's most reliable first-set openers across several decades. It's the rare song that almost never overstayed its welcome — a tight, bright kickoff that got the room moving and showed off Weir's easy cowboy swagger. A crisp version here would have set a confident tone for whatever followed. Details on the recording source for this date can vary, but the Meadowlands was a venue the tape-trading community covered well, and board recordings from the late-'80s Dead runs in the New York area tend to capture the full weight of the band's sound. If you're curious about the band in their commercially ascendant, arena-conquering 1988 form, this is a fine place to start listening.