By the fall of 1988, the Grateful Dead were operating at a different altitude than they had known just a few years prior. The summer of that year had seen the release of *In the Dark*, their surprise commercial breakthrough, and "Touch of Grey" was still radiating out across the cultural landscape, pulling in waves of new fans to arena floors that were getting harder and harder to squeeze into. Brent Mydland was firmly established as the band's keyboardist, his muscular Hammond style adding a rock and soul urgency that distinguished this era from the elegance of the Keith Godchaux years. The band was touring relentlessly and playing to some of the biggest crowds of their career, which brought its own energy — and its own challenges in sustaining the intimacy that made Dead shows sacred. The Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., was a reliable stop on the East Coast touring circuit throughout the 1980s. A standard-issue NBA and NHL arena, it wasn't a legendary room in the way that, say, the Spectrum in Philadelphia carried mystique, but the D.C. area crowd was always passionate, and the band seemed to respond to the region's intensity. The Capital Centre could be electric on the right night, and late summer runs through the Mid-Atlantic states often found the band playing with a looseness that suggested they were hitting their stride after months on the road. What we have from this September 2nd show gives you two distinctly different emotional colors.
"New Minglewood Blues" is one of the band's great engines — a raucous, rocking first-set opener that lets Garcia and Weir stretch out and spar, with Brent pushing hard from behind the keys. It's the kind of song that tells you immediately whether the band is locked in and hungry. Then there's "Black Muddy River," a song of an entirely different temperament — one of Garcia's most quietly devastating ballads, drawn from *In the Dark*, a meditation on age and acceptance that takes on different weight depending on how present Garcia seems in the moment. A great "Black Muddy River" can stop a room cold. And of course, no Dead show is complete without the percussion odyssey of "Drums," that space-within-a-space that gave Hart and Kreutzmann room to take the audience somewhere purely elemental. The recording quality will determine how deep you can get into the nuance, but even a decent source will let you feel the shape of the night. Put "Black Muddy River" on and pay attention to what Garcia does with the silence between phrases — that's where the magic lives.