By February 1989, the Grateful Dead were operating at a level of commercial success that would have seemed almost surreal a decade earlier. Brent Mydland had been the band's keyboardist for nearly a decade at this point, his bluesy, full-throated voice and churning Hammond B3 work fully woven into the fabric of what the Dead had become — a stadium and arena act drawing massive crowds while still, on the right nights, finding that old strange magic in the spaces between the songs. This was the winter leg of what would be a relentlessly busy year, the band touring hard and playing big rooms across the country. The cultural moment was interesting, too: the Dead had crested into a kind of mainstream visibility with "Touch of Grey" a couple years prior, and the Forum shows were drawing that new generation of fans alongside the faithful who'd been there since the Acid Tests. The Great Western Forum in Inglewood was about as big and impersonal as arenas get — the house that the Lakers built, a cavernous bowl designed for spectacle rather than intimacy. The Dead played it regularly through the late '80s and into the '90s, and while it never quite matched the warmth of the Warfield or the outdoor magic of Greek Theatre shows just up the road, the Forum crowds brought their own electric energy. Los Angeles Dead fans were a devoted and vocal bunch, and a February weeknight could still generate the kind of sustained roar that pushed the band to reach a little further.
The songs represented here offer a nice cross-section of what a late-'80s Dead night felt like. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" — the Dylan cover the band had been playing since 1973 — was by this era often a vehicle for genuine emotional weight, with Brent's voice lending it a gospel fervor that the song almost demands. "West L.A. Fadeaway," one of the sharper tunes from the 1987 album In the Dark, fit the setting almost too perfectly: a rolling, bluesy romp about the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, played in Los Angeles. And "Beat It on Down the Line" — the Jesse Fuller cover that had been a Dead staple since their earliest days — was a first-set engine, a short burst of raw energy that audiences never seemed to tire of. If you can get your hands on a clean source from this night, pay close attention to Brent's organ lines weaving under Garcia's leads. The interplay between those two voices, acoustic and electric, is the heartbeat of this era — and on a good night, it could stop you cold.