By the fall of 1989, the Grateful Dead were operating as one of the most improbable success stories in American music — a band well into their third decade that had somehow become bigger than ever, filling arenas night after night on the strength of a fanbase that had grown into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Brent Mydland, now a decade into his tenure as the band's keyboardist, had fully come into his own, bringing a bluesy grit and vocal punch that gave this era a distinctly earthier feel than the polished brightness of the mid-'80s. Jerry Garcia, Bobby Weir, Phil Lesh, and the two Drummer boys — Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — were a seasoned unit, and while the year had its uneven nights, the band could still summon remarkable music when the room was right. The Meadowlands Arena in the New Jersey Meadowlands — just across the Hudson from Manhattan — was exactly the kind of cavernous, concrete sports arena the Dead had long since mastered. It wasn't intimate, but the New York-area crowd was famously devoted and loud, and the Dead had a history of rising to meet that energy. Playing the Meadowlands meant playing to a room full of people who had made the pilgrimage from the city, from the suburbs, and from much farther afield, and the anticipation in a venue like that was palpable from the first notes. What we have from this show centers on Space and Walkin' Blues, and both are worth your time.
Space, the free-form percussion and ambient improvisation sequence that typically bridged the second set's drums passage into the closing material, was one of the Dead's most genuinely unpredictable moments — Garcia and Lesh navigating pure sound alongside Mydland, building textures that ranged from eerie to transcendent depending on the night. Walkin' Blues, the Robert Johnson number Garcia began featuring as a vocal showcase, was a vehicle for his most unguarded, Delta-rooted playing. When Garcia dug into a slide or bent-note riff on that song, you could hear the full depth of his musical inheritance. Listen for the way he phrases the vocals against his own guitar lines — there's a looseness to it that the more structured Dead repertoire rarely allowed. Recording quality for 1989 Meadowlands shows varies, but whatever source you're working from here, the performances themselves are the draw. Pull this one up and let Space carry you somewhere strange before Walkin' Blues brings you back to earth.