By March 1993, the Grateful Dead were deep into the final chapter of their long strange trip, with Vince Welnick having settled in at the keyboards following Brent Mydland's death in 1990. The band was still a massive touring operation, filling arenas across the country with a new generation of Deadheads who had come of age in the era of "Touch of Grey" and the stadium shows of the late '80s. Welnick brought his own earnest energy to the keyboard chair, and while purists sometimes debated his fit within the band's sonic fabric, these early-'90s shows could still crackle with genuine electricity when the band locked in. Jerry Garcia, despite the well-documented health struggles that had plagued him since his 1986 diabetic coma, was still capable of moments of transcendent guitar work, and the spring '93 tour found the band in reasonable form as they made their annual sweep through the heartland. Richfield Coliseum, nestled in the stretch of suburban Cleveland just south of the city, was a standard-issue NBA and concert arena of its era — the kind of cavernous, medium-large room the Dead had made their natural habitat throughout the '80s and into the '90s. It wasn't a room with the mythic resonance of the Fillmore or the outdoor grandeur of Red Rocks, but the Dead had a comfortable history there, and the Ohio crowd reliably brought the warmth. The coliseum closed for good in 1994, which makes any show from this period a small piece of a disappearing building's history.
The songs we have documented from this night are a fine cross-section of what the band was serving up in this era. "Stella Blue" remains one of Garcia's most achingly beautiful compositions, a late-set meditation on loss and memory that demanded a certain stillness from both band and crowd — when Garcia was fully present in it, the song could stop time. Paired in a segue with "Throwing Stones," that shift from fragile introspection into Weir's anthemic, fist-raised indictment of a fractured world has a real dramatic logic to it, the kind of setlist architecture the Dead had refined over decades. "Brown Eyed Women" is the reliable, driving pleasure it always was — a piece of Americana that never overstayed its welcome. Without confirmed source information, recordings from this venue and period vary from crisp soundboards to warm, reasonably clear audience tapes. Either way, that "Stella Blue" into "Throwing Stones" sequence alone is worth the search — queue it up and let Garcia's voice do the rest.