By the spring of 1993, the Grateful Dead were deep into what would prove to be one of their final active stretches, navigating a complicated moment in their long history. Brent Mydland had been gone since 1990, and Vince Welnick — the former Todd Rundgren and Tubes keyboardist — had now been aboard for nearly three full years, bringing a warm, more conventional rock feel to the band's sound. Bruce Hornsby had long since stepped back from his semi-regular role alongside Vince, leaving the keyboard seat to Welnick alone. Jerry Garcia, though still capable of luminous guitar work, was showing the wear of decades on the road, and the band's performances in this era could swing dramatically from the transcendent to the workmanlike. The spring '93 tour caught the Dead in the heart of stadium season, the kind of large-scale outdoor run that had become their annual ritual — a world away from the Fillmore nights that had started it all. The Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, a football stadium on the campus of what was then UNLV on the eastern edge of Las Vegas, was a familiar stop in the Dead's later-era touring circuit. Las Vegas was always an interesting city for the Dead — a town built on spectacle and excess, where Deadheads converged from across the Southwest and the whole scene took on an almost surreal quality against the desert backdrop.
The Silver Bowl seated tens of thousands and offered that wide-open outdoor sound that stadium Dead fans either loved or found diffuse, depending on where you were standing on the lawn. The show data here surfaces Drums, the percussive second-set centerpiece that the Dead had been performing since the early 1970s and which by 1993 had evolved into a sprawling duet between Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart — an acoustic and electronic landscape that could range from tribal thunder to delicate rattling silences. Hart's involvement with world percussion and his Rhythm Devils projects had given the Drums segments of this era a particularly global, textured quality. It's a section of the show that rewards patient listening, and in a big outdoor bowl the low-end resonance of the drums against open desert air can be something else entirely. Recording quality from this era at large outdoor venues varies considerably — a good soundboard circulates from this run, so check your sources before downloading. But wherever you land on 1993-era Dead, the drums alone are worth the price of admission. Fire it up and let Mickey and Billy take you somewhere.