By the summer of 1993, the Grateful Dead were deep into what would prove to be the final chapter of their long strange trip. Brent Mydland had been gone for three years, and Vince Welnick — the former Tubes keyboardist who stepped into an impossible role — had settled into a comfortable groove alongside the band. Bruce Hornsby, who had served as a kind of co-pilot through the early Welnick transition, was no longer a regular presence, leaving Vince to hold down the keys with growing confidence. The band was playing large sheds and stadiums throughout this period, drawing enormous crowds even as Jerry Garcia's health remained a quiet, persistent concern among devoted followers. The 1993 summer tour reflected all of this — a band still capable of transcendent moments, playing for audiences that had grown to festival scale. RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. was exactly that kind of massive room. The old concrete bowl along the Anacostia River had hosted everything from Redskins games to papal visits, and the Dead treated it as a reliable stop during their stadium era runs through the mid-Atlantic. These big outdoor shows had a particular energy — the late afternoon light giving way to the first set, the crowd sprawling across the field and into the upper tiers, the sound system doing its best to fill an enormous and acoustically unforgiving space.
What you sometimes lost in intimacy you gained in spectacle, and D.C. crowds tended to bring genuine heat. The two songs we have on record from this date tell an interesting story about the band's range in 1993. "Promised Land," the Chuck Berry road song that the Dead had been playing since 1971, was a perennial first-set opener and energy igniter — compact, propulsive, a statement of intent. When Garcia was locked in, the guitar work on "Promised Land" had a snapping precision that could set the tone for everything that followed. "The Weight," the Band classic the Dead had been covering since the early days, always landed differently depending on the night — sometimes devotional, sometimes joyful, the vocal harmonies rising and falling with the particular chemistry of whoever was out front. It's worth listening for how Welnick handles the keyboard fills and whether the vocal blend has that warm, relaxed quality these older covers could sometimes achieve late in the run. Recordings from this era vary widely in quality, but if you're coming to this show fresh, go in expecting the warmth and scale of a summer stadium night and let the music tell you what kind of evening it was.