By the fall of 1993, the Grateful Dead were deep into their final chapter — a band that had outlasted every reasonable prediction, still filling arenas night after night with a lineup that had been intact since Brent Mydland's death in 1990. Vince Welnick had settled into the keyboard chair, and while the band would never quite recapture the bristling energy of the Brent years, they were a well-oiled machine capable of inspired moments. Garcia's health was a quiet concern among the inner circle, but on a good night the old telepathy still flickered to life between him and Phil Lesh, between Bob Weir's rhythmic churn and Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann's locomotive percussion. The fall '93 tour found them working through the heartland of America, playing the big sheds and coliseums that had become their natural habitat since the arena era took hold in the mid-eighties. Richfield Coliseum, situated in the suburban sprawl between Cleveland and Akron, was one of those quintessential late-era Dead rooms — a hockey barn that could swallow 20,000 people and somehow still generate the tribal warmth that kept the Deadhead community coming back. Ohio had always been good Dead country, and Richfield was a reliable stop on the touring circuit throughout the late eighties and nineties.
The cavernous acoustics could be tricky, but a hot band could transcend the room, and the Ohio faithful reliably brought an energy of their own. From this show we have a China Cat Sunflower flowing directly into Not Fade Away, which tells you something about how the band was sequencing their sets at this point. China Cat was always a vehicle for Garcia's melodic invention, that opening riff as instantly recognizable as anything in rock and roll, and the segue into "I Know You Rider" was the expected pairing — so the move into Not Fade Away instead suggests they were working some less-traveled connective tissue. Not Fade Away had grown from a Bo Diddley stomp into one of the great communal sing-alongs in the Dead canon, a song the crowd could grab onto and push, the rhythm section locking into that rolling beat while the vocals built into something almost tribal. Whether this recording surfaces as a soundboard or an audience capture, the China Cat opener is worth your time — settle in, let Garcia find his footing, and see if the band catches that particular groove that makes these transitions feel inevitable. Sometimes fall '93 surprised you.