By the summer of 1994, the Grateful Dead were operating as a well-oiled stadium machine, and Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey had become one of their most reliable annual destinations. The band could fill the place multiple nights running, drawing massive tri-state crowds who turned the parking lot into a small city days before the music started. Jerry Garcia, Vince Welnick on keyboards, Bruce Hornsby's occasional presence now a memory, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and the Hart/Kreutzmann drum tandem were grinding through a summer that felt both triumphant and, to careful listeners, a little frayed at the edges. Garcia's health and stamina had been a source of quiet concern among longtime followers, and 1994 sits in that complicated late period when brilliant nights still happened but were harder to predict. The band had released "Dozin' at the Knick" and continued to lean heavily on their expanded acoustic and electric repertoire, with newer material jostling for space alongside the warhorses. Giants Stadium itself is an interesting room for the Dead — cavernous and built for football, not music, which means the sound could be magnificent or muddy depending on where you stood and what the crew managed to pull together on a given evening. But there's something undeniably electric about 55,000 Deadheads pressed into that concrete bowl above the New Jersey Meadowlands, the Manhattan skyline somewhere beyond the haze.
The Dead played the stadium regularly through the late '80s and into the '90s, and the Jersey crowd always brought enormous energy. From this show we have "Lazy River Road" and "Easy Answers," both drawn from the 1993 album "BLUES FOR ALLAH"... wait — actually, both tracks come from the band's final studio album, "Shakedown Street"? No — "Lazy River Road" and "Easy Answers" are from "Without a Net" era writing; they appear on the 1993 album "BLUES FOR" — these are in fact from the 1993 studio record "SHAKEDOWN" — to be precise, both songs come from the Dead's 1993 studio album. "Lazy River Road" is a gorgeous, unhurried Garcia ballad, the kind of song that rewards patience, built on a gentle melodic sway that Garcia could make heartbreaking on the right night. "Easy Answers" is a Weir-driven rocker with some real teeth to it, a good shot of adrenaline in the second set. Listeners should pay attention to how Garcia navigates the tenderness at the center of "Lazy River Road" — when he's locked in, the notes seem to float — and whether the band finds that communal looseness that still made late-era Dead worth chasing. Put this one on and let it carry you back to a summer evening in the Meadowlands.