By February 1995, the Grateful Dead were deep into what would prove to be their final year together, though no one in the crowd at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum could have known that. The band that took the stage that Sunday night featured Vince Welnick holding down the keys, a role he'd occupied since Brent Mydland's death in 1990, alongside the increasingly omnipresent Bruce Hornsby-ish influence on the ensemble sound — though by '95, the configuration had settled into something familiar and lived-in. Jerry Garcia had come through serious health struggles in the late '80s and had shown real signs of revival in the early part of the decade, but by this late period his playing carried a weathered quality that longtime fans parsed with a mixture of devotion and concern. The Dead's world in early '95 was one of massive crowds, devoted touring culture, and an organization still running at full commercial steam even as the musical vitality could vary night to night. Oakland was, of course, home turf in the deepest sense. The Coliseum sits just across the Bay from San Francisco, and Dead shows here always carried a special homecoming energy — a room full of Bay Area faithful and diehard touring heads who'd been following the caravan for years.
The Coliseum was a big barn of a place, not the most intimate room, but the crowd there knew the music cold, and that familiarity between band and audience created a kind of call-and-response electricity that you can often feel in recordings from this venue. The songs we have documented from this night offer a study in contrasts. "Don't Ease Me In," the old jug-band chestnut that the Dead used as a rollicking set opener or occasional first-set warmup, is exactly the kind of loose, good-humored number that could get a crowd grinning before the heavier lifting began — when the Dead were clicking, it had real swing to it. And then there's "Box of Rain," Robert Hunter and Phil Lesh's quietly devastating collaboration, a song that by 1995 had taken on layers of meaning the band could never have anticipated when they wrote it for Phil's dying father back in 1970. As an encore, it lands with particular weight — a gentle, almost benedictory close to the evening. If you're approaching this recording for the first time, listen for the crowd's warmth on that "Box of Rain" outro, and let the familiar chords wash over you the way they must have washed over that Oakland crowd heading back out into the February night.