By the spring of 1995, the Grateful Dead were deep into what would prove to be their final year of touring, though no one in the crowd at the Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum in Birmingham, Alabama that April evening could have known it. The band that took the stage was the lineup that had carried them through the better part of a decade: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Vince Welnick, who had settled into the keyboard chair after Brent Mydland's death in 1990. Garcia's health was a persistent concern among the faithful — he had nearly died from a diabetic coma in 1986 and had struggled with his physical condition in the years since — but the band was still out there, still pulling thousands of fans into arenas and coliseums across the country with the kind of communal ritual that had defined American counterculture for thirty years. The Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum was a mid-sized Southern arena, the kind of room that the Dead had become thoroughly at home in throughout the 1980s and '90s — not an intimate theater, but not a stadium either, a space where the sound could be focused and the crowd's energy gathered into something tangible. Birmingham wasn't a regular stop on the Dead's circuit, which made shows like this one a genuine event for the regional faithful who'd traveled from across the Deep South to be there. From what we have in the database, this show includes "I Need a Miracle" and "Row Jimmy," two songs that speak to entirely different sides of the Dead's personality.
"I Need a Miracle," one of John Barlow and Weir's catchiest uptempo numbers, was a reliable crowd-pleaser by this point, a bouncy, almost comical plea that tended to get the room moving and often opened second sets with a jolt of energy. "Row Jimmy," on the other hand, is one of Hunter and Garcia's most languorous and melancholy pieces — a slow, swaying meditation that rewards patience. In the later years, when Garcia was playing more economically, the best "Row Jimmy" performances could be genuinely moving, his guitar lines winding through the song like something being carefully remembered. Listeners should pay close attention to the interplay between Garcia and Welnick, and to how the crowd responds in these two very different emotional registers. The recording quality for this show will help determine how deep the listening experience runs, but whatever the source, this is a snapshot of the Dead still doing what they did — one more night, one more room, one more chance.