By the summer of 1995, the Grateful Dead were in the final chapter of their story — though no one in the crowd at Riverport Amphitheatre on July 6th could have known that Garcia had less than five weeks left to live. The band that took the stage that night was the lineup that had been together since 1990: Garcia, Weir, Lesh, Hart, Kreutzmann, and Vince Welnick on keys, with Bruce Hornsby occasionally sitting in during this era though absent here. It was a version of the Dead that had grown massive in cultural scale — the summer '95 tour was drawing enormous crowds, with a fanbase that had swelled enormously through the early nineties. Garcia's health was a concern among those paying close attention, but the shows were still happening, still drawing the faithful from across the country. Riverport Amphitheatre, situated just outside St. Louis in Maryland Heights, Missouri, was a large outdoor shed that became a reliable stop on the Dead's touring circuit in this era. It sits in the broad, flat heartland, and a summer night there carries that particular Midwestern humidity that seems to amplify the communal warmth of a Dead crowd.
Not a legendary room on the order of Cornell's Barton Hall or Red Rocks, but a familiar and beloved stop for fans in that part of the country, and the amphitheater's open-air setup always gave the sound room to breathe. The fragments we have from this show offer a compelling cross-section of what a late-era Dead performance could deliver. Big River, the Johnny Cash cover the band had been playing since the early seventies, was by 1995 a sturdy first-set staple — Weir's vehicle for rolling, confident rhythm work. He's Gone, one of the band's most emotionally resonant originals, carries a weight in this period that listeners often find quietly devastating in retrospect; its elegiac quality hits differently knowing what was coming. The segue into Space shows the band still willing to venture into the abstract, those long improvisational passages where the music dissolves into pure texture before finding its way back. Listen for the transitions here — how the band threads He's Gone into the open waters of Space — and for the particular quality of Garcia's guitar tone in this period, which had a worn, plaintive edge that suited the emotional register of the songs perfectly. Whatever the recording source, this is a show worth sitting with.