Through the ’80s, the Dead’s annual three-night weekend at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre became a singular tradition with staggered start times—Friday shows beginning at 7 p.m. (played entirely in darkness), Saturdays at 5 (played through sunset), and Sundays at 3 (played in full daylight). This year, the stage is framed by a pair of rainbows dotted with high-stepping skeletons. The second set opens with a fun new sequence for summer ’84, both party trick and party starter, sending “Scarlet Begonias” into “Touch Of Grey” before going elsewhere, tonight resolving into the expected “Fire On The Mountain,” the fullest iteration so far.

Cozier 500-capacity alternativeT to the larger Fillmore Auditorium and Carousel Ballroom. Opened in September 1911 as the Puckett College of Dancing’s Assembly Hall, it became the Trianon Ballroom in the 1920s and the Avalon by 1937, another stop on the West Coast swing orchestra circuit. When Chet Helms and the Family Dog took over in 1966 after Bill Graham cut them out of the Fillmore Auditorium, the collective maintained their more counterculture-minded contrast with Graham’s polished productions, with a Family Dog commune established several blocks away. While a looser place to play, it simply couldn’t compare to a payday at either of the Fillmores.

The Dead played the Avalon numerous times in its early days (with 1966 recordings yielding the unauthorized Vintage Dead and Historic Dead LPs) and returned in late 1968. The band chose the Avalon to start serious work on what became Live/Dead in January 1969.

The closing Sunday of a three-night Winterland equinox weekend was technically the first show of spring 1977, a hometown sendoff before arguably the band’s most legendary touring season. The band had spent the first of the year recording Terrapin Station with producer Keith Olsen in Los Angeles, the drummers tightening their rhythmic connection for the studio and setting the stage for numerous classic shows. The new sparkle is on display all weekend.
The first set features a strident “Brown Eyed Women” with a crisp, lyrical Garcia solo over a locked-in double-drummer backbeat.

“Twenty Years So Far” read the tickets for the Dead’s November ’85 shows at their newly refurbished and renamed Bay Area home at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center on the banks of Lake Merritt in Oakland, almost precisely the anniversary of when Jerry Garcia plucked the name “Grateful Dead” from a dictionary. Musically, the Dead didn’t generally do intentional anniversary throwbacks, but the middle night at the Kaiser opened (and closed) with a cover straight from the Warlocks’ repertoire: Don and Dewey’s “Big Boy Pete,” played with the garage gusto of a local band made good, its first appearance at a proper Dead show in 15 years and last ever.

A reliable hometown venue that the Dead didn’t outgrow, the 16,000-capacity arena adjacent to Oakland Stadium was a latter-day home for Bill Graham’s New Year’s soirees and other holiday festivities. The December 27 show was the first of four that year, with a plenty big second set featuring Clarence Clemons on saxophone, and Bobby Weir had encored with the perennial “Johnny B. Goode,” but Garcia adds a final statement: his and Robert Hunter’s “Black Muddy River,” written on piano and debuted at the Dead’s first shows after his 1986 diabetic coma, a personal and powerful statement of mortality. Just one more Wednesday night in Oakland.

Perhaps the definitive Bay Area venue in which to see the Grateful Dead during their early years, the Fillmore West continued to be called “the Carousel Ballroom” by the Dead and fans alike even after Bill Graham took over the lease from the consortium
of bands that had been running the place and renamed it. Recorded that year for Aoxomoxoa, “Doin’ That Rag” was perhaps the peak of the Dead’s early psychedelic prog-rock with its jeweled lyrics and mid-song modulation. Overflowing with images and chords, it’s a songwriting voice that Garcia and Hunter will soon put aside, but it’s at home at the Carousel/Fillmore, a cartoon song for cartoon times.

Nestled on the Stanford campus, the Frost Amphitheatre instantly became one of the jewels of the Grateful Dead’s touring year when promoter Bill Graham began to book afternoon Dead shows there in 1982. With its gently sloped lawn manicured into gentle steps that provided great views and encouraged socializing, it was the local home the band always deserved—a great place to hang out and play for crowd and band, within walking distance of where they first made music. Debuted a few months earlier, Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s “My Brother Esau” is intended for the Dead’s album-in- progress, a Biblical tale reset in the present. In this early draft, Esau is “in real estate today and he gets around the dark side of town down around L.A.”

New to the Dead in spring 1993 are their in-ear audio monitors, whose benefits allow the vocalists to conquer venues such as the boxy concrete Capital Centre yet still sing extra quietly, especially useful for the batch of new songs debuted at the beginning of the year. Perhaps the heaviest and most haunting is Garcia and Hunter’s “Days Between,” Hunter’s brilliant and universal evocation of their unforgotten teenage dreams. Tonight it stands on its own, getting a place of honor (and tender reading) after this evening’s most psychedelic of jam suites, a sequence that included “Playing In The Band,” “Dark Star,” and “The Other One.”

The Spectrum in Philadelphia was the Dead’s kinda zoo, where they played 55 times between their 1968 debut and their last shows in 1995, more than any other act. This became an annual tradition that starting in spring ’77, cemented the following May. “The Music Never Stopped” was never more apt than as a description of the Dead and Heads’ northeast travels that spring, which featured crisscrossing tours by the Bob Weir Band, Robert Hunter and Comfort, and the Jerry Garcia Band, who appeared at the Spectrum’s adjacent theater in March. Only three years old (and less than two years since the band’s return to the road), it sounds like a theme song played as a first-set closer.

Playing here in what would become a classic Grateful Dead venue in the heart of Grateful Dead country, the Dead began their somewhat conflicted relationship with Nassau Coliseum with a series of Bill Graham–produced Swell Dance Party shows in March 1973, just a week after Pigpen’s death. And in fact there probably are Heads dancing to this 20-minute set-closing “Playing In The Band” as it swerves into a bass stomp that sends the jam careening in a different direction. Performing in their Nudie suits for probably the last time, the Dead show off an assured collective voice as powerful as the classic compositions they debuted that year.

Suspended six stories above the pulsing Pennsylvania Station, Madison Square Garden was surely one of the Dead’s power spots, with its spring-loaded floor and inner concourse circling the inside of the venue like an ever-throbbing life force. And this probably all went double during the Dead’s triumphant five-show September 1987 stay, their only time visiting with a Top 10 single on the Billboard chart. Though only newly-minted hitmakers, they’d long since translated the power of “Wharf Rat” to arenas, its mountain range of dynamics playing from a broken whisper to wild thunder, the “I’ll get up and fly away” transition sounding like a cliff-side cloudburst.

Red Rocks was one of the most gorgeous places in the world to see the Grateful Dead or any other act, a 9,000-capacity natural amphitheater framed by giant sandstone crags (with only gentle benched seating) and a starlit view of Denver twinkling in the distance. Even without the rain that will force the next two shows inside, the night goes liquid. Moving from an “Estimated Prophet” that overflows with chattering Dyna-Rhodes by new keyboardist Brent Mydland, the band flows like fire into the uptempo late-’70s “Eyes Of The World” (around 130 bpm tonight), Garcia again singing an alternate version of the first line (“sleepy summer home”), before the jam bursts open. Led by the butterflying Garcia guitar, the band focuses, blurs, and heads further as Mydland dials in Moog pans and bleeps and the drummers go free.

In 1981 the Hartford Civic Center was a departure point for the Dead, who were getting ready to head off (a few days later) for their first European shows in more than a half-dozen years, and to release (a few weeks later) their new acoustic live album Reckoning. “Althea” didn’t make the cut for the electric companion Dead Set (a few months later) because it was still a new song, released on Go To Heaven in early 1980, and a site of active engagement, a relationship study performed more shows than not, conveyed in Garcia’s knowing performance of Hunter’s lyrics and even more knowing delivery of his own guitar solo.

Boston Garden, opened in 1928, was getting ready to become a ghost in 1994, with one more (never-performed) Dead run penciled in for fall 1995. While the Dead’s beleaguered sound crew had a testy relationship with the room, the Dead turned in consistently classic performances there. Revisiting one of the most spiritual and fragile ballads of American Beauty (and the whole Dead canon), the Dead returned to “Attics Of My Life” in 1989, bringing it to arenas with the wisdom of the years accumulated in both Robert Hunter’s powerful soul-searching lyrics and the band’s harmonies. With a delicate balance of factors, this late-period October 1994 performance stands out as a small, just-exactly-perfect object.

A gilded downtown arts palace with 3,100-pipe Wurlitzer organ, Boston’s Music Hall was an instant favorite venue, a room for listeners, both onstage and off. It paired perfectly with “Bird Song,” released on Garcia’s self-titled debut that year in a slightly different arrangement. After working through several drafts in 1971, the song had returned to the repertoire over the summer of ’72, now featuring a conversational sky- painting jam sent soaring further into the stratosphere by Bill Kreutzmann’s fluttering drum break. The one-drummer “Bird Song” sang 52 times like this and then flew on, tonight lifting off carefully as the quintet Dead climb into the blue.

When the Dead made their Deer Creek debut in 1989, the 21,000-capacity venue was already a throwback to an earlier era in the Dead’s summer touring, deep in the literal and proverbial cornfields, before “Touch Of Grey” blew them into stadiums. It’s an instant legend. “Truckin’” points the band into the night’s jam sequence, symbolically adding Noblesville to the list of stops on the song’s Möbius strip tour itinerary. Tonight Weir steers the song down the blues exit via Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” a Ron “Pigpen” McKernan favorite in the old world, revived by Weir as an ominous hair-raising standard in the ’80s.

In 1980 the Dead found a nearly perfect Midwestern summer home at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, nestled in a ski resort equidistant to Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison. Unlike nearly all their future stops at Alpine Valley, their 1980 debut wasn’t sold out, with perhaps some extra dancing room on the almost comically steep lawn. With the sun just setting over the trees, the Dead open up the sunshine cascades of Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s disco-prog “Lazy Lightning”>“Supplication,” still sounding crisp and current at the dawn of the new decade.