Often a throwaway, this super bouncy version from a top 10 show sparkles.

Yeah, the dense thicket of this song is cool. The best of their stuff in the 80s is so great, and unique in their canon. Brent's tones, to this "post-taste" listener, are great, even if artificial. Jerry brought back some distortion in his guitar and, surprisingly, added in a lot more "machine gun" stuff. It's awesome that they could still pull off these jazzy detours while significantly beefing up the blues part of their set (particularly on this show--lots of great, shorter-form 80s blues-rock here).

I may be the only person in the world who likes this song. I don't know why it's panned: Welnick is a bad singer, but so was pretty much each member of the Dead. He starts pretty off-pitch here, but by the time the chorus rolls around, it's tolerable. The post-solo chorus sounds genuinely great. Otherwise, it's a neat little groove. Cheesy? I guess, but if you like the Dead, aren't you already post-taste? Even their stuff in the 70s requires some acclimation: the singing was *never* that great and the sound, with Garcia playing clean and often submerged in the mix whether on AUD or SBD, is really not like that of most other rock groups. Not cornier than anything Weir wrote in the 80s, Brent ever wrote, or some of Garcia's worst material (heresy, but I really don't care for "Sugaree" or "Althea" -- they're just so slow, slow enough that the harmonic motion just feels "off" to me). (BTW, there's a version of Vince doing this song as a duo on Youtube after the Dead years. It's kind of haunting knowing his fate, which transpired just a few years after the video. He sings significantly better and still has this same moxie. It's really quite good).

The last three or four minutes of this basically invents indie rock. That g r o o v e that Garcia gets into with the 12-string (simulator?) has big Malkmus vibes. A stunning jam.

Someone joked (maybe Tyler Wilcox) that this is the "headiest Bill Graham intro", which is pretty funny, but the way that each band member comes in and they're off to the races before Graham can even finish just shreds.

Yeah, his froggy tone really suits the song and feel. Better vocals on this than any 70s version, IMHO -- this sounds weird, but sometimes I've found when I've had a cold or a sore throat, I actually sing more on pitch, and this seems to be the case with Jerry -- again, I know it sounds weird, but he and Weir both seem to be way more consistently on pitch in the 80s, whereas basically every other song in the 70s has someone way off-key at some point, even if the song overall is very strong.