As the Grateful Dead headed into Labor Day weekend 1985, the band began the second half of their Twenty Years So Far tour to mark the 20th anniversary of their formation. The band—then consisting of Jerry Garcia (lead guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), Brent Mydland (keyboards, vocals), Mickey Hart (drums), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums)—had just delivered their most consistent tour in years, during a time when Garcia’s substance abuse and health issues rendered their shows largely inconsistent.

During the six-week break between the two legs of the tour, Garcia kept busy with a slew of eight smaller gigs in and around the Bay Area, either with the Jerry Garcia Band or as a duo with bassist John Kahn. But Garcia’s offstage habits were catching up with him, and the shows were generally short by his standards, with sets containing as few as four songs and two set shows containing less than 90 minutes of music.

The Grateful Dead also worked in a stand-alone daytime show on August 24th at Boreal Ridge Ski Resort in Donner’s Summit, CA, to oil the engine before the full tour. However, 98-degree weather and high winds were just two of the factors that made for a tough day and a subpar show. Garcia’s stamina was clearly not at a high point, and the Grateful Dead would have to work around it, but the show must go on, and on it went.

Friday, August 30th
Houston, TX — Southern Star Amphitheatre At AstroWorld

Houston’s AstroWorld amusement park had hosted rock concerts in the far corner of the property in a big field with a stage at one end for over a decade, but in 1985, the park took a big step forward and built the Southern Star Amphitheatre onsite. The Grateful Dead were the 12th act to headline the new venue, in between shows by Midwestern rock stalwarts REO Speedwagon and British pop duo Wham! Concert ticket purchasers also got free admission to the amusement park, so there was decidedly more long hair and tie-dye than usual on the rides during that hot, humid, and rainy day. Thirty-six years later, the park’s parking lot would host rapper Travis Scott‘s Astroworld festival, where ten concertgoers were killed in a deadly crowd surge during Scott’s headlining set.

The stifling humidity would affect the first two-thirds of the show by shortening Garcia’s stage time. The first set would consist of only six songs, but the song choices and performance made up for its brevity. Weir opened with the locally appropriate “Jack Straw” that hit a nice peak before “Row Jimmy” and a cover of Ma Rainey’s “C.C. Rider” before straight crowd pleasers in the form of an ethereal “Bird Song”, an emotive Looks Like Rain”, and a buoyant “Deal” that closed the set after just under 50 minutes.

The second set started with the welcome “Scarlet Begonias”, but after just a couple minutes of its percolating outro jam, Garcia steered the music away from the expected “Fire on the Mountain” and started “Touch Of Grey”, then just two years away from becoming the Dead’s first and only Top 10 single. After Weir led a charge through “Samson & Delilah”, Garcia headed for the wings after just over 20 minutes of music while Hart and Kreutzmann began their “Drums” segment with Weir and Mydland sticking around for a bit to accompany them.

So far it had been a good show, but one that was clearly on the short side by Grateful Dead standards. Garcia would rally though, and following the free-form “Space” segment, the closing run would become the best part of the show. First up were Lesh and Mydland, who teamed up on Spencer Davis’ “Gimme Some Lovin’” before Garcia sang “The Wheel”, a reversal of the customary order of those songs when paired together. From there, Weir steered proceedings into a fast-moving version of “The Other One” before Garcia summoned the energy for a dramatic “Morning Dew” to close the set. “Sugar Magnolia” was the surprising and welcome encore for a show that often gets overlooked.


[Audio: Matthew Vernon]

Saturday, August 31st
Austin, TX – Manor Downs

After a quick 150-mile journey west on State Highway 290, the tour reached Austin, a town best known as Texas’ weirdest city. Fueled heavily by a music scene that rivalled anyone’s, a place where rockers, hippies, cowboys, and punks intermingled far more peacefully than almost everywhere else. The show was another outdoor affair held at Manor Downs, a horse racing track outside Austin. Developed in 1975 by Frances Carr and former Grateful Dead tour manager Sam Cutler, the venue also successfully hosted rock and country shows between racing events. It was the Grateful Dead’s fifth visit there since 1977, and it should come as no surprise that it was another blazingly hot summer day and evening in Texas Hill Country.

The first set’s decidedly country/Americana flavor reflected the Austin location. After Garcia opened with “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” and its Rio Grande reference, Weir went straight for one of his longtime favorites, Marty Robbins’ Texas-based classic “El Paso”. Garcia soon followed with the tale of rough justice in “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” before Weir paired his “Mexicali Blues” with Johnny Cash’s “Big River.” Two more well-crafted Dead originals in the forms of “Althea” and “My Brother Esau” preceded Garcia’s take on the traditional “Jack-A-Roe”, and the nine-song set concluded with another one of the Dead’s best original compositions, the sprawling but structured “Let It Grow”.

The second set started with an impressive “Terrapin Station” in an unusual but welcome leadoff slot, with Lesh adding some nice low-end booms during the song’s dramatic closing. It led to an intricate and lengthy “Estimated Prophet” with each song augmented by Mydland’s continued use of a vocal sample of him blurting out something resembling the words “I need…” at random spots. The two songs combined for 26 minutes of entrancing music, but once again the heat caught up to Garcia and he headed offstage to let the drummers do their thing.

The “Drums” segment maintained the energy, with Hart and Kreutzmann making heavy use of the largest drums in the band’s arsenal to send reverberations through the crowd. Following the “Space” segment, the band delivered a solid closing run of “Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad”, “Stella Blue”, “Throwing Stones”, and The Crickets‘ “Not Fade Away”. Garcia then produced another highlight for the first encore, a delicate version of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me”, before Weir closed out the evening with “One More Saturday Night”.


[Audio: Matthew Vernon]

Monday, September 2nd
Oklahoma City, OK – The Zoo Amphitheatre

The 7,000-capacity Zoo Amphitheatre got its name simply because it was built next to the Oklahoma City Zoo. Constructed in 1936 through financing from the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, it’s still there today in heavily renovated form. This was the Grateful Dead’s third show at the Zoo, and the Labor Day show was a good snapshot of the band and repertoire during this time period. It was the only show out of the four in this article where Garcia’s health didn’t prompt him to cut any part of the show short.

The show started out normally enough, with “Bertha”, Greatest Story Ever Told”, and “West L.A. Fadeaway”, but then Weir paired Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” with “Me and My Uncle” for his two-song cowboy medley, making for an unusual occurrence of him playing these two songs at the same show. Garcia then offered up the newly revived “Stagger Lee”, which he enjoyed so much that he immediately started an upbeat “Iko Iko” before Weir could choose the next song. The ten-song set concluded with “Minglewood Blues”, “Ramble On Rose”, and “Hell In A Bucket”.

The second set launched with the long-time pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider”, with the expected peaks coming via the jam after the third verse of “China Cat” and Garcia’s “headlight” verse of “Rider”. Second-set staples “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” and “Ship of Fools” followed before the show’s highlight, a 14-minute version of “Playing in the Band” whose jam took the sorts of exploratory turns the crowd was hoping to hear.

Following the “Drums” and “Space” segments, the band closed out the night with “I Need A Miracle”, a “China Doll” with a couple of rough vocal lines from Garcia, Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” and The Olympics’ “Good Lovin’” that contained a Weir rap that went slightly beyond his usual vocal vamps. After the “Keep Your Day Job” encore, the tour loaded out for the 350-mile drive to Kansas City.


[Audio: Jonathon Aizen]

Tuesday, September 3rd
Kansas City, MO – Starlight Theatre

The venerable Starlight Theatre in Kansas City is on the short list of the best venues the Grateful Dead ever played. Designed by renowned architect Edward Buehler Delk and opened in 1950, the stage’s large towers create the image of a castle, while the main entrance at the top of the seating area is marked by a large arch with similar towers of its own, making for a picturesque setting in the form of a 7,739-seat venue. And on a balmy Tuesday night in September 1985, the Grateful Dead played one of their most unique sets of the mid-’80s era while legendary concert taping duo Jim and Doug Oade engineered one of their best audience recordings.


[Audio: Jonathon Aizen]

The show launched with the funky, disco-esque “Feel Like A Stranger”, always a plus because its jam allowed the band to open up musically right away. After Garcia’s reggae-tinged “They Love Each Other” and Weir’s cover of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”, the remainder of the set was a run of five straight upbeat songs: “Dire Wolf”, “Cassidy”, “Big Railroad Blues”, “The Music Never Stopped”, and “Don’t Ease Me In”.

The top of the second set contained the highlight of the night and this four-show run: the last-ever performance of “That’s It For The Other One”, the psychedelic suite from 1968 comprised of Garcia’s slower “Cryptical Envelopment” at the beginning and end, framing Weir’s upbeat, frantic “The Other One”. While “The Other One” remained firmly in the Dead’s regular rotation from its inception, the “Cryptical” portions of the suite had been shelved in 1972 until Garcia had dusted them off three months earlier, to a wild response at the 20th anniversary shows at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre. However, the song’s first airing in 13 years was briefly marred by Garcia’s microphone cutting out at the crucial moment when he belted out the song’s final “You know he had to diiiiiiie” line during the reprise.

“Cryptical” made three more appearances over the next month next to or near “The Other One”, but tonight would be the second of the two full, unbroken versions of the suite before “Cryptical” was retired for good, and this final version is an example of Garcia’s ability to make magic and mistakes at the same time; he mumbles vocals and flubs a couple notes during both halves of “Cryptical”, but it didn’t matter all that much to the the amped crowd taking it all in.

“The Other One” ran for about seven minutes in total, with nearly four minutes of spirited jamming before the first of the song’s two verses. And this time, during the “Cryptical” reprise, Garcia’s microphone didn’t fail him at the critical moment. He’d belt out the final line with as much vocal energy as he could muster in 1985, and it’s a moment that’s still making Deadheads smile, smile, smile every time they hear it. For their part, the band reacted to Garcia’s bellow with a matching swell of music before the song ended, this time for good.

The night’s knockout blow had been delivered, but there was more to come. After Garcia led the band through a typically brisk “Eyes of the World”, fatigue reared its head, and he headed offstage while Mydland performed his angry blues lament “Don’t Need Love”. The song first appeared in 1984 and the Grateful Dead played it regularly throughout the year, but this was its first appearance in 1985, and after this show it only made five more sporadic performances before being dropped from the repertoire in April 1986.

Following the “Drums” and “Space” segments, Garcia had another big moment up his sleeve: the first version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” since 1981, and only the fourth version since the Dead’s 1975 hiatus. He’d sing all three verses cleanly, and even though it all went very well, it would also end up being the Grateful Dead’s final version of the song. It led to a solid reading of the band’s signature song, “Truckin’”, after which Weir quickly sang the opening line of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning”, ensuring he could sneak one more snaking blues tune into the set before Garcia chose his late-show ballad, the recently revived “Comes A Time”. He’d get through it with only a couple of sour vocal notes before Weir rounded out the set with Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn On Your Lovelight” to close, and Garcia went with Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” as the gentle encore.

Aside from the blast of psychedelic energy that would be the final performance of the entire “That’s It For The Other One” suite, the second set featured three other relative rarities in the form of “Don’t Need Love”, “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”, and “Comes A Time”, giving this set a distinctive flavor that’s kept Deadheads coming back to listen again and again. The show remains a dark horse candidate for an official release.

From Starlight, the Grateful Dead completed the second leg of the Twenty Years So Far tour with three shows at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre just outside Denver, three shows at their “home” venue of the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, CA, and a stand-alone show in Chula Vista, CA. This would be the sole Grateful Dead appearance at Southern Star Amphitheatre and their final visits to Manor Downs, Zoo Amphitheatre, and Starlight Theatre, but they’d go in and out with as much of a bang as they could muster in the dog days of the hot summer of 1985.

Author’s note: This article is lovingly dedicated to Houston native Andrea Greer, a lifelong friend and fellow Deadhead.