Not particularly heady, but a notably not-too-bad later version with nice Vince vox

Perfect acoustic version

Weird, jazzy 90s version. Remarkably good!

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

Shockingly good. I've been listening to 1994 shows lately thanks to John Hilgart. They're surprisingly good! I'm often underwhelmed by late 80s Dead, more than anything because of Jerry's rhythm and verse playing--I can take a froggy vocal because they were never that good, but even on some of those famous 89/90 shows, his playing during the "song part" of almost every song is sloppy as hell, even if the solos are great. Here, he's on fire the entire song, and it seems like a lot of it is the tone: he has a very pleasant, almost acoustic tone that doesn't have too much sustain or plinky electric brightness. Singing on this is also great, and Vince and Bobby seemed to be having especially good nights. I've also always thought that this is one song where the double-drummers happened to work especially. The "test me, test me, why don't you arrest me" section sounds especially good with their thundering fills and the crowd very audibly cheering, even on an SBD. There is an enormous number of good versions of this song, so I'm not going to suggest that this is a true top 10 or something, but if you specifically wanted to hear the Dead being 100 percent present and listenable, in a period when even most committed fans had written them off, this is great. They sound 20 years younger!

Hard to get past the fact that the Devils cannot agree what the tempo of the song is for the first few measure of the introduction.

Jamming is very solid. Playing is some of the tightest post-coma. I have to be a hater...Garcia never seemed to fully recover. In particular, the dampened notes on virtually all his rhythm guitar playing limit my enjoyment of much of the 89/90 stuff. This is a welcome exception, and his lead playing remains fine and fluid.

Several reasons make this the best, over other highly-rated versions such as the Spectrum 72 show or the Iowa Fairgrounds 74 show. 1. Jerry's solos are as good as they ever were, exploratory and gorgeous at the same time. 2. Bill's drumming is really propulsive, without some of those slightly-annoying slowdowns he executes elsewhere just as the guitars are getting hot at the end of the proper "song part" of China. 3. Jerry's actually mixed correctly on this version, i.e. not ridiculously quiet in the mix as he is on far too many soundboards 4. They really nail the singing on this, with "Rider" actually sounding more-or-less totally in-tune.

Excellent barnstorming fusion version and the super-percussive ending jam is just the kind of small but very fun flourish that you'd get out of a band like CAN.