The Record Collector

Released in 1987, In The Dark is the Grateful Dead's 12th studio album, their first since Go To Heaven, six years earlier.

It was a surprise hit, the band's first ever LP to reach the Top 10. It also spawned a Top 40 single with Touch Of Grey, a playfully happy song (I'm not sure what it's about but the lyrics are great) that was accompanied by an equally playful video that went into heavy rotation on MTV.

In the Dark was recorded over seven days in January, 1987. Most of the songs had been in the band's live show since the beginning of the decade, which gave the 'Dead several years to perfect them while playing in front of live audiences. After the overwhelming and stinging critical panning of Go to Heaven, In The Dark marked a return to form as well as a relief.

It was, essentially, a live recording. The band had been playing most of these songs live for so long they decided to record the album in an empty auditorium. The idea was to capture the live feel, which they decided could be best accomplished by approximating the concert experience as much as possible without actually making another live album. They had already released two live albums since their last studio LP and weren't really keen on putting out three in a row. The venue chosen for the recording was the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael, California.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann recalls they ran all the guitars and whatever other electric instruments through amplifiers in the basement while keeping the drums bright and loud on stage. "Everything was fed to a recording truck parked outside," he said. "Everybody played their parts in real time, together. When we took breaks, we'd go into the wings by the stage door and sit there and talk about what we'd just done. Talking about the music, then going right out to play the music, then talking about it some more was something that we really should've done more often. It really put us in a good spot."

Second drummer Mickey Hart claims the album got its name from a practical joke he played on the rest of the band. “There was no audience," he told Uncle Joe Benson, on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show. "I came up with the idea to turn the lights off. I told my equipment guy, ‘On my signal, turn the lights off.’ I didn’t tell anybody else. I said, ‘Just turn everything off.’"

The signal was given. All of a sudden "they couldn’t see their fretboards and we couldn’t see our cymbals and drums and it was chaos!" Hart said. "Obviously we were playing a song, and it just turned into some maniac band. Then, of course, it was getting dangerous; we didn’t know what we were doing, everyone was laughing too hard. So I signalled them to turn the lights back on and we just stopped and we looked at each other and we laughed our brains out. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s great to be playing music in the dark.’” And so that's where the album's name comes from.

The recorded tracks were brought to the studio and cleaned up where necessary with a couple of overdubs. But there really wasn't much cleaning up required. The band was well rehearsed and had been in great form. The tracks appear on the album pretty much as they were recorded.

The version of the album that I have is the Mobile Fidelity pressing, released in 2012, and I think it sounds incredible. It has more punch and clarity than I remember my original copy having, which I traded away after getting this copy. The lower end is not in any way muddy and there's excellent separation and space. The vinyl is quiet, a really wonderful pressing.

And it's still available. You can usually pick it up for under $80, sometimes as low as $60. But that price is starting to creep upwards, so if you're a fan and you want to hear this record sound as good as it can, don't wait too long!

I saw the Grateful Dead around the time this album was released, maybe a couple of years later, in Hamilton, Ontario. The city shut down the streets all around the venue and there were a lot of old VW campers and people were strumming guitars and walking around smoking dope and trying to trade oranges for tickets. It was like going to a concert on another planet. It was also one of the best sounding concerts I have ever been to.