Blair Jackson: It's a rainbow full of sound… Grateful Dead: All the years combine

The show that dominates View From The Vault IIItook place a little less than a year after the Alpine shows: June 16, 1990, at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA, south of San Francisco. This turned out to be the last tour for Brent Mydland, who died in late July 1990, but here the sextet is still going strong, with no hint of the calamity to come. This is another show I attended, and it was easily among the best of the dozen I saw that year. This particular concert is revered for its extraordinary second set, which includes solid versions of "China Cat" › "I Know You Rider," "Estimated Prophet" and "Terrapin" before the band launches into one of their most interesting and exploratory jams during this era. The full group stays onstage for what seems like an eternity, tossing musical ideas around, moving from riffs to unusual melodic lines to deep space, all following some unknown directive from who knows where. The "drums" segment takes that experimental approach into assorted other directions, and then it all eventually resolves at an overwhelming version of the heavy ballad "China Doll" — before the celebratory "Sugar Magnolia" ending. I remember happily wondering aloud at the end of the set: "What the hell was that ?

The first set is also loaded with goodies, including the opening trifecta of Sam Cooke's "Let The Good Times Roll," "Truckin"' and "Touch Of Grey"; the seldom-played "Big Boss Man"; and an over-the-top "One More Saturday Night." Bonus footage on the DVD consists of the first six songs from the October 3, 1987, concert at Shoreline (the group's second-ever show at that new venue) and is perhaps most notable for the N'awlins funk rave-up "Hey Pocky Way" and one of the few extant video versions of Weir's slithery "My Brother Esau."

The first View From The Vaultrelease, (recorded July 8, 1990, from the now-demolished Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh) gets off to a rollicking start with "Touch Of Grey" and "Greatest Story Ever Told" and keeps grooving with the old British folk number "Jack-A-Roe" — always a treat. Phil does a great job singing Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," and the set-ending "Let It Grow" has some fierce and feral jamming. In the second set, there's "Samson And Delilah," "Eyes Of The World" leading into "Estimated Prophet" (reverse of how they usually played that duo), plus "Terrapin," the gritty blues of Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle," "Turn On Your Lovelight" and more. The encore is an emotional "Knockin' On Heaven's Door."

Also worth noting is this disc's bonus material — from the more intimate Cardinal Stadium, in Louisville, Kentucky, two nights earlier (July 6, 1990). Two of the best numbers on View From The Vault come from this addendum: a magnificent "Standing On The Moon," sung with tremendous passion and nuance by Garcia; and a hot, bluesy 13-minute excursion labeled "KY Jam," which hints at the "Wang Dang" that would appear two nights later, but also goes to some other cool spaces.

Our decades-spanning video tour concludes with View From The Vault II, a show from (long-gone) RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, on June 14, 1991. A few months after Brent Mydland's death in the summer of '90, the Dead had returned to the road as a septet, with the keyboard slot occupied by two players — Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby. Vince, formerly of The Tubes, was chosen as the permanent replacement for Brent. But Hornsby and his grand piano (and occasional accordion) were on hand for nearly every Dead show from the fall of '90 to the spring of '92, and he certainly had a huge impact on the band's sound. A confident and inventive soloist and accompanist, Hornsby seemed to have an especially close musical relationship with Garcia. Their music together is filled with bright conversation, spirited mutual searches of the unknown and also a ton of little musical in-jokes.

The '91 RFK Stadium concert captures this incarnation of the group at its finest, laying down thick layers of interweaving parts and fearlessly jamming on some of the group's most challenging material. The second set, for instance, opens with a potent version of the much-loved trilogy "Help On The Way" › "Slipknot!" › "Franklin's Tower," moves into "Estimated Prophet" and then offers up an interstellar "Dark Star" (a tune Hornsby clearly relished playing at every opportunity). The heartfelt ballads "Stella Blue" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" show that this lineup wasn't just about power-playing, either. "Maggie's Farm" turns up in the first set (it's a double-Dylan night!), as does "Jack-A-Roe," "Black-Throated Wind" and "The Music Never Stopped."

This DVD's bonus footage returns to RFK a year earlier for a portion of one of Brent's last shows. We get a very different-sounding "Dark Star," as well as "Victim Or The Crime," "Foolish Heart" and Phil leading the group through a reassuring and hopeful "Box Of Rain": "Believe it if you need it; if you don't, just pass it on…"

There's an oft-quoted Bill Graham statement about the Dead that was plastered on a wall outside of Winterland for years: "They're not the best at what they do — they're the only ones that do what they do." It was true when the Dead were around, and it is still true 17 years after the group played their last notes together. The powerful alchemy that made the Grateful Dead the unique beast it was is evident in every show in this DVD set. We see the band age before our eyes, but the music remains timeless — never moored to the group's glorious past, but always somehow right for the era in which it was performed. And that's because the band members never rested on their laurels and always trusted their collective Muse to direct them to interesting new places and weird but wonderful spaces… commercial considerations and music industry imperatives be damned.

You can find nearly the whole history of American music spread across these discs, with music encompassing rock, folk, blues, jazz, country, ragtime, soul, funk, modern classical and avant-garde elements. Where else can you hear songs by Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly, unifying anthems, party rave-ups, songs of existential longing, murder ballads, cowboy tunes, love songs, primal drums and dissonant electronics all in one place? The Grateful Dead created a rich and sumptuous psychedelic patchwork quilt stitched together with magical golden thread. Sad to say, we'll never see anything quite like them come this way again — but at least we have the recorded footage, reminding us that it wasn't just a beautiful dream…