Along with AMERICAN BEAUTY and WORKINGMAN'S DEAD, IN THE DARK is one of the greatest Grateful Dead albums ever. Featuring numerous great songs, including "Touch Of Grey" (highly inspirational), "Throwing Stones", "Hell In A Bucket" (both highly cautionary), "West L.A. Fadeaway", "Push Comes To Shove", and "Tons Of Steel", the band sounds rejuvenated by Jerry Garcia's learning to play guitar again after lapsing into a diabetic coma the year before. This is the album where the Grateful Dead finally made the Top Ten, and with great music to boot, which was highly refreshing in an era of prefab teen pap.

I think Ton of Steel, My Brother Esau, Throwing Stones are great tracks, but overall I'd say this record is a bit overrated, especially when compared to American Beauty or Workingman's Dead. If you've already listened to those two masterpieces, then consider getting this, otherwise get them first.

If someone told you back in 1967 that this pyschedelic band The Grateful Dead would have a #1 hit 20 years from now, they would have asked you for some of the LSD you were taking. This album was the first studio the Dead had done in 7 years. Jerry had been in a coma a few years earlier, and many thought the Dead were finished as a band (and as living creatures. Garcia didn't live a really healthy lifestyle). But luckily, he survived and so did the Dead (well, at least a few years more). This is one of my favorite Dead albums, and one of their best studio albums. They are known as a live band, but I really prefer their studio stuff to the live stuff (some of their jams go on way too long). This album has the well known classic Touch of Grey, one of my favorite Dead songs. The 2nd song, Hell in a Bucket, is another great one, with one of the most intense performances by the Dead in years. I love Throwing Stones, a 7 1/2 minute track by Weir and Barlow that really jams. I saw them do this one live, and it went on for 12 minutes or so (it was awesome). The closer Black Muddy River is one of those great ballads that only Garcia and Hunter could write so well. There's really only one clunker in the batch, and that's Tons of Steel. But it doesn't detract too much.

For the record, this was the first CD I ever bought.

In the Dark is the album that seemed to catapult the Dead to new commercial success. It's also the album that in my opinion was the beginning of the end... It lead to Dead shows becoming a "scene" for people who went not to listen to the music, but to be seen at a Dead show as wasted and drunk as they could get. And no more Dead shows at theaters...if you want to catch 'em now you go to a football stadium...

Anyway, back to the album... Hey, it's no Workingmans Dead, or American Beauty, or Wake of the Flood; what it is though is a disc with a lot of good tunes that you'll always remember and want to play again and again. And when you come down to it, isn't that what you want from a record in the first place?!

This one is probably easier for some to digest as it has a more accessible sound than some of the other albums by the band. This was the album that put the band on the map commercially speaking. Those of us who were already fans at the time found it a little hard to take due to the fact that it has such a radio friendly feel. This new version has bonus tracks but some of them are only so-so. One of the songs "My Brother Esau" was a bonus track on the cassette when the album was first released. The cassette had slightly different sequencing and was arranged better. I wish for this release that they would have gone with the cassette sequencing but then I wished that back in '87 too.