Both dates sold out, but the crowd both in and outside the building remained of manageable size. Instead, the headliner was listed only as ''Formerly The Warlocks,'' in a nod to the Dead's short-lived original name from 1965.

But the band and its promoters came up with an ingenious workaround: they scheduled two shows at the Mothership that were not featured in any announcements of the other stops on the Dead's fall tour tickets for the two concerts were put on sale just 10 days in advance of the dates, rather than weeks or even months in advance, as was usually the case only local ticket outlets were used, with no mail order sales or availability on national electronic ticketing chains and in the sneakiest bit of all, the words ''Grateful Dead'' were never used in advertising the shows. This was just two years after the stunning commercial success of the multi-platinum album ''In The Dark'' and its breakout Top Ten single, ''Touch Of Grey.'' The accompanying increase in the Dead's audience base made the idea of playing a relatively small room like Hampton Coliseum problematic, and local authorities were nervous, to put it mildly, about what they envisioned as an unmanageable influx of humanity, both with and without tickets. The Dead logged 21 shows at Hampton between 19, with the most legendary of these almost certainly being the two that the band played on October 8 th and 9 th of 1989. After four triumphant shows split between two iconic venues in the New York metropolitan area, Dead & Company headed south to finish off the East Coast mini-tour called the Fall Fun Run with a couple of nights in a spot with its own special place in Grateful Dead lore: Virginia's Hampton Coliseum, known and loved by live music fans as ''The Mothership'' for its distinctive design and multicolored exterior lighting, suggesting a late-1960s architect's idea of what a spacecraft might look like in some distant future.

Grateful dead space ship hampton