As fans streamed toward Folsom Field in Boulder on Sunday evening for the second of two concerts by Dead & Company, a woman stood on the sidewalk on University Heights Avenue, just east of the venue.

By her manner and appearance she seemed not to be there for the shows, and with the crush of cars on the street I speculated that she had come out of her home to complain. She did live there, she told me, but she didn’t have complaints. I asked her about her experience with the show the previous night.

“I hardly heard it,” said the woman, Liliana (who didn’t want me to use her last name).

This surprised me, because Folsom Field towered a mere several hundred feet to the west. She added that the fans were “really nice … even if they were wearing T-shirts,” by which I took her to mean the tie-dye-wearing hippie hordes.

When the University of Colorado announced the Dead & Company shows in February, an immediate question was whether organizers could avoid the problems that plagued past concerts at Folsom.

Complaints about noise, traffic and rowdy fans largely put an end to shows at the venue after 1986, with just a handful of concerts staged in the intervening years. Until this weekend, there hadn’t been any since 2001, the year a Dave Matthews Band set went defiantly past curfew.

Current university officials seemed at first to have forgotten the venue’s troubled history, and it was easy to suspect that the push to bring stadium rock back to the football field was a hasty drive to generate revenue for the athletic department, which spearheaded the latest shows.

Few seemed as determined to make a good impression as Don Strasburg, the AEG Live Rocky Mountains senior talent buyer who promoted the Dead concerts. He insisted during a phone conversation Sunday morning that the previous night’s event — the first major concert at Folsom in 15 years — had gone off without a hitch.

Already thinking about the future, he used the words “Radiohead” and “next year” at Folsom in the same sentence. Whether Strasburg is talking to Radiohead about playing Folsom in the summer of 2017, or he just threw that out there as an example, I don’t know. But you can be sure he’s talking, right now, to major artists about playing Folsom.

Should he?

Sunday night’s show started a little after 7 p.m. There was a decent crowd, but the stadium was hardly packed — CU reported 24,303 attendees in a venue university officials have said could hold 42,000 for concerts. (Saturday’s concert was attended by 26,204, according to CU.)

My first thought was that the volume was low. Dead & Company is led by Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and includes Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, along with Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and pop-star guitarist John Mayer. The band ran through Dead staples, including “I Know You Rider,” with its line about the “cool Colorado rain,” which drew an approving roar from the crowd. Fans throughout the venue danced in the stands and on the floor for the duration of the performance.

I had been told that the mountains did funny things with sound coming from those old Folsom concerts, so I left the show halfway through the second set to investigate. By the time I got to my car at the Euclid Avenue parking facility on the north side of campus, I could barely hear the music. In fact, there were few signs at all that a rock concert was in progress nearby.

I drove up Baseline Road to Chautauqua Park and gave a listen. Nothing but the breeze. Then I headed down to Whole Foods at Baseline and Broadway. Standing in the parking lot I could hear the sharper notes of Mayer’s guitar leads. But the bass was absent, as was most of the drums.

I wonder if organizers, in an effort to avoid community complaints, ordered the volume to be set lower than usual, and if doing so detracted from the fans’ experience.

Whatever the details of their approach, it seems to have succeeded. Police reported few problems at Saturday’s show and a community complaint line received just two noise complaints for that night. Sunday’s show, as far as I’m aware, was similarly peaceful.

Not every band has the sort of kind-spirited following that Dead & Company enjoys. But given this weekend’s experience, it would be hard to fault CU for letting Folsom rock on. And if Strasburg wants to bring Radiohead to Boulder, you will hear no complaints from me.

Quentin Young: 303-473-1342, youngq@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/qpyoungnews