With the Grateful Dead turning 60 this year, you may be able guess how many CDs are included in a forthcoming epic boxed set of live shows from the band’s heyday. There’s a clue in the 50-disc package that came out for the band’s 50th birthday 10 years ago. Indeed, “Enjoying the Ride” will include, yes, a whopping 60 CDs.
Other relevant stats, some of them also including a six and a zero: Those 60 discs represent 20 shows from the 1969-1994 period, most of them complete. There are about 60 hours of music and 450 tracks in all. The set will be limited to 6,000 individually numbered packages, available only through the band’s webstore, Dead.net. And it will go for, you guessed it, $600.
Don’t imagine that the size of this collection sets any record, though. The Dead previously released two of the largest multi-CD sets ever put out: “30 Trips Around the Sun,” which topped out at 80 discs, and “Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings,” which included 73 discs. (As high-water marks go, none of these Dead packages held a candle to some big kahunas in the classical world, like 200-disc-plus boxed sets devoted to Mozart, Bach and Herbert von Karajan.)
If you’re on a budget, or if a medium-sized amount of unreleased Dead material goes a long way for you, a more economical abridgement of the set will be available on vinyl as well as CD in retail outlets. The condensed version is titled “The Music Never Stopped” and boils the roughly 450 tracks from the bigger set down to 26 select highlights. The three-CD version of that set lists for $40, and the six-LP vinyl edition will go for $150.
Full track listings have only been released for the smaller set, not the full 60-CD behemoth. But news about the big set does include the locations and dates of all 20 shows listed that will be included. (Scroll down for those.) The announcement from Rhino says that 17 of those 20 shows are included in full, while the other three had part of the taped elements missing, but they’ve made up for it on those by appending recordings from a different, adjacent night. None of the shows have been released in full before, and in fact, Rhino says only a handful of the 450-plus tracks have gone public before in any context.
You might have thought the Dead well would be about running dry by now, given the wealth of vintage shows that have been released through the “Dick’s Picks” series over the decades. And you would think wrong about that. According to archivist David Lemieux, as quoted in Rolling Stone, “only” about 400 concerts by the band have been released up to this point, which leaves at least 1,200 shows that the archivally savvy Dead put on tape but still have in the vault still up for consideration someday. (Presumably there’ll be an all-new 70-show collection released on the 70th anniversary, if CDs still exist then.)
The full 60-disc boxed set will only come out physically on CD and not on vinyl, for perhaps obvious reasons. But CD is not the only format it’ll be out in. If you are purely a digital person these days and don’t need all that packaging, the downloads can be had for cheaper — $500 for FLAC files and $400 for ALAC.
Given all the Dead live albums that have come out prior to now, you may wonder how these 20 shows were chosen, and it’s because they represent what are considered signature venues for the band in its long history, from Red Rocks in Colorado (pictured above) to Fillmores West and East.
There’s a fun asterisk to that: Lemieux told Rolling Stone that there were 21 venues he was committed to representing in the big box. But making it a 63-disc set hardly had the same ring to it, for a 60th anniversary commemoration. So the package includes one additional piece of media — a cassette tape that includes 80 minutes’ worth of a ’69 show at the Avalon in San Francisco that Lemieux could not resist throwing in.
The 60th anniversary of the Dead will also be celebrated with the offshoot group Dead & Company returning to Sphere for a second residency, which kicks off March 20 and runs through May 17. Although nothing has been announced for beyond the Sphere run, fans are convinced that that will not mark the end of the Dead’s birthday parties this year.
Bob Weir and Mickey Hart are the surviving original Dead members participating in Dead & Company, joined by John Mayer in the Jerry Garcia role. Bill Kreutzmann has retired and is no longer part of the offshoot group’s shows; another member who did not sign on with Dead & Company, Phil Lesh, died earlier this year. The band members were recently celebrated as Persons of the Year at MusiCares’ annual gala.
