As The Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary celebrations continue, the legendary jam band has announced plans to release its first-ever official greatest-hits compilation. The album, aptly and cleverly titled Gratest Hits, will hit stores on June 13.
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The retrospective features nine of the San Francisco group’s most popular and recognizable tunes, including “Casey Jones,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Truckin’,” “Fire on the Mountain,” and “Touch of Grey.”
Gratest Hits, which can be pre-ordered now, will be available on CD, via digitally formats, and as a vinyl LP. The Grateful Dead’s official website, Dead.net, is selling an exclusive blue-smoke vinyl version of the LP. Other exclusive colored-vinyl variants will be available at Target (green), Amazon Music (orange), and Walmart (magenta).
About the Dead’s Upcoming 60-CD Live Box Set, Enjoying the Ride
Shortly before the arrival of Gratest Hits, The Grateful Dead will release the massive 60-CD box set, Enjoying the Ride. The limited-edition collection, which will be released May 30 exclusively via Dead.net, explores key live moments in the band’s history. The box set includes performances spanning from 1969 through 1994, recorded at 20 different venues across the U.S.
Most of the recordings on Enjoying the Ride are previously unreleased. The box set features more than 450 tracks, with a running time exceeding 60 hours.
The collection boasts 17 full concerts recorded at various famous venues that the Dead frequented. Among them are the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco; the Fillmore East and Madison Square Garden in New York City; the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York; the Philadelphia Spectrum; Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado; and Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin.
In honor of the Grateful Dead’s tradition of allowing fans to tape the band’s concerts, the earliest show included in Enjoying the Ride is a cassette-only version of an April 5, 1969, performance at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
The CDs and cassette come packaged in a custom box inspired by fans’ experience of traveling from city to city to watch the Grateful perform across the U.S. The collection also includes a variety of photos, and a tour guide featuring liner notes, a producer’s note from longtime Dead archivist David Lemieux, and an essay by the Owsley Stanley Foundation.
The 60-CD Enjoying the Ride collection, which limited to 6,000 individually numbered copies, can be pre-ordered now. Digital versions of the box set also will be released on May 30.
Advance Tracks from the Box Set
Coinciding with the announcement of Gratest Hits, a new advance track from Enjoying the Ride was made available via digital formats. The song is a live version of “Althea,” recorded on March 14, 1981, at the Hartford Civic Center in Hartford, Connecticut. The studio version of the tune appeared on The Grateful Dead’s 1980 album, Go to Heaven.
Four other advance tracks have been released so far from the box set. Three of those performances come from a July 13, 1984, concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California—renditions of “Scarlet Begonias,” “Touch of Grey,” and “Fire on the Mountain.”
The fourth is a version of “The Music Never Stopped,” from a May 13, 1978, show at the Philadelphia Spectrum.
An Abridged Version of the Box Set Also Will Be Released
An abridged version of the box set, titled The Music Never Stopped, also will be available via various retailers on May 30. The collection will be issued as a three-CD set, a six-LP vinyl package, and digitally.
The Music Never Stopped will include at least one performance from every venue represented in the deluxe box set.
Gratest Hits Track List:
- “Casey Jones”
- “Friend of the Devil”
- “Box of Rain”
- “Sugar Magnolia”
- “Truckin’”
- “Scarlet Begonias”
- “Fire on the Mountain”
- “Estimated Prophet”
- “Touch of Grey”
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