Celebrating 50 Years of The Grateful Dead

As part of their 50th Anniversary celebration, the Grateful Dead are releasing their largest box set to date. The 80-disc compilation, named 30 Trips Around the Sun, catalogs the band’s illustrious career over thirty influential, transformative years from 1965 to 1995. With an unreleased and never-to-be-released-otherwise concert to commemorate each of these years, the band also included an exclusive track from their earliest recording sessions. The set will be available as both an 80-disc box set and a custom-lightning bolt USB drive—each packed with over seventy-three hours of music.

For a personalized touch, a limited number of 6,500 sets (a tribute to the year the band formed) are available with each box individually numbered. In addition to the CDs, the boxed set includes a gold-colored 7-inch vinyl single which bookends the band’s career. The box also comes with a 288-page book, highlighting their sweeping career and featuring different fans’ favored memories with the band, as well as a scroll, offering visual representation of the evolution of their live sound. The Grateful Dead wants to give their fans an exclusive, experiential tour of thier history as a band. As the band’s archivist and producer stated, “For those who listen to the entire box straight through, chronologically, the narrative of the Grateful Dead’s live legacy will be seen as second to none in the pantheon of music history.”

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The other limited edition version of 3o Trips Around the Sun comes on a lightning bolt shaped, gold USB drive with the Grateful Dead 50th anniversary logo engraved on the side. This limited-edition version is capped at 1,000 copies and includes all of the music from the collection in both FLAC (96/24) and MP3 formats.

On September 18th, the Grateful Dead will also be releasing a four-CD version of the collection, 30 Trips Around the Sun: The Definitive Live Story 1965-1995, and a featured essay by Dead enthusiast Jesse Jarnow as introductory samplers. However, the complete 50th Anniversary edition of 30 Trips Around the Sun is available to pre-order now on Dead.net.