Grateful Dead

Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead is a live album consisting of audio and video recordings from the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead concerts performed by surviving members of the Grateful Dead Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, with Trey Anastasio, Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti…

We are thankful to be here today celebrating the Grateful Dead's most lauded studio masterpiece with a 50th ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION. Available on October 30th, the three-CD set will feature the original album with newly remastered audio, plus one of the most requested archival recordings in the Dead's vault - the unreleased concert recorded on February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY. On stage that night, the Dead debuted a whole new batch of songs, five in all: “Wharf Rat,” “Playing In The Band,” “Bertha,” “Greatest Story Ever Told” and “Loser.”

It only seems like there has been an endless stream of Grateful Dead compilations. In reality, there has only been a handful, and the most notable of those were released while the band was still an active recording and touring unit in the '70s – and before they had belated chart success in the late '80s, 20 years after their debut album. So, Warner/Rhino's 2003 collection The Very Best of Grateful Dead marks the first attempt to do a thorough single-disc overview of the group's career, encompassing not just their classic Warner albums but also the records they cut for their own Grateful Dead/UA and Arista.

The 14th installment of Dave's Picks is devoted to another 1972 show, this one taken from an appearance at New York's Academy of Music on March 26, 1972 - i.e. before the Dead headed across the Atlantic for their legendary series of European shows. Generally, it's a pretty muscular performance, getting off the ground with a driving "Greatest Story Ever Told" and featuring a hefty dose of Pigpen in the first set, including "Mr. Charlie" and the one-two punch of "Big Railroad Blues" and "Big Boss Man." Here, his blues leanings seem of piece with the other roots the Dead lay down early - Jerry Garcia sings Hank Williams' "You Win Again," Bob Weir turns Marty Robbins' "El Paso" into one of his signature cowboy rambles - but by the time Pigpen surfaces toward the end singing the crawling "The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)"…

The ongoing Dave's Picks archival series takes on the lifelong challenge of presenting some of the best of the Grateful Dead's endless back catalog of live sets, cherry-picking recordings from nearly four decades and literally thousands of gigs and revisiting them with refurbished sound and meticulously detailed presentation. Vol. 13 of the series presents the full three-set performance from the band's February 24, 1974 date, the third of three nights at San Francisco's Winterland Arena. This date finds the band in fantastic form, using a sound system that predated their famous "wall of sound" amplifier system by just a month, and spinning their cosmic wheels through a spirited first set of rockers like "U.S. Blues," "Candyman," and "China Cat Sunflower" before relaxing into more wide-reaching territory in the second and third sets on extensive jams like "Weather Report Suite"…