The Golden Road Grateful Dead

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.

During the mid-1970s, the Grateful Dead saga was unfolding like a Greek classic. The Sisyphean Wall Of Sound had nearly broken the band. From it spawned a Medusa head of countless side projects, all deliciously fruitful but woefully not the same as the whole. The chorus lay in wait, pondering the reemergence of their heroes, and wondering if "THE LAST ONE" had really been it…

The primary impetus behind this ambitious 12-disc box set is to gather all nine of the Grateful Dead's Warner Brothers titles. However, the staggeringly high quotient of previously unissued bonus material rivals – and at times exceeds – the content of those original albums. The Golden Road (1965-1973) truly has something – and usually a lot of it – for every degree of Deadhead…

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's eponymous debut studio album. What better way to celebrate than with a special album reissue series that will include two-disc deluxe editions and limited edition vinyl picture disc versions of all the group’s studio and live albums! These two-disc deluxe editions will include the original album with newly remastered sound, plus a bonus disc of unreleased recordings.

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure…

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

The Grateful Dead - The Best of The Grateful Dead (2015) [2CD] {Rhino}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 999 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 380 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 273 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 Rhino / Warner | 081227955984
Rock / Psychedelic / Folk Rock / Jam Band

Only the second major career-spanning retrospective of the Dead, The Best of the Grateful Dead – released in the spring of 2015, just before a series of farewell shows in the summer – takes advantage of the extra disc 2003's The Very Best of Grateful Dead lacked. Weighing in at 32 tracks – a full 16 cuts longer than Very Best – The Best of the Grateful Dead also follows a strict chronological sequence, so it takes a little while for the psychedelic haze to lift and the Dead to settle into the rangy, rootsy groove that characterized so much of their existence – right around "St. Stephen" and "China Cat Sunflower," both from 1969's Aoxomoxoa. From there, many – but by no means all – of the group's warhorses are marched out, all in their studio incarnations.