The Golden Road Grateful Dead

320 Momentous Hits & Notable Tracks From The Warner Bros. Archives on Custom Metal USB Flash Drive The Equivalent of 20 CDs with Over 21+ Total Hours of Music!

Even though the two-disc WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN may have more fully anthologized the Grateful Dead's fruitful Warner years, no previous anthology has ever summarized the band's entire career, on through the slim-pickin's mid-1970s to their celebratory late-'80s comeback. In this respect, THE VERY BEST OF… can be called a nearly definitive collection. Still, this is an entry point for the casual passerby, so the psychedelic largesse of the Dead's late-'60s albums is entirely eschewed in favor of the shorter, more concise songs of their folk-rock period ("Uncle John's Band," "Friend of the Devil," etc.). Consequently, this becomes a tribute not to the improvisational warrior Dead but to the creatively songful Dead, even as we hear them age gracefully into the older, wiser "Touch of Gray," which brought them a whole new generation of admirers.

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…