Dead Eyes of London

The Best of the Grateful Dead Live is a compilation album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It contains songs that were recorded live in concert and previously released on other Grateful Dead albums. It was released on March 23, 2018.

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.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats' first album, Vol. 1, may not have cost much money to make, but the ideas behind it are solid gold. Working cheaply on clapped-out gear, guitarist/vocalist Kevin Starrs, bassist Kat, and drummer Red take all the dusty tropes of heavy metal, acid rock, biker rock, and doomy psych rock, knock them around mercilessly, then breath life back into them until they shine like new. It's defiantly lo-fi and unadorned by studio gloss, but it works. It doesn't matter that Starrs' grinding guitars sound ready to fizzle out half the time, the bass and drums are barely audible, and the vocals are murky when the songs are so hooky and the performances are so on point…

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.