Grateful Dead Archivist Details Massive, New 80-Disc Box Set
On October 27th, 1979, the Grateful Dead pulled up to the third stop on their fall tour that year — the Cape Cod Coliseum in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts — for the first of two concerts there. It was not an auspicious setting. The venue was a long, drab box of steel and cement that typically hosted minor-league hockey games and World Wrestling Federation matches.
But that night, the Dead – guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart and keyboard player Brent Mydland, the latter in only his sixth month with the band – played one of their best shows of that road era. “They are on fire,” the group’s archivist David Lemieux tells Rolling Stone. “There was always something about the Dead in New England – they were pretty darn spectacular. But some of the jams in this one are incredible.”
Lemieux cites the half-hour joining of “Dancin’ in the Street” and “Franklin’s Tower” in the second set and a long run, right after that, through “He’s Gone” and “The Other One.” “On top of that,” Lemieux goes on, “the first set is meticulous – songs like ‘Lost Sailor’ and ‘Saint of Circumstance,’ played so beautifully.” Recorded, as usual, by the band to soundboard cassettes, that gig is, Lemieux notes, “one of the most requested shows we have in the vault.”
It will finally come out on September 18th as part of the largest box of live Dead ever officially released: Thirty Trips Around the Sun, a 50th anniversary monument of 80 CDs with 30 complete, previously unissued shows, one from each year of the Dead’s touring life. The collection – issued by Rhino in the wake of the Dead’s “Fare Thee Well” shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field on July 3rd through 5th – is now available for pre-order and is limited to 6,500 numbered sets.
The box includes a bonus vinyl 45 that bookends the concert saga. The A-side, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” is from the Dead’s earliest studio session in 1965. The B-side, “Box of Rain,” is the encore from the Dead’s final show, at Chicago’s Soldier Field on July 5th, 1995 – the last song the band played together before Garcia’s death that August.
Thirty Trips Around the Sun also comes as a lightning-bolt-shaped USB drive, in a run of 1,000. The list price, for both variations, is $699.95. A four-CD companion set, Thirty Trips Around the Sun: The Definitive Live Story 1965-1995, features one song from each show in the box, with an emphasis on rarely anthologized songs such as “The Rub” by original organist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and “Althea” from the Dead’s 1980 album, Go to Heaven.
“This is, without a doubt, the biggest thing we will ever do,” says Lemieux, who has been the Dead’s archivist since 1999, when he succeeded the late Dick Latvala. “I know we said that with Europe ’72,” referring to the 2011 beast of 22 shows from that storied tour. “But this tells the entire narrative of the Grateful Dead live: how they changed from year to year, how they grew. Lots of bands change, but they don’t grow. The Grateful Dead grew, and this set tells that story.”