When the Grateful Dead celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015, the band hardly downplayed the moment: The surviving members congregated for a series of Fare Thee Well shows and released a 50-disc box set of previously unreleased live cuts. Phil Lesh’s passing last fall put an end to any possible plans for a 60th-anniversary reunion show this year. But the Dead and its related company, Rhino, are still going big with another, even heftier package to mark six decades since the band (then called the Warlocks) played at Magoo’s Pizza in Menlo Park, California, in May 1965.
Arriving on May 30, a new box, Enjoying the Ride, will include largely complete shows from 20 venues that were long associated with the Dead: three discs per show, totaling a staggering 60 discs. “I’m traveling today, and it’s almost the size of my little suitcase,” David Lemieux, the band’s dedicated archivist, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the kind of thing you want to put on your mantelpiece.”
Lemieux says the idea for the limited-edition set, which incorporates concerts from 1969 to 1994, originated partly from his experience at Dead shows. “In 1987, I was seeing my second-ever Dead show, in Toronto,” he says, “and a friend of mine came up to me and said, ‘Dude, if they do Alpine [Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin] again, you gotta go.’ He said the show was fantastic, but he was also talking about the venue and the setting. So we started thinking about a box focused on the Dead on the road and also the Deadheads’ journey on the road to those venues.”
Enjoying the Ride — a title taken, of course, from In the Dark‘s “Hell in a Bucket” — includes shows recorded at Deadhead destinations like New York’s Madison Square Garden and Fillmore East, San Francisco’s Fillmore West and Winterland, Colorado’s Red Rocks, the Boston Garden, the Hartford Civic Center in Connecticut, the Capitol in Port Chester, New York, and more. With the exception of a few songs here and there, like one from the Fillmore East in 1971, Lemieux says none of these tapes have been released before. (For those who can’t afford the 60-disc, $599 set, a more compact version, The Music Never Stopped, will distill the set into three CDs for $34 or six LPs for $149..)
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Lemieux encountered a few challenges as he worked on the project over the last few years. Of the 20 shows, 17 are heard in full. But when it came to a set at the Boston Garden in 1972, he discovered that the last reel — about 25 minutes — was missing from the Dead’s vault. To compensate, Lemieux included a version of “Dark Star” from the same venue the following night. A four-night stand at the Fillmore West in 1969 also had to be carefully culled due to problematic tapes.
After selecting the 20 venues, Lemieux realized that another one, the Avalon in San Francisco, needed to be honored as well. “Avalon came in at 21,” he says, “but we didn’t want to include another CD, and we didn’t want to lose any of the venues selected.” A touch of old-world flair resulted: a cassette with 80 minutes of that 1969 show will also be jammed into the box’s elaborate packaging.
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Enjoying the Ride arrives in a year that will also find Dead & Co. celebrating its tenth anniversary with a series of shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Another edition of Lemieux’s Dave’s Picks series, a Baltimore show from March 1973, will also drop next month.
And when the Dead turn 70, 80, or even 100, don’t expect these sorts of collections to have wound down. Of the roughly 2,300 shows the Dead played until Jerry Garcia’s death, about 1,700-1,800 were recorded, says Lemieux. Only a little under 400 have been released — which means that at least 1,200 to 1,300 full show tapes remain in the vault, ready for future endeavors.
