The Very Best of Grateful Dead

The Very Best of Grateful Dead is a single-CD compilation album chronicling all the years of the San Francisco psychedelic band the Grateful Dead. It is the first release to document every label the band recorded on: Warner Bros. Records, Grateful Dead Records/United Artists Records and Arista Records. It was released on September 16, 2003.

The Very Best of Grateful Dead
Greatest hits album by
ReleasedSeptember 16, 2003
RecordedVarious
GenreRock
Length77:05
LanguageEnglish
LabelWarner Bros./Rhino Records
ProducerJames Austin
David Lemieux
Grateful Dead chronology
Dick's Picks Volume 29
(2003)
The Very Best of Grateful Dead
(2003)
Dick's Picks Volume 30
(2003)

A songbook under the same name was released alongside this album which provides lyrics and musical tablature.

Critical reception

edit
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic     [1]

On AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said, "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. As always with the Dead, it's hard to condense the band's free-ranging, freewheeling output onto one disc [..] but the 17 tracks here do present nearly all sides of the Dead while hitting their biggest songs. [..] The collection would have been better if sequenced a little more chronologically, but nevertheless it provides a first-class introduction to a band whose catalog can often seem a little unwieldy."[1]

Track listing

edit
  1. "Truckin'" (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir) – 5:08
  2. "Touch of Grey" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:50
  3. "Sugar Magnolia" (Hunter, Weir) – 3:19
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  4. "Casey Jones" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:28
  5. "Uncle John's Band" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:46
    • Originally released on Workingman's Dead
  6. "Friend of the Devil" (Dawson, Garcia, Hunter) – 3:24
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  7. "Franklin's Tower" (Garcia, Hunter, Bill Kreutzmann) – 4:33
  8. "Estimated Prophet" (John Perry Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
  9. "Eyes of the World" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:20
  10. "Box of Rain" (Hunter, Lesh) – 5:20
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  11. "U.S. Blues" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:40
  12. "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" (Garcia) – 2:12
  13. "One More Saturday Night" (Weir) – 4:50
    • Originally released on the 1972 live album Europe '72
  14. "Fire on the Mountain" (Mickey Hart, Hunter) – 3:48
  15. "The Music Never Stopped" (Barlow, Weir) – 4:35
    • Originally released on Blues for Allah
  16. "Hell in a Bucket" (Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
    • Originally released on In the Dark
  17. "Ripple" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:10
    • Originally released on American Beauty

Personnel

edit

Technical personnel

  • James Austin – compilation producer
  • David Lemieux – compilation producer
  • Cameron Sears – album coordination
  • Robin Hurley – associate producer
  • Jimmy Edwards – product manager
  • Joe Gastwirt – remastering
  • Gary Peterson – discographical annotation
  • Vanessa Atkins – editorial supervision
  • Stanley Mouse – cover art, lettering
  • Hugh Brown – art direction
  • Linda Cobb – design
  • Michael Ochs Archive – photography
  • Bob Seidemann – photography
  • Herb Greene – photography
  • Bruce Polonsky – photography
  • Fred Ordower – photography
  • Hale Milgrim – project assistant
  • Kevin Gore – project assistant
  • Scott Pascucci – project assistant

Mark Pinkus – project assistant

  • Tim Scanlin – project assistant
  • Steven Chean – project assistant
  • Dennis McNally – project assistant
  • Jeffrey Norman – project assistant

Charts

edit

Album - Billboard

Year Chart Position
2003 The Billboard 200 69[2]
  • The album debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart on October 4, 2003. It spent 4 weeks on the chart.

References

edit
  1. ^ a b Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Very Best of Grateful Dead at Allmusic. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
  2. ^ "Billboard album chart history-Grateful Dead". Retrieved March 1, 2009.