Dead to Release 12-CD Box
Tuesday June 12 02:33 PM EDT
dailynews.yahoo.com
The Grateful Dead will give fans a generous peek into their
considerable vaults with the October 16th release of The Golden
Road 1965-1972, a twelve-CD compilation that will feature digitally
re-mastered versions of the band's 1967 to 1973 albums on Warner
Bros., as well as live and unreleased material.
"Basically, what we tried to do was load up each CD to the maximum," says James Austin, senior
A&R director/special projects for Rhino, who is working on the box set in conjunction with drummer
Mickey Hart, singer/guitarist Bob Weir and the new vaultmaster general, David Lemieux. "In other
words if an album was forty minutes long, we added another thirty-five to thirty-six minutes so we
could get right up to the full-length of the CD . . . The only one that isn't touched is Live Dead
because we all feel it's a perfect record and that one has no room for bonus material anyway."
Slated to retail for $159.00, the box will include a two-disc set being assembled by longtime Dead
publicist Dennis McNally, called "The Birth of the Dead," which features tracks recorded before the
Dead signed with Warner Brothers. "One [disc] will be studio, one will be live," McNally says of the
early recordings. "It was recorded between late '65 and the end of 1966, primarily '66, and they
basically sound like a smoking blues band, which was what they were before they started really
getting experimental. We've got some absolute jewels. There's some wonderful material most
Deadheads have never heard."
Deadheads' taping practices are legendary but Austin said Lemieux -- who took over custody of the
Dead vaults after Dick Lavalta of Dick's Picks (a series of authorized live Dead releases) fame
passed away -- has unearthed some surprise finds that even the legions of cassette-trading fans don't
know about.
"He's just recently gone through the vault with a fine-tooth comb, looking for stuff they didn't think
was there, they didn't know was there," Austin says. "There's some major discoveries." Austin
declined to specify what these "discoveries" might entail, saying the track listing for the comp is still
being finalized at this time.
The set has been culled from what Austin estimates to be 200 to 250 hours of tapes, and he pegs the
biggest surprise in those many hours of listening as hearing the Dead display studio chops, something
of a shocker for a band with a well-known propensity for aimless jamming.
"It's always been thought that the Grateful Dead were just a great live band, which they always were,
and their longevity on the road, attracting those Deadheads has proven that," Austin says. "But the
band was a great studio band -- not just [the] passable studio band as a lot of people thought."
Austin, an avowed Deadhead, says the process of adding Surround Sound 5.1 to the original masters
has changed his perception of certain albums, American Beauty in particular. "I was absolutely blown
away by how beautiful it sounded," he says. "There were some instruments like Jerry's pedal steel that
was buried, and you hear voices better. There's more going on in those records than anybody ever
dreamed."
COLIN DEVENISH
(June 11, 2001) |
