The Grateful Dead, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary, contained multitudes. Its best music was both of the Sixties and out of time, improvised in the moment yet collected like relics by the faithful — first on traded cassettes, then CDs and now vinyl. Its members played as though they were of one mind, but they came together from very different places — Phil Lesh from the avant-garde, Pig Pen from R&B, Bob Weir from blues and country and Jerry Garcia from every genre all at once. And although the Dead disbanded in 1995, after Garcia died, they never really went away: The successor group Dead & Company will play three shows in San Francisco on the first weekend of August 2025, and the band just released a 60-CD archival set, Enjoying the Ride. In a way, the Dead are peaking right now.
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In the name of stunt journalism, I wanted to listen to the 60-CD album, which includes 20 shows, 17 complete, adding up to 60 hours of music, recorded between 1969 and 1994. Then I realized that this would take the better part of a week. Instead, I listened straight through to The Music Never Stopped, a three-CD, four-hour collection of highlights. It’s familiar ground for me: I’ve been a Dead fan since the late Eighties, and I saw the group about a dozen times between 1988 and 1993. And I’ve heard enough concert recordings over the years that I recognized the compilation’s 1984 jam of “Scarlet Begonias,” “Touch of Grey” and “Fire on the Mountain.” The band played fast in those years.
The Music Never Stopped plays like a sampler platter of incredible performances: a stunning 1978 version of the title track, all funk tempo and guitar madness; a 1971 cover of “Hard to Handle” that shows its roots in R&B; a searching, jazzy take on “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes of the World” from 1979. It shows the sheer range of a band that put its own stamp on more kinds of American music than any other, from the traditional folk of “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad” to the early rock of “Not Fade Away” to its own nods to rock (“Brown-Eyed Women”), psychedelia (“Bird Song”) and jazz (“Let it Grow”). Multitudes. For all that, fans may find that it lacks the organic throughline of a single show, since it jumps around so much in years and styles, and it’s too dense to be a good introduction to the group. (For that, start with American Beauty or Live/Dead.)
Among the most remarkable things about the Grateful Dead, and there are plenty, is that the band has released far more music in the past decade than it did in its first three. Yes, really. Until 1995, the Dead was really a touring act. In its first three decades, it released 13 studio albums — of which only Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty hold up well as recordings (though my colleague Dan Rys thinks I’m nuts) — and nine live albums. It’s not much for a band that by the late Eighties would play the New York area three times a year — a few spring performances in suburban arenas, a couple of summer concerts at Giants Stadium and as many as nine shows at Madison Square Garden in September. Then, in 1993, the band started to release “Dick’s Picks” albums of past concerts, which took its name from band archivist Dick Latvala.
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At the time, most Dead fans listened to concerts on cassette, which the band allowed them to record and trade, but not make a business of selling. The idea of curated concerts on CD was a revelation. And over the next decade, the band put out another 34 volumes of “Dick’s Picks” (36 in total), plus 12 “Grateful Dead Download Series recordings,” eight retrospective live albums, and a half dozen live box sets, plus a compilation of Bob Dylan covers and one of live performances handpicked by Lesh. The Dead was just getting started, though.
In 2006, the Dead signed a deal with Warner Music’s Rhino Entertainment to manage its official albums (its early ones came out on Warner but it released others independently and then on Arista), live recordings and direct-to-consumer merchandise business. (The band renewed the deal in 2016.) Since then, under Rhino President and “resident Deadhead” Mark Pinkus, the label has released 17 “Road Trips” albums; 55 “Dave’s Picks” albums (named for Dead archivist Dave Lemieux); 15 box sets, including a 73-CD set of every show of the band’s 1972 tour of Europe and an 80-CD 50th anniversary box, plus a variety of smaller of box set highlights and vinyl editions of individual shows. Some Dave’s Picks albums have come out on vinyl, while others are marketed with glassware, coasters or other tchotchkes.
As I said, peaking. The vault is not infinite — there are only so many tapes of so many shows — but there’s plenty in there. It’s a good business: The 60-CD Enjoying the Ride was limited to 6,000 copies, but it sold for $600, and it will help market The Music Never Stopped, which is available on CD, vinyl and streaming services. Rhino has never shared much information about this business, but a rough estimate suggests that the Dead brings in about a gold record’s worth of revenue in physical albums alone — at a good margin, since the recordings already exist, not much marketing is needed and most items are only sold by mail order. This also fuels a merchandise business that is astonishing in its scope.
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If you listen closely to The Music Never Stopped, you can hear this kind of potential — the way the band could play psych-rock or folk or another genre well enough to suggest that this was all it did, but in fact it was only a small part of a bigger picture. Listen even closer and you might hear something that sounds like nothing else but itself — instantly identifiable but different enough that you can’t stop listening, comparing, even following. To me, those differences can be stark — I’m not much interested in most of what the Dead did from 1979 to 1988. But when the band was at its best — I’d say 1969 to 1972, most of 1977 and parts of late-1989 and early-1990 — there wasn’t anyone better. That kind of specificity might sound ridiculous to the uninitiated — is there that big a difference between spring and fall 1989? To me there is, and I’m hardly alone. The Dead was a cult band so big that it could not only sell out stadiums — it could do so for multiple shows, every summer, in cities it played three times a year.
The Dead’s catalog is an odd one because most of its albums just aren’t that good, and only one had a real hit, in “Touch of Grey.” Its best recordings were never intended to be recordings at all — they’re in-the-moment improvisations, captured on tape and stored in a vault, that somehow retain their immediacy decades later. Some of them bring back memories, like the Road Trips recording of the first show I went to, when a high school buddy rhapsodized about how amazing it was to see this concert outdoors, under the stars — when we were in an indoor arena. OK, maybe you had to be there for that one. But the recording sounds pretty great even if you weren’t — even if you weren’t even born yet. So do many of these other meticulously packaged moments, created in and for a specific time and place, that seem to have taken on a life of their own.
