Grateful Dead

Music, idealism, freedom: the grand task of the ’60s was, arguably, to fuse all three . . . and no band rose to that task better than the Grateful Dead, rolling through the subsequent decades on their own tie-dyed terms. A multitude of perspectives, many of them a little hazy, are required to make sense of the band’s legend, but make your way through the smoke surrounding the Grateful Dead and a band of profound artistic substance emerges. Weaving folk, blues, rock, free jazz, and even New Orleans funk into a sonic stew, the Dead used songs like “Uncle John’s Band” and “Truckin’” to sketch in vivid detail nothing short of an American mythology. Studio innovation peppers the wealth of live Dead material, in Next Steps.

In his San Francisco heyday, Jerry Garcia — who had started out in bluegrass bands before swerving towards LSD-era Haight-Ashbury — was dubbed Captain Trips. Before passing away in 1995, the Captain led his crew on countless flights both across the world and into the far corners of the cosmos. A gifted guitarist and visionary songwriter, he always radiated a mellow goodness through exalted jams like these, and the 30-year creative partnership between Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter really took off with the band’s third studio album, Aoxomoxoa (1969), a hugely experimental (and expensive) release recorded on state-of-the-art equipment: check out “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.” The longest live-jam among these Essentials is waiting for you, in Deep Cuts.

Whether embroidering a traditional folk tune or jamming their way to a far-off star on the back of an epic original, the Dead were endlessly inventive. In the end, they left behind a cryptful of sonic shape-shifters: take your time to best enjoy the layers in tracks like “Attics of My Life” from the band’s 1970 studio masterwork, American Beauty. To best appreciate the Dead, though, a full immersion in their live recordings is mandatory — and it was pressure from the band’s huge bedrock of dedicated fans, the Deadheads, that resulted in their first full-length live release, Live/Dead, featuring the jam classic “The Eleven.”

The story of the Grateful Dead is remarkable for countless reasons, and not the least of them was that the band — despite various brushes with tragedy — refused to let their counter-culture dream fade, and still lives on as an instantly understood global entity. Has there ever been a rock outfit that’s won such enduring fan devotion? Ultimately, the Dead converted the masses by keeping the Summer of Love spirit alive for nearly three decades through nonstop touring and endless jamming. Jerry Garcia’s unfettered guitar flights and the group’s righteous rhythms expanded innumerable young minds: 20 years after their arrival, the band scored its first Top 10 Pop hit in 1987 with “Touch of Grey.” These Deadhead Essentials cover the entire canvas, from groundbreaking studio cuts to legendary live jams. Open your horizons to the sounds that made the Dead immortal.