Grateful Dead – The Golden Road (1965-1973)

Excess is a hallmark of Grateful Dead fandom — collecting trunkfuls of tapes that no human being could possibly listen to in their entirety more than once or twice, following the band around the world in vans, and so forth. So it should come as little surprise that the box set covering the band’s prime years as a recording act is of a similar gargantuan scale.

Every studio album and most of the live albums the band released in the 1960s and early 1970s are on this 12-CD package, as well as a whole lotta extras. Most of the original albums are garnished with bonus cuts; two CDs of unreleased material predate their first album (1967’s The Grateful Dead); and, of course, there’s a jam-packed oversize 78-page booklet, as well as liner notes for each individual disc.

And, after all’s said and done, it changes nothing. If you’re a Deadhead, you’ve probably already bought this; if not, you’re going to wonder what all of the fuss is about.

All paths were one to the Grateful Dead, who right from the beginning were combining admixtures of folk, psychedelic rock, R&B, blues, country, jug band, and unfathomable weirdness. As heard on the first disc, even on their first half-dozen demos in late 1965, they switched from an imaginatively off-kilter cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and a pass through the traditional folk-blues “I Know You Rider” to inscrutable druggy stream-of-consciousness on “Mindbender (Confusion’s Prince)” and Them-like British Invasion R&B on “Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)”.

On their first album, they reached back to distant Americana for songs learned from banjo players and old blues-jug band discs. But before 1970, finding a song to hold onto and hum was an intermittent reward, and one had the feeling the band preferred it that way.

Nothing will convince Deadheads, but it’s nonetheless true, that the group were mediocre-to-excruciating R&B and blues interpreters; that Pigpen’s presence as singer/organist was at best superfluous, at worst downright annoying; and that they never had a good lead singer. For those reasons, it is when they concentrated on songs, and on their warped Crosby, Stills & Nash-styled harmonies, that they made what were inarguably their two most cogent records, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

Those are the albums (both from 1970) that fuse multiple influences of American roots music — country, folk, cowboy-style narratives, bluegrass harmonies, and thankfully not too much blues — into an organic whole. Those are also the records that give them a place, if a tenuous one, in the ranks of those who have managed to invest deep-rooted American folk music forms with genuinely new spins and a cult appeal that eventually became mass appeal.

These albums remain available separately, which brings into question why anyone but the group’s admittedly massive fan base might need everything here. Certainly the most important unreleased material is contained on the first two CDs, which consist almost wholly of unissued tracks. Those include their late-1965 demos for Autumn Records; June 1966 sessions for Scorpio (including both sides of their scarce debut single “Stealin'”, an update of another jug band standard); and live July 1966 performances, weighted toward their trudges through the blues, although covers of “In The Pines” and “He Was A Friend Of Mine” are present too.

The bonus cuts to the familiar studio albums are largely live, and fail as essentials on three counts. If they duplicate material on the studio LPs, the concert versions are markedly inferior overall. If they don’t repeat songs on the albums, they’re often crummy blues covers. And if you want live Dead, there are more than twenty official live archive CDs from which to choose.