The Grateful Dead will celebrate their 60th anniversary with a 60-CD collection, ‘Enjoying the Ride,’ featuring recordings from 25 years of live shows, spanning 1969 – 1994, with recordings from 20 different venues.
The collection includes 450 tracks, most of them previously unreleased, which translates into more than 60 hours of music.
Of the 20 shows, 17 are presented in full, with the other three containing songs curated from multiple performances at specific venues.
Dead archivist David Lemieux describes the Grateful Dead experience as akin to “running away and joining the circus,” with the 20 venues featured in the collection being where the circus took them, and the show being something fans never wanted to miss.
“Enjoying the Ride” will be released on May 30, limited to 6,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively for pre-order on Dead.net.
The set comes in a custom keepsake box inspired by the experience of traveling to legendary venues across America.
Rhino will also release a smaller compilation, “The Music Never Stopped,” on May 30, described as a “shorter route through the band’s diamond anniversary celebration.”