Going to see this on Thursday evening:

Looking forward to that.

This was fun

Does anyone know the presale password?

treyniacs

Spoiler: show

jk

You know its a simple code. Pot? Drugs? Chicago?

I saw a Grateful Dead tie at JC Penny today. I bet Jerry is rolling over in his grave.

its ok

* tie dyed

It was a cool looking tie. Actually not even tie dyed which was a surprise. It's like when I see Nirvana and Hendrix shirts at Target and Walmart. Something seems off there.

I'm giving props where props are due - 200,000 tickets sold in about 3 minutes. Damn. Hot damn.

So these farewell shows are basically the surviving members of the Grateful Dead playing with some other jam-band dude playing in Jerry's spot, and the tickets are going for like thousands of dollars? I don't get it -- isn't this exactly the same thing these guys have been doing for the past decade?

I don't understand how you can get the full dead experience around a group of millionaires

I'm not sure I'd shell that out if they resurrected jerry..

Kinda bums me out at the thought of what I'd have to spend to see zeppelin or floyd if that ever happened..

All that said they could keep their 10k$ seats n I'll go see dark star orchestra for 20 bucks in this awesome little venue near my house.. actually The dead 50th will probably be aired somewhere local I bet

I'm somewhat into the Dead. I don't have many live albums, but a solid chunk of studio albums. What do you all consider to be their best studio albums? Like top 5?

Aoxomoxoa
American Beauty
Workingman's Dead
Wake of the Flood

Those would be my obvious picks, and for my final, less obvious pick I would probably say "In the Dark" (unless "Anthem of the Sun" is being counted as a studio album, in which case that takes precedence). There are some middle albums in the '70's ("Mars Hotel," "Blues For Allah," "Terrapin Station") that contain much better songs than the ones on "In the Dark," but in my opinion these songs are infinitely superior in a live setting, to the point of the studio versions barely being worth your attention (though I do think the studio version of "Terrapin" is wonderful). But "In the Dark" came at a time when the Dead weren't really giving stellar live performances anymore -- some decent improvisations like always, but Jerry's slurring and significantly compromised vocal range rarely did the songs themselves justice. For my money the studio album is where those songs are most successfully realized.

Apart from that, I think the earliest contemporaneous live albums -- "Live/Dead," "Europe '72," and the eponymous album frequently nicknamed "Skull and Roses" -- are all essential, and will repeat very few of the songs that appear on the studio records (in the case of the latter two, some of the performances were touched up in studio to make the songs more presentable, as from a commercial standpoint these live albums constituted these songs' "original versions"). Beyond there -- have fun digging.

But the early studio albums, especially Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa in their original, far stranger and far more primitive mixes, are surprisingly fairly enjoyable to my ears now. They're dated, sure, but they hold some legitimate interest for me. Please note that Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa were both heavily remixed in 1972 by Garcia and Lesh, who listened back to the albums and felt embarrassed by them. This was a stupid move, because the version of Aoxomoxoa most people have heard sounds as sterile and dreadfully dull as I used to think this band was almost across the board. And trying to sanitize Anthem of the Sun, which is a gigantic and ridiculous studio/live collage utilizing editing methods that anticipated Can, was just a losing endeavor from the start. They only succeeded in making those records sound tedious and boring. In their original mixes, both records sound like they were made by a pleasantly wacky, sloppy, folksy garage band who were tripping their brains out on industrial strength acid.

truth

That looks like a fun night.

An 80 disc box set is on the way for you Dead heads out there...

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/premi ... t-20150602