Grateful Dead: The Best of the Grateful Dead | Album Review

Compared to the forthcoming Thirty Trips Around the Sun, an 80-CD box set of 30 complete, previously unissued shows, this 32-track double CD of studio highlights feels lightweight. But in practical terms this well-edited introduction to this iconic American band is of more value to the non-"Deadhead". This year is the band's 50th anniversary and though they broke up after the death of founder member Jerry Garcia in 1995, various iterations of the band still perform. Coming out of San Francisco in the 1960s, the Dead's psychedelia captured the counterculture's renegade spirit, but they grew into other genres such as the country-rock of American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. Their epic live performances encouraged a cultish fan base that has endured. But only in America. The rest of us never quite got it, though there remains much to admire.