Grateful Dead discography

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Main article: Grateful Dead

This is an annotated listing of the recordings of the American rock band the Grateful Dead.

[edit] Traditional album release

More so than most bands, the Grateful Dead frequently released live albums that filled the role of conventional studio albums, in that they were recently recorded and often contained newly-written material not on any studio album. An integral part of the contemporaneous evolution of the band, such live albums are included in this section, but it is split into two subsections, studio albums and "current" live albums.

[edit] Studio albums

[edit] "Current" live albums

[edit] Compilations/Box sets

[edit] "Retrospective" live albums

[edit] Traditional releases

[edit] Dick's Picks

In the 1990s and 2000s, the Grateful Dead released numerous live concert recordings from their archives in three concurrent series. The "From the Vault" series are remixes of multi-track recordings made at the time of the concerts. The "View from the Vault" series are also multi-track remixes, but are released simultaneously as albums on CD and as concert performance videos on DVD. (The first three volumes were also released on VHS videotape.) Both of these series are included in the "Retrospective" live albums list above.

The third series of concert releases is Dick's Picks, which are based on two-track concert recordings. Because the options for remixing two-track recordings are much more limited than for multi-track recordings, the sound quality of the Dick's Picks series, while generally very good, is not quite as high as that of the other official releases of live recordings, as explained in the various "caveat emptor" notices on the CD boxes.

The Dick's Picks series, which started in 1993, was named for Grateful Dead tape vault archivist Dick Latvala, who selected shows with the band's approval and oversaw production of the albums. After Latvala's death in 1999, David Lemieux became the Dead's tape archivist and took over responsibility for the Dick's Picks releases. Latvala and Lemieux worked with recording engineer Jeffrey Norman, who was in charge of mastering the CDs.

Volume 15 and later were released in HDCD format. This provides enhanced sound quality when played on CD players with HDCD capability, and is fully compatible with regular CD players.

[edit] Digital Download series

In the summer of 2005 the Dead began offering downloadable versions of both their existing live releases, and a new Internet-only series, The Grateful Dead Download Series, that is available exclusively through both their own GDStore.com (which offers the albums in both 256 kbit/s mp3 files and FLAC files -- a preferred audio standard for those who archive Dead and other fan-made live recordings on the Internet) and the iTunes Music Store (which offers them in their 128 kbit/s AAC format). Not surprisingly, these Internet-only albums have met with the same success as their CD-based brethren.

[edit] Videos

Grateful Dead videos.

This section does not include the "View from the Vault" videos, which were also released as audio CDs and are listed in "Retrospective live albums" above:

• View from the Vault, Volume One
• View from the Vault, Volume Two
• View from the Vault, Volume Three
• View from the Vault, Volume Four
• The Closing of Winterland
• Truckin' Up to Buffalo

[edit] Singles

[edit] Problem with Archive.org

In November of 2005, the Dead's management outraged fans by asking the operators of the popular Internet Archive (archive.org) to stop making concerts available for download, and to offer only streamcast recordings instead. The band's spokesman, Dennis McNally, claimed such a repository "doesn't represent Grateful Dead values" because it doesn't foster one-to-one connections between fans. However, David Gans, host of a syndicated radio program, "The Grateful Dead Hour," speculates that the band is motivated by money, noting "when they were making $50 million a year on the road, there wasn't a lot of pressure to monetize their archives."[1]

The removal of the Dead's concerts from Archive.org created a storm of protest, in addition to a rapidly spreading boycott of the band's remaining commercial products. [citation needed] Several days after the announcement that the concerts had been removed, Brewster Kahle of Archive.Org made a cryptic announcement that audience tapes of the concerts would again become available, though so-called board tapes would only be available as streaming audio. Kahle claimed that the whole affair had been a "misunderstanding," but John Perry Barlow, one of the band's lyricists, claimed that concerts had been restored after several members of the band had backed away from their earlier opposition after realizing they had created a public relations "catastrophe."