The Very Best of Grateful Dead
Greatest hits album by
Grateful Dead
ReleasedSeptember 16, 2003
RecordedVarious
GenreRock
Length77:05
LanguageEnglish
LabelWarner Bros./Rhino Records
ProducerJames Austin
David Lemieux
Grateful Dead chronology
Dick's Picks Volume 29
(2003)		 The Very Best of Grateful Dead
(2003)		 Dick's Picks Volume 30
(2003)

The Very Best of Grateful Dead is a single-CD compilation album chronicling all the years of the San Francisco psychedelic band the Grateful Dead. It is the first release to document every label the band recorded on: Warner Bros. Records, Grateful Dead Records/United Artists Records and Arista Records. It was released on September 16, 2003.

A songbook under the same name was released alongside this album which provides lyrics and musical tablature.

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[1]

On AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said, "The Very Best of Grateful Dead marks the first attempt to do a thorough single-disc overview of the group's career, encompassing not just their classic Warner albums but also the records they cut for their own Grateful Dead/UA and Arista. As always with the Dead, it's hard to condense the band's free-ranging, freewheeling output onto one disc [..] but the 17 tracks here do present nearly all sides of the Dead while hitting their biggest songs. [..] The collection would have been better if sequenced a little more chronologically, but nevertheless it provides a first-class introduction to a band whose catalog can often seem a little unwieldy."[1]

Track listing

  1. "Truckin'" (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir) – 5:08
  2. "Touch of Grey" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:50
  3. "Sugar Magnolia" (Hunter, Weir) – 3:19
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  4. "Casey Jones" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:28
  5. "Uncle John's Band" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:46
    • Originally released on Workingman's Dead
  6. "Friend of the Devil" (Dawson, Garcia, Hunter) – 3:24
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  7. "Franklin's Tower" (Garcia, Hunter, Bill Kreutzmann) – 4:33
  8. "Estimated Prophet" (John Perry Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
  9. "Eyes of the World" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:20
  10. "Box of Rain" (Hunter, Lesh) – 5:20
    • Originally released on American Beauty
  11. "U.S. Blues" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:40
  12. "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" (Garcia) – 2:12
  13. "One More Saturday Night" (Weir) – 4:50
    • Originally released on the 1972 live album Europe '72
  14. "Fire on the Mountain" (Mickey Hart, Hunter) – 3:48
  15. "The Music Never Stopped" (Barlow, Weir) – 4:35
    • Originally released on Blues for Allah
  16. "Hell in a Bucket" (Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
    • Originally released on In the Dark
  17. "Ripple" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:10
    • Originally released on American Beauty

Personnel

Technical personnel

  • James Austin – compilation producer
  • David Lemieux – compilation producer
  • Cameron Sears – album coordination
  • Robin Hurley – associate producer
  • Jimmy Edwards – product manager
  • Joe Gastwirt – remastering
  • Gary Peterson – discographical annotation
  • Vanessa Atkins – editorial supervision
  • Stanley Mouse – cover art, lettering
  • Hugh Brown – art direction
  • Linda Cobb – design
  • Michael Ochs Archive – photography
  • Bob Seidemann – photography
  • Herb Greene – photography
  • Bruce Polonsky – photography
  • Fred Ordower – photography
  • Hale Milgrim – project assistant
  • Kevin Gore – project assistant
  • Scott Pascucci – project assistant

Mark Pinkus – project assistant

  • Tim Scanlin – project assistant
  • Steven Chean – project assistant
  • Dennis McNally – project assistant
  • Jeffrey Norman – project assistant

Charts

Album - Billboard

Year Chart Position
2003 The Billboard 200 69[2]
  • The album debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart on October 4, 2003. It spent 4 weeks on the chart.

References

  1. 1 2 Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Very Best of Grateful Dead at Allmusic. Retrieved July 4, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Billboard album chart history-Grateful Dead". Retrieved March 1, 2009.
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