Grateful Dead

One of the few luxuries in which I indulge is the purchase of all music made available by GD and Jerry. Although the music is the most important thing (by a zillion times), I actually do like some of the extras they have thrown into some of the boxes. For instance, the repros of the sheets that went out with mail order tickets that listed campgrounds and had messages from the band on the other side. I never thought to save those things. On the other hand, if it adds much to the expense, I can appreciate how it makes it easier for many to purchase the releases if the cost were kept as low as possible, and I certainly wouldn't complain if the extras were eliminated. I'm just saying that I do like them, especially the books. I enjoy having as much documentation about the shows as possible and like reading about them from people who were there or whomever they get to discuss background stories, context, personal experiences, technical information about tape restoration or tape re-acquisition, etc ad nauseum :) Whichever way they decide to do, smaller boxes with less bling, or larger boxes with tons of do-dah, I'm going to be in. There really isn't any era of their music I don't enjoy. Sure, I don't particularly want lack-luster performances (from any era), but I find that it is rare to find no gems even in those. I freely admit that I am not a very critical deadhead. That does not mean I can't distinguish bad, fair, good, great, and magically-inspired. To me, it just means that I'm lucky that I pretty much enjoy the whole trip, warts and all. With that in mind, some other shows I was at that I would love to see released, not just because I was there but because each of these would make fine releases would include: The '84 shows in Cuyahoga Falls, OH and Indianapolis, IN. The 3/24/86 (middle show of 3) at the Spectrum in Philadelphia (on youtube) The '88 and/or '86 Alpine Valley shows; I enjoyed every Alpine run, but these and the '89 run were, I thought, particularly good. and a few of the '90's Soldier Field shows were really great (not all of them). 4/11/87 at the UIC Pavilion has one of the greatest Terrapin's every played, but for maximum enjoyment you need the crowd. During the ending part, the way the crowd erupted each time they came back for another go-round was incredible. They didn't just erupt all at once. As the music climaxed each time, the crowd climaxed right along with them, pushing them to keep going longer and further; any analogy that sentence brings to mind is quasi-intentional after the fact as well as being apropos. My sister, who was at this show also, recently reminded me (when I brought this show up in conversation) how Ms. Brightman had the lights swing out to directly point at the crowd each time they began to climax again, further instigating the crowd. It worked. You can hear the crowd and the band riding each other to the heights. There are decent copies of this show on the archive. I'm going to get back to some '90's now. Oh, one more thing about backups. If you backup to something like an external drive, or anything that resides in your home/apartment. It is a good idea to make a duplicate to keep offsite somewhere. If your collection AND backup are destroyed in a fire, flood, or simply stolen, then your backup won't do you any good at home.

There are some Grateful Dead releases that give me a "Gotta Get This One, Other One Feeling" that sez: Please Order NOW! It pulls a trigger that allows me rationalize a rare credit card purchase v.s. having the most recent, best sounding available Dead show that I want. I think all of the Spring '90 shows are keeper's. When I saw how soon this box-set ship's to me I got excited. Usually I order then forget that I ordered until it shows up in the mailbox. However these show's arrive in just 4 short weeks !!! My last Brent shows were Cal State U. Dominguez Hills LA, May 5th and 6th 1990. I always dig bands that would use a B-3 organ plus Brent's 4 leslie speaker cabinets filtering that distinct organ sound in stereo all around the stage. These were all Jerry n Brent's last shows. After Brent passed, the bands number of song's selected for a tour was slashed in half. So for me I will look forward to having a lot of fun digesting this release. At Nassau Coliseum we would see the remote truck, daily parked just around the corner from the truck ramp. I believe the crew stayed at our Marriott in the Coliseum's parking lot. So now 24 years later (pinch-me), I have just placed an order to own the actually disc, from the 24-track Master tapes made in that remote truck. I listened to one of these teaser-tracks on GD radio and the sound CRUSHED on internet 64kb radio. Also on here too! (Pasted from Dead.net) HDCD provides higher resolution when played in an HDCD-equipped CD player, and offers superior sound when played in regular CD players. HDCD CDs can be played in all CD players. Cub sez: but why would you?

"The reason the SSDD has not sold out is because you can buy it on Amazon for less then Dead.net. You do not get any of the extras, but you get the music in its entirety and the dvd. For many, that is all they want." Very, very true. There's an unlimited version out there, with no cap on sales, since this is a release that the folks at Rhino must have deemed to be in high demand and that would appeal to non-Deadheads. I'm not surprised that the 30,000 SSDD special edition CD/DVD pack hasn't sold out. I mean, I'm someone who has bought everything they've put out since the days of Dick Latvala, but if I had known that there was going to be a unlimited, less expensive CD/DVD SSDD set that just didn't have the cool packaging, I would have certainly bought that one. Instead, I dropped over 50 bucks on 3 cds and a DVD, because they hadn't announced the wide release when I placed my order.

I, too, wish the cost of this box set was cheaper, but I'm not sure that the cost would decrease significantly without all of the schwag. Most of the releases here average $10 per disc, whether it's Dave's Picks ($29 for three CD's), or Spring 1990 TOO ($240 for 23 CD's). So that's about $10 or so for the extra trinkets. I agree that they're a novelty, and not necessary, but it doesn't look like they add that much to the cost. I've held off on ordering the new Spring 1990 box set. It is expensive. Then I heard the songs... WOW! They sound OUTSTANDING! So I picked up a little extra summer work and now I'm going to order it.

Spacebro - Like you I prefer the physical media. I care more about the music than the trinkets. I would prefer to have just music versions. I'll thumb through the book once. In fact, for Spring90 I copied the music to my pc and put everything back in the shipping box, since that was cool. It wasn't until recently where I re-organized my cabinet in prep for S90TOO, that I took the box out of the shipping box and pulled the CD cases out and added them to the rest of the Dead CDs in chronological order. What I was initially replying to is that there are cloud services - amazon, apple, etc. But there are also backup specific services like carbonite, mozy, dropbox, idrive. People might want to check it out. But note to most users they take a long time to copy unless you want to spend some scratch... I have my music on a pair of mirrored hard drives. I periodically back them up to a couple of USB drives and also a Seagate Central (like USB drive, but has ethernet cable too for a cheap network attached solution). I suspect I will probably eventually go to an online service if I don't build or buy some more robust NAS systems with RAID6 parity protection.

I think they planned well with Spring 90 Part 2 with downloads, a single hard copy show, and the big box so I am not surprised that it is not sold out yet. It will. Come December there will be holiday purchases. Having said all of that, small boxes are the way to go with the Winterlands, Fillmore West 69 being larger with a book, Spring 77 in an even larger and a more handsome box with bigger book too. The Spring 90s and E72 Titanic Box are great but being somewhat of a completist and sympathetic to those Heads with less money for everything I vote for more like The Winterlands yet favoring Spring 77 for a future release model. Spring 77 was a compromise and a very beautiful one at that! As others have noted -- eventually all limited releases sell out. Smaller boxes could mean more variety of years and decades? Yes, yes, yes, customer rewards discounts are a fabulous idea. And Now I urge Dave to consider N.Y.C. MSG September 1979 as a box set with Claney's (?) Alaska 1980 Land of the Midnight Sun Box. Many here would be very, very happy with those releases. Space Bro gets a box of his choosing as well,but, after the two boxes above. God Bless Bobby and his wife and children. Heal, brother, heal.

The reason the SSDD has not sold out is because you can buy it on Amazon for less then Dead.net. You do not get any of the extras, but you get the music in its entirety and the dvd. For many, that is all they want. I myself bought the first Spring '90 Box and I jumped on TOO as soon as I received the email notice. I cannot wait! Judging by the Listening Parties, the sound is going to be phenomenal. But other then the book that is included, I really have no use for the other doodads, ticket stubs, etc. that are included. And I know that I will read the book once and then put it away for many, many years. I would like to see the price of these box sets kept lower by eliminating all of the extras. Just give us the music in a nice case, like they do with the DaP releases and let it go at that. I have a few downloads but I prefer to have the physical discs. As SB pointed out, I burn all of my downloads to discs anyway. I love my iPod, but I have had two of them shit the bit with no notice and watched thousands of hours of music disappear in an instant. Rock on

I would agree that the download options make the "rush to buy" priority for some a little lower than previous limited edition sets where no download options were offered. In regards to comparisons from the Dead from the era of this set to '69 or even '77 in particular, and line-up performance quality and sales figures, I can point to the May '77 box as one specific example. That box, which was released June 11th 2013 and significantly less expensive than this set has only recently sold out. One could even take the 8/27/72 Sunshine Daydream release, and being a show that is widely considered as THE most popular show the Dead ever played (I would say definitive), which btw was/is even far less expensive yet, was released 11 months and a day ago or so and still hasn't sold out of the limited editions. Certainly that release and it's availability in multiple formats and volume could again dictate why that particular show, and one of such a highly regarded caliber for many, and from the most saturated year release wise, is still available to purchase. That one, I am surprised hasn't sold out of the 30,000 units. The vinyl version did sold out quickly though at 5000 units. This leads to a question. Does era, price and volume play a role in how fast and why certain releases have sold out faster? I would say, both none of the above and all of the above. I go back to the Road Trips series and point out that April Fools '88 was one of the very first of that series to sell out right along with Fillmore 5/15/70 and Denver '73. Many of the '70s era RTs releases still have yet to sell out. Even the '93 Cal Expo release has sold out. Perhaps there are other factors as to why some eras and/or particular releases sell out faster than others, and perhaps not. The Dave's Picks series subscriptions, which have heavily slanted heavily towards the '70s, and even cheaper yet individually, after three years has yet to sell out. Perhaps the subscriptions will set out for 2015. Another factor to consider is that there are likely many people who buy up multiple copies, whether to give them to friends and acquaintances and/or to resell. So am I surprised that S'90 (TOO) hasn't sold out yet? No, not really, but it will. On another sort of related point... Would I purchase downloads of releases? I have but would rather not. The real estate that physical media takes up versus electronic storage is an acceptable trade-off for me. If I have physical media taking up storage space, I'd rather it be factory manufactured with the sleeves and artwork rather than CDRs or recordable DVDs, especially if I spend money on them. A recent incident happened where about 70% of the music on my computer just suddenly vanished. I have disc back-ups of most of it o am ok, but am bummed that the handful of purchased downloads on my hard drive have vanished. Thankfully I haven't invested much into downloadable media, but if a $100 plus dollar download disappeared before getting a chance to make back-ups, I would be extremely pissed. A lesson here. If you do purchase downloads, you damn well better make disc back-ups or on other hard drives. They will eventually crash at some point. Manufactured obsolescence at it's worst, but that another debate...

I'd been putting off that "chore" (assembling 3/24/90) ever since I got the first spring 90 box, and was doing that while listening to the 3/15/90 show I mentioned below. Finally have it in iTunes as a full album and burned CDs; for some reason I still like to have physical copies. When I said "unfortunately" I just meant that I didn't get to go to any of the spring shows in 90. I did have a great time at the Tinley Park shows, but the last run of shows I had gone to prior to that was the alpine valley 89 run which were x-factor heavy and full of all the golden yummies. Tilnley Park as a venue was awful, and for some reason I didn't move to the lawn where I understand the sound was much better. It was still a great time, and realizing a couple of days later that I would never get to see Brent again made me realize how lucky I was to have been at those shows. My first show was 7/4/81 Manor Downs, Texas. There are decent copies of this show on the archive. If you haven't heard it check it out. Very wild and strange jamming; the PITB is very unique, and it has one of the last (maybe the last) of the really extended NFA's. A lot of folks mention the next year's Manor Downs show which went past midnight into Jerry's birthday and was a great show also, but the '81 show was x-factor from start to finish. The sugar mags is one of the most rocked out you will ever hear - I think I remember the taping compendium describe it as "ludicrously powerful". Understatement.

Listening to my recently assembled 3/24/90 and just received 3/15/1990 this week- making sure there are no bugs with anteni on 3/24 before the full tour in September. Can't wait! Before tonight I have been listening to DVP 11 and though I still think the '70s Dead is overall more powerful and can better turn on a dime with just one drummer- there is no denying what Brent brought to the table and the band as a whole has a more party vibe. Anyway not trying to start a debate, we've been down that road before. Just goes to show that each era should be appreciated on its own for its own vibe- I really need to remember that the next time I feel all estimated prophet about the '70s hahaha its all good. I even go back to dicks pick 27 with Vince every so often for that first set especially.