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Grateful Dead - Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead Audio CD

A fair review of the Grateful Dead "Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Grateful Dead reviews here, or go back to the Grateful Dead tabs.

Grateful Dead Band: Grateful Dead
Title: Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead
Rating:
Release Date: 1990-10-25
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) 2: Truckin' 3: Rosemary 4: Sugar Magnolia 5: St. Stephen 6: Uncle John's Band 7: Casey Jones 8: Mexicali Blues 9: Turn on Your Love Light 10: One More Saturday Night [Live] 11: Friend of the Devil

please don't bother
to be honest most of the deads studio stuff is not representive of thier music. i bought this album when it came out,i had only seen the dead about 3 times at that point,i didnt know any better. i got to know the world of tapeheads and collected many shows alot of which are out on cd now. this album is like the dead on an oldies station. ugh.


Grateful Dead 101
I had a fair amount of Dead albums already (although I wasn't quite the completist some of my friends were). When the vinyl version of this record was released in '74, there was almost no way I would have picked up on it. But in principle, I objected to buying "best of" albums in general, especially of artists I basically admired. That was for dilettantes. Or for people on a very limited budget.

Of course, as a poor college student, I probably should have been on a budget and was sort of on a de facto one, always INTENDING to pick up this or that record eventually. There were any number of Dead albums I never did manage to buy. Still, I at least got to hear pretty much all the Dead I wanted in friends' apartments or dorm rooms. It was like the wallpaper. Getting a "Best Of" release seemed kinda redundant.

But a lot can change in 34 years. All these format changes (to say nothing of real life budgetary issues) have forced me to look at "best of" and "greatest hits" packages in a new light. And even if I were a much harder core Deadhead than I am, there's so much other Dead product out there now to sample (I've only heard a fraction of Dick's famous Picks, for instance) that maybe I really DON'T want to repurchase every single pre-74 release on CD quite yet.

Besides I got this one on sale for just a couple of bucks. And what a treat it is. I love the fact that it's not sequenced chronologically. It begins with "Golden Road" from the very first album but then proceeds on to "Truckin'" from AMERICAN BEAUTY. When I was a kid, I might have been upset that over six years of musical history was seemingly blithely ignored in this sequencing. Now I see it as quite canny marketing (in a good way). The entire album's strategy seems to be to wrap the more experimental stuff around the much more accessible tracks from BEAUTY and WORKINGMAN'S. That might have offended me back when I was a 22 year old purist. In my 50s, I'm a heck of a lot cooler with it.

Some might find that too much emphasis is placed on the more "commercial" early 70s Dead product. But there's live stuff too--which is important for any accurate representation of the Dead. AND bits of weirdness like "Rosemary" from AOXOMOXOA. It would have been nice to see a selection or two from MY own personal favorite Dead LP, ANTHEM OF THE SUN. But that album is pretty much all of a piece, and it'd be next to impossible to isolate a single representative track from it.

In fact, the album seems to have an almost "concert like" flow--as opposed to "historical. " Whoever sequenced it seems to have been thinking, "What works best with what?" They chose well. It all keeps truckin' along rather nicely and makes for a rather nice "nostalgia trip" (for some of us--albeit a "short and not all THAT strange a one. " And, of course, it could serve as an effective introductory Grateful Dead course for others, especially given since it has so much from the most "tuneful" era.

Win-win, I guess. Veterans will understand--and newbies should keep in mind--that this collection just scratches the surface. But what a surface.

.


Good Album, Good Band
This CD is great for anyone who likes the grateful dead but just wants there most common songs plus the price you cant beat. a good greatest hits complimation containing all the radio hits. good band good cd. the grateful dead.


Splendid Little Collection.
Those two albums though were hallmarks of my college experience. I guess I have to be the opposite of a Grateful Dead fan because I loved Workingman's Dead and American Beauty but never got into all the bootleg live stuff. I'll never forget them. I listened to these tracks over and over again. My dormmates and I even made up alternative lyrics for a few of the songs which we sang to one another at every opportunity. I like every tune that's here but I'd be a liar if I didn't mention that Uncle John's Band is near the top of my "Favorite Songs Ever" list. This CD is a good buy, but, just in case you're a Dead outsider like me, independently obtaining the two studio releases I mentioned above is an even better bet. Regardless, this is an immaculate collection, and you can't beat the z shop price. .


good album what our the bad reveiws for?
sure rosemary isnt that good but it still is good. this is a good album. this is a great album for someone who is just getting into the grateful dead. it includes lots of classics casey jones etc. all the songs on here are or were very radio frendliy all the songs they would play of the dead on the radio. buy it its cheap and its good music so dont listen to those reveiws that say not to buy it its good so how is it bad? .


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