Grateful Dead: about their new 17-cd box release

Some things take time and sometimes it’s all worth the wait. This can be said again

and again with the Grateful Dead. After 15 years together, Madison Square Garden, the world-famous New York City arena, finally became an East Coast home away from home for the Grateful Dead and a place where perhaps more than any other, real magic was captured night after night. The band would play there 52 times (once a record), and the arena’s remarkable acoustics would allow New York metro fans to claim superiority over rival markets like Philadelphia and Boston, where venues were more de­signed for sports, the circus and rodeo shows than musical outings. That fidelity informed the Dead that there were no excuses for poor showings: You arrived to play, period.

That era began in the early 1980s and is now captured in a powerful new release called In and Out of the Garden. This 17- CD box set presents six previously unre­leased shows recorded at Madison Square Garden on March 9 and 10,1981; Septem­ber 20 and 21,1982; and October 11 and 12,1983. In and Out of the Garden features newly restored and speed-corrected audio by Plangent Processes; it was mas­tered by Jeffrey Norman and produced for release by Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
This collection represents an era of rebirth for the band. At the time of the recordings, the group consisted of singers-guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, and keyboardist-singer Brent Mydland. This was a band transitioning from their Go to Heaven launch to what would be a fully fueled Mydland revival. With him, the Grateful Dead became a bona fide arena rock band.
In and Out of the Garden was aptly named after the line in “St. Stephen,” which the band played live for the first time in four years at the October 11, 1983, MSG show and showcases a mo­ment when the band performed most of the songs that would appear on 1987’s In the Dark. The new collection includes performances of four songs from that al­bum - “Touch of Grey,” “Hell in a Bucket,” “Throwing Stones” and “West L.A. Fadeaway” - plus the B-side “My Brother Esau.”
The set comes in a custom box featur­ing new artwork by Dave Van Patten and detailed liner notes by music journalist David Fricke, who explores the bands connection to the Big Apple. In short, it may well be regarded as perhaps the most interesting and complete Grateful Dead offering to date.