TWO GRATEFUL DEAD TITLES
DEBUT IN THE TOP 15 OF BILLBOARD'S TOP ALBUMS CHART
Long-Awaited Release Of Their May 8, 1977 Performance At Cornell University's
Barton Hall, Revered By Many As The Best Grateful Dead Show Of All Time,
Drives The Band's Highest Chart Position In 30 Years
Cornell 5/8/77 Debuts At #10 While Dead.net Exclusive 11-Disc Boxed Set
Get Shown The Light Lands At #15;
Both Titles Are Available Now On CD And Digitally
LOS ANGELES - The official release of the Grateful Dead's May 8, 1977 show at Cornell University's Barton Hall, thought by many to be the band's finest live performance, has delivered yet another milestone for the band: their highest chart position in 30 years with two albums debuting in the top15 of Billboard's Top Albums chart. CORNELL 5/8/77 debuted at #10 while MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT, a dead.net exclusive 11-disc boxed set featuring the Cornell show, landed at #15. The releases have received praise from both fans and critics, with Pitchfork giving the boxed set a "Best New Reissue" designation and noting that "it's perfect for beginners and lifelong Deadheads alike."
The Grateful Dead played more than 2,000 concerts, but none continues to spark interest and provoke discussion quite like the band's performance at Cornell. It is one of the most collected, traded, and debated concerts by any band ever, has topped numerous fan polls through the years, and was a favorite of the group's longtime archivist Dick Latvala, who stated: "Enough can't be said about this superb show." Even Uncle Sam got into the act in 2011 when the recording was "deemed so important to the history and culture of the United States" that a copy was added to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.
CORNELL 5/8/77 is available as a three-CD set ($29.98), a limited edition five-LP set ($119.98, limited to 7,700 copies), as well as via digital download and streaming. The 11-disc boxed set MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT features the Cornell show along with three other previously unreleased concerts: Veterans' Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT (5/5/77), Boston Garden, Boston, MA (5/7/77), and Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY (5/9/77). All of these recordings are sourced from the legendary Betty boards, which Jeffrey Norman has mastered in HDCD for unrivaled sound quality. The transfers from the master tapes were produced by Plangent Processes, further ensuring that this is the best, most authentic that Cornell (and the other three shows) has ever sounded.
MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT is available now exclusively at dead.net. A limited edition version of 15,000 individually numbered copies is now sold out, but the "All Music Edition" is still available for $139.98. The set is also available as a digital download in Apple Lossless ($99.98) and FLAC 192/24 ($124.98) exclusively at dead.net.
"These four concerts have been the holy grail of wish-list releases both externally and internally for a long, long time," says David Lemieux, Grateful Dead archivist and the set's producer. " During the 18+ years I've worked with the Grateful Dead, no concert has garnered as much attention and as many requests for release as Cornell, with the New Haven, Boston, and Buffalo shows following very closely behind. For those who didn't know the history of these master tapes and about their absence from the band's vault, and for those who have, like us, lamented this hole in the collection, we join with you in celebrating what might be, minute-for-minute, song-for-song, the most high quality Grateful Dead release ever produced."
The now sold out, limited edition version of MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT comes in an ornate box crafted by Grammy®-winning graphic artist Masaki Koike. The set includes an in-depth essay by noted Dead scholar Nicholas G. Meriwether, who explores the memories and mysteries that surround this run of shows. The set also comes with Cornell '77: The Music, The Myth And The Magnificence Of The Grateful Dead's Concert At Barton Hall (Cornell Press), a new book by Peter Conners dedicated to the Cornell show. The book will also be available for purchase separately. The "All Music Edition" features all four shows, each in its own folio, housed in a slipcase which was also designed by Koike, as well as the liner notes.
Jerry Garcia, Donna Jean Godchaux, Keith Godchaux, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir had just completed Terrapin Station, the band's ninth studio album, when they hit the road for a spring tour leading up to the album's release in late July. This new set serves as a prequel of sorts to the May 1977 boxed set from 2013, which featured the next five shows from that magical tour. It adds further sonic evidence that the 1977 tour was truly a high-water mark in the Dead's history.
The set lists played at the four shows included in this set - especially Barton Hall - offer up sweeping retrospectives of the band's career, touching on the early psychedelic days ("Morning Dew" and "St. Stephen"), and the rootsy early-Seventies ("Uncle John's Band" and "Tennessee Jed") up to and including previewing songs from the group's then-unreleased album Terrapin Station ("Estimated Prophet" and "Samson and Delilah.")
Elevating this already extraordinary release is the fact that the recordings are sourced from the fabled Betty boards, which are soundboard tapes made by Betty Canton-Jackson, who was the Dead's live recording engineer for many years. Since some of her tapes began circulating in the 1980s, her live recordings of the band have become the gold standard by which others are measured. After decades in limbo, more than 350 reels of her recordings are now part of the Grateful Dead's musical vault. The July 1978 set released last year represented the first official release of the Bettys, with even more to come after MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT.
In the set's liner notes, Meriwether captures how the Cornell show pulls together many of the disparate strands of the Grateful Dead phenomenon and the Deadhead experience, from the music and experience of the show to its recording and dissemination. "The story of Cornell '77 is more than just a tale of another great Dead show, another enduring example of what [Dick] Latvala called 'primal Dead': It is the stuff of history and legend, myth and mystery, and how those all played out to finally produce this long-awaited, much anticipated release, forty years after the last notes of 'One More Saturday Night' rang out in the drafty, cavernous confines of Barton Hall that night."
MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT
Track Listing
Veterans' Memorial Coliseum
New Haven, CT (5/5/77)
Disc One
"Promised Land"
"Sugaree"
"Mama Tried"
"El Paso"
"Tennessee Jed"
"Looks Like Rain"
"Deal"
"Lazy Lightning>"
"Supplication"
"Peggy-O"
"The Music Never Stopped"
Disc Two
"Bertha"
"Estimated Prophet"
"Scarlet Begonias>"
"Fire On The Mountain>"
"Good Lovin'"
"St. Stephen>"
"Sugar Magnolia"
"Johnny B. Goode"
Boston Garden
Boston, MA (5/7/77)
Disc Three
"Bertha"
"Cassidy"
"Deal"
"Jack Straw"
"Peggy-O"
"New Minglewood Blues"
"Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo>"
"Big River"
"Tennessee Jed"
"The Music Never Stopped"
Disc Four
"Terrapin Station"
"Samson and Delilah"
"Friend Of The Devil"
"Estimated Prophet"
Disc Five
"Eyes Of The World>"
Drums>
"The Wheel>"
"Wharf Rat>"
"Around and Around"
"U.S. Blues"
Barton Hall (Cornell University)
Ithaca, NY (5/8/77)
Disc Six
"New Minglewood Blues"
"Loser"
"El Paso"
"They Love Each Other"
"Jack Straw"
"Deal"
"Lazy Lightning>"
"Supplication"
"Brown-Eyed Women"
"Mama Tried"
"Row Jimmy"
Disc Seven
"Dancing In The Street"
"Scarlet Begonias>"
"Fire On The Mountain"
"Estimated Prophet"
Disc Eight
"St. Stephen>"
"Not Fade Away>"
"St. Stephen>"
"Morning Dew"
"One More Saturday Night"
Buffalo Memorial Auditorium
Buffalo, NY (5/9/77)
Disc Nine
"Help On The Way>"
"Slipknot>"
"Franklin's Tower"
"Cassidy"
"Brown-Eyed Women"
"Mexicali Blues"
"Tennessee Jed"
"Big River"
"Peggy-O"
"Sunrise"
"The Music Never Stopped"
Disc Ten
"Bertha>"
"Good Lovin'"
"Ship Of Fools"
Disc Eleven
"Estimated Prophet>"
"The Other One>"
Drums>
"Not Fade Away>"
"Comes A Time>"
"Sugar Magnolia"
"Uncle Johns Band"
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