Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks Vol 34 - Community War Memorial, Rochester, NY 11/5/77 (Limited Edtion 180 Gram 6LP)

If the saga of the Grateful Dead is a long strange trip, then we've definitely been along for part of the ride! First, we brought you the entire Dick's Picks series of live concerts on CD, all 36 volumes of it, many of them never before available at retail. Then we began putting out the Road Trips series, none of which has ever been in stores before. But now, dear Deadheads and Real Goners, the time has come to take the next step in our evolution as a key source for rare Grateful Dead recordings. It's time to cross...the vinyl frontier with the6-LP set, Grateful Dead: Dick's Picks Vol. 34--Rochester, NY 11/5/77!

That's right...we are finally putting Dick's Picks on vinyl, and, boy, have we picked the right one. How do we know? You told us! This was by far the best-selling volume on CD from our reissue campaign. And no wonder, it's from that magical year of 1977, with fiery performances of "Big River," "Jack Straw," "Deal," and "Eyes of the World" powered by a particularly lively Phil Lesh. But for many the highlight will be one of the truly great performances of "The Other One" in the Grateful Dead catalog, 12 minutes of surging intensity and building crescendos.

This Pick also included highlights from a 11/2/77 Toronto show, including a great medley of "Estimated Prophet"/"St. Stephen"/"Truckin'"/"Around and Around" (we've reconfigured the track listing to put all the bonus tracks at the end of the set for a seamless concert experience). Definitely a great place to begin our journey into the realm of Grateful Dead vinyl! Such a stellar performance deserves a great package with great sound.

For this Real Gone release, we've enlisted David Glasser at Airshow Mastering to remaster the set from the original tapes for vinyl. David's had a long association with the Dead; he mastered the soundtrack to the Long Strange Trip documentary among many other projects. For lacquer cutting, we turned to John Golden at Golden Mastering. John has worked with artists as far-ranging as Jonathan Wilson, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, and Soundgarden among many others, and he is our go-to engineer for lacquer cutting. The test pressings were approved by David Glasser, the Grateful Dead's resident audiovisual archivist David Lemieux, and Gordon Anderson from Real Gone. We've pressed the set up on 180-gram vinyl for maximum fidelity, too. And we even scrapped the first pressing because it wasn't up to our quality standards. As for the packaging, we've placed all six LPs inside a hardshell box adorned with the original front cover and a custom back cover featuring a great shot of Jerry Garcia from the show. Inside, you'll find a 4-page, LP-sized, full-color insert offering photos from the original package along with the original trippy graphics. Each of these limited-edition sets is hand-numbered all the way up to 1500. This set will not be repressed once we run out of the 1500 limited edition copies.

Release date 12.5.2019