Roxor Blog

Acoustic or electric, solo or side project; Jerry Garcia was prolific during his breaks from the Grateful Dead. Between 1972 and 1982, Garcia recorded five historic studio albums and jammed with a revolving cast of musicians in the Jerry Garcia Band.

Rhino is releasing a new 2 disc set with the first-ever compilation spotlighting Garcia’s solo work.

While some of it like Run For The Roses highlights everything that could go wrong when Garcia went into the studio the vast majority of this 2 Disc Set shows what happened when Garcia was at top form creating a unique flavor of Americana.

Birdsong and The Wheel highlight was was amazing about the album of the same name, and “Rubin And Cherise and Cats Under The Stars gives an excellent account of the songs from that album of the same name. Let It Rock gives you his version of Chuck Berry Rock-n-roll and Russian Lullaby seems to me to be a foreshadowing of what is coming from Garcia in his later years.

As with his work with the Dead, the live disc is hard to evaluate because many of us have favorite versions of all these songs from other live discs ( or bootlegs for that matter ).

But hey listen for yourself here: Windows Media or Quicktime

DeadHeads are known for their ability to identify the year of a bootleg by listening to just a few notes. But for even the most “dead”icated listener, the band’s 1976 New Year’s Eve concert presents a genuine challenge. Rarely does any Dead show display the essence of several distinct periods of their sound, but this release contains the best elements of three or four clearly defined eras, and the sum of the parts adds up to one of the most interesting and inspired concerts of the band’s 30-year performing career.

The three-disc set includes more than 180 minutes of music capturing the Grateful Dead playing in their Bay Area backyard at the peak of the group’s live prowess and just a few months before the release of the band’s ninth studio album, Terrapin Station.

Tune in for a taste: Windows Media or Quicktime