I'll take one. Hold the mayo...

Just made a post bemoaning the fact of no new product for Christmas and then i see this

have to check postage for over here

Bob

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Spanish Jam

Shipping - only one option to UK:
"USPS - First Class Mail (can be slow)" - $15.00

Ordered and now taking bets on delivery time ;-)

Greg

How could TOO from Cape Cod not be included in this?

"The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean."

www.geocities.com/newcamptownraces/
gratefulgoddamneddead.html

Oh my God, who do you have advising you, Carl Rove? No friggin' way do I go for this new idea. I do not like compilations. Compilations are fine for bands that perform all their songs in concert exactly how they sound on the album. Compilations are not for Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead were never REALLY about songs, per se, or albums, they were about free-flowing jams. They weren't about singing as much as they were about playing their instruments. If the band was a singer's band then have compilations like Nat King Cole, otherwise give us the John Coltrane-ish magic of second sets.

If you want to give us compilations then give us second sets of an entire run of shows, because when you break them up into individual songs you ruin the concept of a piece of music flowing into the next piece. Second sets is where the Grateful Dead unleashed the magic in musical ideas that dovetailed from one to the next ~ no band in the history of modern popular music accomplished that in the same manner. Compilations destroy the uniqueness of that which made the Dead the Dead.

While you're at it, there is a tremendous amount of excellently recorded material from the band's Wall of Sound days, like the great days of 1973, plus you have tons of excellent "Movie" footage just waiting to fly. Oh, it's not perfect? So what? The sound and sights on the Movie are tremendous and stand fine alone on their own merit. You should just release entire shows from the Movie run and give them to us on DVD. And let's not forget the multitracks from the tours of 1989 and 1990 ~ it's all great stuff.

I know, I know, you're worried about the upfront costs to release DVD's of the Movie. You will gain it all back in spades. Put Jeffrey Norman to work on re-mastering them and put them out. We'll buy the audio sets and the DVD's, damn it. We'll buy it all. When haven't we?

Don't you get it? You're futzing around on this and you're losing us and the whole slough of new people that have come onto the jamband scene. There's a whole new brand of Dead Head out there who never attended a show, and now you have the power to help them attend.

Only thing I can figure is that you have former Grateful Dead employees advising you on what to release. Doing business the way the Grateful Dead did business is not going to cut it. Do not rely on old advice.

Evan S. Hunt