30 Trips Around The Sun

About

30 Trips Around the Sun is an 80-CD live album, packaged as a box set, by the rock band the Grateful Dead. Announced for the celebration of their 50th anniversary, it consists of 30 complete, previously unreleased concerts, with one show per year from 1966 through 1995. Comprising 73 hours of music, the box set is individually numbered and limited to 6,500 copies. It was released on October 7, 2015. The package also includes a gold-colored vinyl 7-inch single which bookends the band's career. The A-side is "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" from the band's earliest recording session in 1965, with a B-side of the last song the band ever performed together live, "Box of Rain" recorded during their final encore at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 9, 1995. Also contained in the box set is a 288-page book that includes an extensive essay about the history of the Grateful Dead by band archivist Nicholas Meriwether, and a scroll that has "a visual representation of how the band's live repertoire has evolved through the years". Before it sold out, the box set was priced at $700. All of the concerts were essentially previously unreleased. However, two tracks from the July 3, 1966 performance ("Gangster of Love" & "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing") previously appeared on Rare Cuts and Oddities, and one track ("Candyman") from April 15, 1970 is a bonus track on American Beauty. The seven-inch B-side, "Box of Rain", was previously released on the CD accompanying early prints of Phil Lesh's book Searching for the Sound, while another track from that July 9, 1995 performance ("So Many Roads") was released on So Many Roads. Some tracks have been previously released informally as free downloads as part of the 30 Days of Dead series on the band's website. The July 3, 1966 performance of "Cream Puff War" was included in 30 Days of Dead in both 2013 and 2014. The October 3, 1976 performance of "Scarlet Begonias" was included in 30 Days of Dead in 2011. The June 24, 1985 performance of "My Brother Esau", the March 27, 1993 performance of "Loose Lucy" and the October 1, 1994 performance of "So Many Roads" were included in 30 Days of Dead in 2013. A USB drive version of the collection was released December 11, 2015. It is shaped like a gold lightning bolt with the Grateful Dead 50th anniversary logo engraved on the side. The drive includes all of the music from the collection in both FLAC (96/24) and MP3 formats and is an individually numbered limited edition of 1,000 copies. There is also a 4-CD album that was released September 18, 2015, with one song from each of the 30 concerts, plus the 1965 recording of "Caution". That album is called 30 Trips Around the Sun: The Definitive Story (1965-1995).

via Last.fm