Grateful Dead Channel To Preview New Box Set: May ’77

UPDATE: More info on May ’77 has emerged see below.

MAY ’77 TO CONTAIN FIVE ENTIRE SHOWS
FROM FIVE CONSECUTIVE APPEARANCES

The Grateful Dead have been putting out live archival releases at a dizzying pace and that’s been continuing into 2013. Today, word has come down about the next box set the band has in the works and it’s called May ’77. Thus far little is known about its contents other than that it will contain five entire performances from five consecutive shows recorded during arguably one of the best months of the Grateful Dead’s career.

This Wednesday, May 8th, a date notable for being the anniversary of the Dead’s legendary Barton Hall show in 1977, Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux will play a sampling of each show included in May ’77 on SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead channel starting at 9 a.m. ET. The 90-minute special will be rebroadcast on May 10th at 1 a.m. ET, May 11th at 3 p.m. ET and on May 13th at 5 p.m. ET.

The ever resourceful @duanebase, who tipped us to this news, has put together a list of Grateful Dead shows from May 1977 that have yet to be released by the band. He notes that GD performances from May 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th, 17th, 18th and 26th are yet to make their way out of the Grateful Dead’s vault and onto an official release.

We look forward to seeing what Lemieux has cooked up for this release and we’ll be sure to share more details once the archivist tells us the contents of May ’77.

UPDATE: More information on this release has surfaced.

What’s Inside:

•Five Complete Shows
• 5/11/77 St. Paul Civic Center Arena, St. Paul, MN
• 5/12/77 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, IL
• 5/13/77 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, IL
• 5/15/77 St. Louis Arena, St. Louis MO
• 5/17/77 Memorial Coliseum, Tuscaloosa AL
•14 Discs, 111 tracks
•Mastered in HDCD by Jeffrey Norman
•Artwork by Grammy Award-winning graphic artist Masaki Koike
•Period Photos by James R Anderson
•Historical Essay by Steve Silberman
•Individual show liner notes

Individually Numbered, Limited Edition of 15,000

A description of the box set is as follows.

MAGICAL, MYTHICAL MAY 1977!

If you’re a Dead Head, chances are you’ve spent many an hour expounding upon the distinction of May 8, 1977, Cornell University, Barton Hall. Well, at the risk of preaching to the choir, we’d like to reintroduce you to a series of shows that matches said greatness from that same gloriously fertile season. While Barton Hall is well known, the astounding tour that surrounded it has occasionally flown under the radar due to the uneven quality of tapes in circulation. May 1977 is set to change all of that with a boxed set that zeroes in on this high-water mark in the Grateful Dead’s long strange trip.

For a band resurrecting itself after a 20-month hiatus, there was a great frenzy of expectancy that surrounded the Spring of 1977. We anticipate a grand reoccurrence of this fervor with the release of May 1977, a 14-disc boxed set featuring five complete shows from consecutive stops on that magical tour. Mastered in HDCD by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering, the “psychoacoustic phenomena” as Jerry once put it, of St. Paul Civic Center Arena, St. Paul, MN (5/11) Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, IL (5/12, 5/13), St. Louis Arena, St. Louis MO (5/15) and Coliseum at the University Of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL (5/17) can now finally be appreciated. Each of these shows finds the Dead delivering punchier, more focused sets, tightening up the framework; each night turning out first- ever renditions (“Passenger,””Iko Iko,””Jack-A-Roe”), unloading potent new pairings (“Scarlet Begonias”>”Fire On The Mountain”, “Estimated Prophet”>”Eyes Of The World”), classic covers (“Dancing In The Street”) and soon-to-be staples (“Estimated Prophet,” “Samson and Delilah”), and ultimately rising up to paradise.

Here’s video of David Lemieux describing the box set.

[Hat Tip – @duanebase and Marcust99]