Grateful Dead reissuing 'American Beauty' for 50th anniversary

Album is available in several configurations

Grateful Dead is celebrating the 50th anniversary of American Beauty with a new deluxe remastered edition on October 30th. American Beauty: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition will be available on 3 CD, colored LP and Picture Disc via Rhino Records. The album is considered the crown jewel of the Dead’s studio output with the album’s original ten tracks among many of the Dead’s best-known, most-loved, and most popular songs both on record and in concert for the next 25 years.

An album that includes “Box Of Rain,” “Friend Of The Devil,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Candyman,” “Ripple,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Attics Of My Life,” and “Truckin’” looks more like a greatest hits compilation than a second album of 1970, and yet American Beauty demonstrates a band unable to slow down in terms of the quality of its writing, recording, and performing.

“It has some of the first things I’ve written, and that we’ve performed as a band, that in my opinion are genuinely beautiful,” Jerry Garcia said at the time of its release. “We were in the studio, creating this thing, pullin’ together, and because we managed to get off under those circumstances the music has a certain quality.”

The three CD set will feature the original album with newly remastered audio, plus one of the most requested archival recordings in the Dead’s vault – the unreleased concert recorded on February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY. On stage that night, the Dead debuted a whole new batch of songs, five in all: “Wharf Rat,” “Playing In The Band,” “Bertha,” “Greatest Story Ever Told” and “Loser.” Fans were also treated to a few standbys from the previous decade, including “St. Stephen” and an inspired “Dark Star>Wharf Rat>Dark Star” jam. Notably, keyboardist Ned Lagin (who played piano on “Candyman” on American Beauty) sat in with the band for the show. It’s all been mixed from the 16-track analog master tapes by Jeffrey Norman at Bob Weir’s Marin County TRI Studios with all of the audio remastered in 2020 by Grammy Award-winning engineer David Glasser.

“It still boggles my mind to think of the Grateful Dead’s creative output in 1970,” says Dead archivist David Lemieux. “For any other band, catching lightning with an album as perfect and excellent as Workingman’s Dead is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. The Dead, however, followed up just a few months later with an album that virtually every Dead Head considers its equal. Ten songs, nearly all of which became cornerstones of the band’s live repertoire for the next 25 years. Today, 50 years on, these songs are still essential parts of the band members’ continuing live activities. The 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition includes one of the first, and best, live performances of 1971, just a couple of months after the release of American Beauty, and the five live debuts in the show demonstrate that the spectacular creativity of 1970 was no fluke. This was the new Dead, and we’re still tapping our feet and humming along to these songs 50 years later.”

“American Beauty was, at heart, a beautifully made record,” provides Dead historian David Browne in the new liner notes. “The interplay of rippling piano, vocal harmonies, and slide guitar in ‘Brokedown Palace’ was unlike anything they had created before, even on Workingman’s Dead. Thanks to Barncard’s expertise with recording acoustic instruments, ‘Ripple,’ perhaps [Robert] Hunter and Garcia’s most meditative song, had a country-stream clarity. ‘Friend of the Devil’–a Hunter, Garcia, and John “Marmaduke” Dawson tale of an on-the-run rogue that almost ended up with Dawson’s New Riders of the Purple Sage–had the same crispiness. (Both tracks also benefited from overdubbed mandolin parts from David Grisman.)”

The colored LP will be a dead.net exclusive limited to 4,000 copies and pressed on “American Reality” custom, 180-gram vinyl with tip-on jacket. The limited Picture Disc will only have 15,000 copies pressed and feature customized album artwork on each side of the LP.