Box set traces trails of Dead's long, strange trip

While Phish's improvisation has a buoyant elasticity, and some of the Dead offshoot bands -- particularly the various incarnations of Phil & Friends -- have risen well above the nostalgia factory, none of the keepers of the flame have a fire that burns quite as brightly as the Dead's, at its hottest moments.

The rock 'n' roll conversation of Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann is one of those inventions that started off as an accident but ended up as something inevitable, unique and quite impossible to imitate.

"So Many Roads (1965-1995)," a new five-CD box set, is an ambitiously edited attempt to chronicle the growth of this ever-changing musical conversation. It's the sort of project -- an aural biography of jamming -- that could only be done on the Grateful Dead, and it comes closer to capturing the band than any of the "greatest" Dead collections such as "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been."

It's a rough-hewn but carefully thought out collage, mostly comprised of concert recordings reaching from the short-lived "You Don't Have to Ask" at the Fillmore in 1966 to the elegiac "So Many Roads" at the Dead's final concert in 1995. These live selections -- some of them snippets of longer pieces -- are interspersed with unreleased studio material, notably early-1990s songs such as "Eternity" and "Days Between" that had yet to be included on an album when Garcia died.

Most of the pre-1980 live cuts are extraordinary, if not definitive. Each one bookmarks a different stage in the band's early musical development, from the full-frontal acid playing of the late 1960s to the cosmic space journeying of the early 1970s. On "The Same Thing" jamming from 1967, you can hear Garcia segue from traditional blues riffs into the fiercely modern enterprise that he will later perfect.

Surprisingly, the Dead's most famous jam vehicle, "Dark Star," is represented by a speedy 1968 version that only hints at the open-ended exploration the song later inspired. But it flows into an interestingly primitive "China Cat Sunflower" and then into a scorching "Eleven" that fairly drips with the night's energy.

The "Watkins Glen Soundcheck Jam" from 1973 reveals a band that has fully fleshed out its own jazz-rock sound, with a final third that is so uplifting it should be named "Happy Jam." And one of the box set's peaks is a 1974 improvisation that plows through "Spanish Jam" and into "U.S. Blues" on the ballast of Phil Lesh's ferocious bass lines. It's the Dead in fifth gear, in the last months of its most inspired era.

Like the band, the box set loses some of its magic as it reaches into the 1980s. Or at least, the magic changes, with a shift in keyboardists, with the 1977 return of second drummer Mickey Hart (who had left in 1971), with the unwieldy expansion of the Dead's audience, and with the beginnings of the malaise that would haunt Garcia until his death.

Gone are the ragtime riffs and bright tinklings of Keith Godchaux, replaced by the synthetic arena-rock intonations of Brent Mydland. "Estimated Prophet" from 1979 gives us Mydland at his best, as his solos build seamlessly into some classic Garcia, but the inclusion of a pair of Mydland-sung tunes from the '80s is unfortunate. So is an unremarkable "Scarlet Begonias -- Fire on the Mountain" from 1990, included to show Garcia toying with MIDI technology.

The strongest jams from the Mydland era are an eerie, self-enclosed "Playing in the Band" and a gorgeously twisted "Bird Song" that has the Dead diving headlong into fusion madness with Branford Marsalis.

The box set's most poignant moments are on its 1990s disc, which could double as the Dead's final album of new material. As music, these pieces aren't amazing; as Dead history, they are essential.

The most engaging latter-day song is "Liberty," which is represented well with a live version from 1994. And a fascinating fly-on-the-wall rehearsal cut has Garcia drawing his bandmates into an impromptu version of the Irish folk tune "Whiskey in the Jar." The disc and the entire set ends with Garcia singing his ailing heart out on his last-ever "So Many Roads," a song that calls to mind Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." A month later, he was dead.

"So Many Roads (1965-1995)" summarizes three decades of Dead as much as any five-disc set possibly can.

Yes it's too bad the producers fade in and out of jams, a technique that Deadheads continue to debate on the Internet. But it was an unhappy necessity when faced with a band whose most intensely synchronized moments were often in the middle of aimless noodling, or worse.

With cutting and pasting, we are able to hear small, telling gems that might have fallen into the void, like the piercing "Beautiful Jam" from 1971, or Garcia's fluttering 1990 foray with Bruce Hornsby, "Jam Out of Foolish Heart."

And anyway, the truest portrait of Dead music is coming out bit by bit, with the archival releases known as "Dick's Picks" (of which there are 15 so far). They are where the spaciest and spookiest and most sparkling versions of "Dark Star" can live and breathe, and that's where Deadheads can continue to mine for the gold.

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