Dave’s Picks, Volume 4: College of William & Merry, Williamsburg, VA, 9/24/76

Winterland, May 30th, 1971

Dick’s Picks, Volume 1: Tampa, Florida, 12/19/73

The Grateful Dead never did quite figure out how to sell records directly to heads from their own branded ice cream trucks as they’d once planned, but they do continue to find new revenue streams for their massive archive. The Dave’s Picks subscription series enters its second year and Rhino – and now Brookvale – Records have begun issuing vintage Dead shows on vinyl.

The fourth volume of Dave’s Picks – recorded in Virginia in 1976 – has the Deadhead-specific selling point of being a show not previously in circulation as a soundboard in taper circles. But, besides a buttery “Playing in the Band” > “Supplication” > “Playing in the Band,” it remains a Deadheads-only affair, filled with Quaalude-slow rearrangements ( “Tennessee Jed,” “Around And Around” ) and joyously warm fusion slop.

Rhino’s Winterland, May 30th, 1971 is a lusciously mastered sequel to Skullfuck Where it falls rather short on the psychedelic mind-melting front, those seeking Pigpen’s chauvinistic humanism will enjoy the high-fidelity grease of a sidelong match-making “Turn on Your Lovelight.”

The first issue in Brookvale’s pressing of the beloved Dick’s Picks series is a mixed blessing, meanwhile, containing at least four sides of supremely improvising Dead, including an extraordinarily out “Other One,” but also a direct-from-CD mastering job that leaves it without the vinyl depth that one might expect from its $80 price-tag. Even so, the 14-minute “Here Comes Sunshine” is so kinetically synesthetic in any medium or sonic resolution that it makes one wonder what was so good about ice cream in the first place.