First, can we please, once and for all, stop saying that the Grateful Dead’s debut album is weak? For some of us, it’s just about perfect and always has been. Yes, they were out of their minds when they made it; it often lacks depth and sounds like someone sped up the tapes; it’s not big on nuance, even “Morning Dew” is rushed. But this is who they were during their first couple of years. If you ever needed to explain to someone what LSD sounded like, then all you had to do was crank “Viola Lee Blues” to full volume and let nature (and Jerry Garcia) take its course. Disc one of this 50th anniversary edition is the album remastered. It still rocks like crazy, and you either love it by now or, well, poor you. But the real draw here is disc two, a full live gig (plus a few extra tracks) from July 1966 in Vancouver. It’s a revelation in so many ways, especially since high-quality recordings of complete early gigs are so rare. Here are the formative Dead at both their most incendiary/innovative and their sloppiest. (This “Viola” is a freakin’ mess.) The band was clearly still figuring out what exactly they could and couldn’t pull off: blues, check; sizzling garage-rock, check; folk-rock, got it; chaos, oh yeah, and if they sometimes stumbled, they made up for it in enthusiasm. Garcia is still about two parts ambition to one part chops, but Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh prove to be one of the toughest rhythm sections in town. Bob Weir comes off as the kid he is (“New, New Minglewood Blues”—egads!) and Pigpen is all bravado and cool. They would not stay in this place much longer so, as a document—there are several songs here that never made it to official albums—it’s priceless. As a musical experience, it’s flawed and loads of fun. That it happened more than a half-century ago is mind-boggling.