A month ago, Rhino Records released a 50th Anniversary edition of the Grateful Dead’s self-titled debut album.  When it was announced, Rhino promised that it would kick off a series of anniversary reissues of all of the band’s albums.  Details of the next Dead project have now emerged and it is not a new edition of an officially released album but rather the first authorized released of one of the band’s most famous concert bootlegs:  the Cornell 5/8/77 show.  It will be released on May 5 to celebrate the concert’s 40th anniversary.  The bootleg recording of this show was so significant that it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2011.

The show will be available separately and also as part of an 11-disc box set entitled May 1977: Get Shown The Light.  The set, in addition to the Cornell show, premieres the first official release of the concerts from New Haven on 5/5/77, Boston on 5/7/77 and Buffalo on 5/9/77.  This 1977 tour is considered by fans as among the best in the storied band’s career, coming right on the heels of their recording of their ninth studio album, Terrapin Station (which would be released in July, 1977).  This new box set serves as prequel of sorts to the 2013 set May 1977 which contained the following five shows from the tour.

All of the shows in the box are sourced from the “Betty Boards,” so named as they were recorded and preserved by Betty Cantor-Jackson, the Dead’s longtime live recording engineer.  Last year saw the first official release of Cantor-Jacksons recordings and the press release promises more will follow.  The concerts have been remastered by Jeffrey Norman in HDCD and transferred via the Plangent Process.  The box set, designed by Masaki Koike, features new liner notes from Nicholas G. Merriweather and includes a copy of the book Cornell ’77: The Music, The Myth And The Legend Of The Grateful Dead’s Concert At Barton Hall by Peter Connors, which will also be available separately on April 11.  The set will be available on May 5^th, exclusively on dead.net in a limited, individually-numbered 15,000 CD edition as well as digitally in Apple Lossless and FLAC.  The Cornell 5/8/77 show will be released on the same day separately to all retailers by Rhino.  It will come as a 3-CD set, a 7,700 limited edition 5-LP set, and digitally to download or stream.

We’ve got Rhino’s press release below with more details together with the full tracklisting and pre-order links if you’d like to take a trip with the Grateful Dead back to the spring of 1977.

LOS ANGELES – The Grateful Dead played more than 2,000 concerts, but none continues to spark interest and provoke discussion quite like the band’s performance at Cornell University’s Barton Hall on May 8, 1977. It is one of the most collected, traded, and debated concerts by any band ever, has topped numerous fan polls through the years, and was a favorite of the group’s longtime archivist Dick Latvala, who stated: “Enough can’t be said about this superb show.” Even Uncle Sam got into the act in 2011 when the recording was “deemed so important to the history and culture of the United States” that a copy was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of that magical show, Dead.net will release May 1977: Get Shown The Light, a new 11-disc boxed set that features the commercial debut of the Cornell University show (5/8/77) along with three other previously unreleased concerts: Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT (5/5/77), Boston Garden, Boston, MA (5/7/77), and Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY (5/9/77). As if that weren’t enough, the source for these recordings is the legendary Betty Boards, which Jeffrey Norman has mastered in HDCD for unrivaled sound quality. The transfers from the master tapes were produced by Plangent Processes, further ensuring that this is the best, most authentic that Cornell (and the other three shows) has ever sounded.

“These four concerts have been the holy grail of wish-list releases both externally and internally for a long, long time,” says David Lemieux, Grateful Dead archivist and the set’s producer. ” During the 18+ years I’ve worked with the Grateful Dead, no concert has garnered as much attention and as many requests for release as Cornell, with the New Haven, Boston, and Buffalo shows following very closely behind. For those who didn’t know the history of these master tapes and about their absence from the band’s vault, and for those who have, like us, lamented this hole in the collection, we join with you in celebrating what might be, minute-for-minute, song-for-song, the most high quality Grateful Dead release ever produced.”

The set is available now for pre-order and will be shipped to arrive on May 5, the anniversary of the first show in the collection. Production of the set is limited to 15,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively from Dead.net for $139.98. The set will also be available as a digital download in Apple Lossless ($99.98) and FLAC 192/24 ($124.98) exclusively at dead.net beginning on May 5.

On the same day, Rhino will release the Barton Hall concert separately in multiple formats. Cornell 5/8/77 will be available as a three-CD set ($29.98), a limited edition five-LP set ($119.98, limited to 7,700 copies), as well as  digital download and streaming.

May 1977: Get Shown The Light comes in an ornate box crafted by Grammy®-winning graphic artist Masaki Koike. The set includes an in-depth essay by noted Dead scholar Nicholas G. Meriwether, who explores the memories and mysteries that surround this run of shows. The set also comes with Cornell ’77: The Music, The Myth And The Legend Of The Grateful Dead’s Concert At Barton Hall (Cornell Press), a new book by Peter Conners dedicated to the Cornell show. The book will also be available for purchase separately.

Jerry Garcia, Donna Jean Godchaux, Keith Godchaux, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir had just completed Terrapin Station, the band’s ninth studio album, when they hit the road for a spring tour leading up to the album’s release in late July. This new set serves as a prequel of sorts to the May 1977 boxed set from 2013, which featured the next five shows from that magical tour. It adds further sonic evidence that the 1977 tour was truly a high-water mark in the Dead’s history.

The set lists played at the four shows included in this set – especially Barton Hall – offer up sweeping retrospectives of the band’s career, touching on the early psychedelic days (“Morning Dew” and “St. Stephen”), and the rootsy early-Seventies (“Uncle John’s Band” and “Tennessee Jed”) up to and including previewing songs from the group’s then-unreleased album Terrapin Station (“Estimated Prophet” and “Samson and Delilah.”)

Elevating this already extraordinary release is the fact that the recordings are sourced from the fabled Betty Boards, which are soundboard tapes made by Betty Cantor-Jackson, who was the Dead’s live recording engineer for many years. Since some of her tapes began circulating in the 1980s, her live recordings of the band have become the gold standard by which others are measured. After decades in limbo, more than 350 reels of her recordings are now part of the Grateful Dead’s musical vault. The July 1978 set released last year represented the first official release of the Bettys, with even more to come after May 1977: Get Shown The Light.

In the set’s liner notes, Meriwether captures how the Cornell show pulls together many of the disparate strands of the Grateful Dead phenomenon and the Deadhead experience, from the music and experience of the show to its recording and dissemination. “The story of Cornell ’77 is more than just a tale of another great Dead show, another enduring example of what [Dick] Latvala called ‘primal Dead’: It is the stuff of history and legend, myth and mystery, and how those all played out to finally produce this long-awaited, much anticipated release, forty years after the last notes of ‘One More Saturday Night’ rang out in the drafty, cavernous confines of Barton Hall that night.”

Grateful Dead, Cornell 5/8/77 (Rhino 2017) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada)

Disc 1

1. New Minglewood Blues
2. Loser
3. El Paso
4. They Love Each Other
5. Jack Straw
6. Deal
7. Lazy Lightning
8. Supplication
9. Brown-Eyed Women
10. Mama Tried
11. Row Jimmy

Disc 2

1. Dancing In The Street
2. Scarlet Begonias
3. Fire On The Mountain
4. Estimated Prophet

Disc 3

1. St. Stephen
2. Not Fade Away
3. St. Stephen
4. Morning Dew
5. One More Saturday Night

Grateful Dead, May 1977: Get Shown The Light (Rhino/Dead.net, 2017) (Order from Dead.net)

Disc 1 – Veteran’s Memorial Colesium, New Haven, CT – 5/5/77 Disc 1

1. Promised Land
2. Sugaree
3. Mama Tried
4. El Paso
5. Tennessee Jed
6. Looks Like Rain
7. Deal
8. Lazy Lightning
9. Supplication
10. Peggy-O
11. The Music Never Stopped

Disc 2 – Veteran’s Memorial Colesium, New Haven, CT – 5/5/77 Disc 2

1. Bertha
2. Estimated Prophet
3. Scarlet Begonias
4. Fire On The Mountain
5. Good Lovin’
6. St. Stephen
7. Sugar Magnolia
8. Johnny B. Goode

Disc 3 – Boston Garden, Boston, MA – 5/7/77 Disc 1

1. Bertha
2. Cassidy
3. Deal
4. Jack Straw
5. Peggy-O
6. New Minglewood Blues
7. Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
8. Big River
9. Tennessee Jed
10. The Music Never Stopped

Disc 4 – Boston Garden, Boston, MA – 5/7/77 Disc 2

1. Terrapin Station
2. Samson and Delilah
3. Friend Of The Devil
4. Estimated Prophet

Disc 5 – Boston Garden, Boston, MA – 5/7/77 Disc 3

1. Eyes Of The World
2. Drums
3. The Wheel
4. Wharf Rat
5. Around and Around
6. U.S. Blues

Disc 6 – Barton Hall (Cornell University), Ithaca, NY – 5/8/77 Disc 1

1. New Minglewood Blues
2. Loser
3. El Paso
4. They Love Each Other
5. Jack Straw
6. Deal
7. Lazy Lightning
8. Supplication
9. Brown-Eyed Women
10. Mama Tried
11. Row Jimmy

Disc 7 – Barton Hall (Cornell University), Ithaca, NY – 5/8/77 Disc 2

1. Dancing In The Street
2. Scarlet Begonias
3. Fire On The Mountain
4. Estimated Prophet

Disc 8 – Barton Hall (Cornell University), Ithaca, NY – 5/8/77 Disc 3

1. St. Stephen
2. Not Fade Away
3. St. Stephen
4. Morning Dew
5. One More Saturday Night

Disc 9 – Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY – 5/9/77 Disc 1

1. Help On The Way
2. Slipknot
3. Franklin’s Tower
4. Cassidy
5. Brown-Eyed Women
6. Mexicali Blues
7. Tennessee Jed
8. Big River
9. Peggy-O
10. Sunrise
11. The Music Never Stopped

Disc 10 – Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY – 5/9/77 Disc 2

1. Bertha
2. Good Lovin
3. Ship Of Fools

Disc 11 – Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY – 5/9/77 Disc 3

1. Estimated Prophet
2. The Other One
3. Drums
4. Not Fade Away
5. Comes A Time
6. Sugar Magnolia
7. Uncle John’s Band