The Grateful Dead will release the new 17-disc box set, Here Comes Sunshine, on June 30th. The massive collection spotlights five previously unreleased concerts, including: Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, IA (5/13/73); Campus Stadium, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA (5/20/73); Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, CA (5/26/73); and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Washington, D.C. (6/9&10/73).
Here Comes Sunshine is limited to 10,000 individually numbered copies and is available exclusively from Dead.net for $189.98. The complete audio will also be available as a digital download exclusively at Dead.net in Apple Lossless ($99.98) and FLAC 192/24 ($124.98).
Grateful Dead’s archivist and legacy manager, David Lemieux said in the album’s announcement, “Even with hundreds of tapes at my fingertips, I returned to these 1973 shows frequently. That old saying, ‘I listened to that show so often, I wore the tape out?’ It was created because of shows like this.”
Mickey Hart told us that although he and the Dead’s surviving members — Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann — don’t personally troll through the band’s tape archive, the group takes a very hands-on approach with their live releases: “We decide on which ones we wanna release, how many a year, and (our label) Rhino does it. And they do a really good job. We have designated someone, and of course we have input into each release. I mean, we control what goes out there. It’s our responsibility. We have a wonderful staff who have our sensibilities.”