Artist: Grateful Dead
Title: “Fare Thee Well”
Label: Rhino Entertainment
Release Date: 11/20/2015
Genre: Rock
Rating: 4/5

Back in the Summer of 2015, the surviving members of The Grateful Dead, meaning Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreautzmann, were joined together in music with long time keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, Bruce Hornsby and Trey Anastasio for a series of shows under the “Fare Thee Well” banner. These shows would be celebrating the milestone 50th Anniversary of the Grateful Dead and also would be the last time that the name would be used for concerts and recording. There would be a total of five concerts with two being in California, while the remaining and final three would happen at Chicago’s Soldier Field and this Blu-ray/CD set delivers the full final performance of The Grateful Dead. Over the course of my life I didn’t initially enjoy what The Dead was all about but this was because a lot of my friends who did like them would always tell me that what I listened to sucked. My appreciation of Hard Rock and the burgeoning Metal sound found me alienating what the Dead offered up purely by association to those memories. I admit this to you readers because that was a long time ago and since that time I have learned to appreciate a whole lot of Grateful Dead music but mostly by way of the “greatest hits” that every single other casual fan might know. The concert is a long one and something like 180 minutes/three hours long and each set is delivered on separate discs. Let’s go over the first set.
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