Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead was the first compilation album from the Grateful Dead. It was first released on LP in February 1974. The release was a ploy for Warner Bros. Records to cash in on the escalating popularity of the band (based on the sales of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty).
Four of the tracks were not original Dead album studio recordings. This "Turn On Your Lovelight" first appeared on the album The Big Ball, which was a loss leader sampler distributed by Warner Bros.; it had also appeared in longer form on Live/Dead. "One More Saturday Night" was taken from the band's live release Europe '72. And "Mexicali Blues" was actually a track from guitarist Bob Weir's solo release (but essentially Dead album) Ace. The version of St Stephen on the European release of Skeletons from the Closet is the identical recording from the Live/Dead LP with the long jam in the middle edited out.
Warner Bros. released the album on CD and cassette in 1988 before re-releasing the LP in 1990. The album would be later re-released on by Rhino Records on May 24, 2004 as part of a greatest hits series by various bands. It contains the complete "Lovelight" from Live/Dead.
Skeletons from the Closet is the Dead's best-selling album, going triple platinum in the United States.
Read more about Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of Grateful Dead: Album Cover Art, Track Listing, Personnel, Charts
Famous quotes containing the words skeletons, grateful and/or dead:
“History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
...
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody’s place in line.”
—Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923)
“Tell my son how anxious I am that he may read and learn his Book, that he may become the possessor of those things that a grateful country has bestowed upon his papa—Tell him that his happiness through life depends upon his procuring an education now; and with it, to imbibe proper moral habits that can entitle him to the possession of them.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“If I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never
gracious; if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)