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:
“What though the traveler tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our America and today to some man’s ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger
and purer temple.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Politicians—power itself—are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives.... One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abjectness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Jesus saw Lazarus.
Lazarus was likely in heaven,
as dead as a pear
and the very same light green color.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)