It must have been daunting trying to boil down 30 years of Grateful Dead

concerts and studio recordings to one box set; one of the Dead experts

who compiled So Many Roads (1965–1995) said he and his partners

didn't even try.

The mostly live set of rarities, which comes out Tuesday (Nov. 9), is

designed instead as a starting point for the uninitiated and a high-fidelity

assortment of rare treats for the faithful.

"This is like a guided tour to peaks and vistas that are now open for

future exploration on their own," said Steve Silberman, co-author of

"Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads" and part of the four-person

compilation team.

"If somebody likes that '74 'Spanish Jam'/ 'U.S. Blues,' well, hell,"

Silberman said, "There's quite a few [recordings of 1974 shows] out there

that you should check out. In a way this whole thing is a tease. If you

like that 'Terrapin [Station'], then listen to the other 50 versions that

are great."

The elegantly packaged five-CD collection of rare studio outtakes and

live tracks follows the psychedelic rock band's 30-year career from

folk-rock garage band to legendary live act. It includes six live and

rehearsal tracks from a studio album that was left unfinished when

singer/guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995.

It's clearly not a greatest-hits package, with no "Truckin'," no "Uncle

John's Band," no "Touch of Grey." But it does contain live performances

that are legendary among Deadheads — the group's ravenous and cultlike

dedicated fans — but previously unavailable outside of freely traded

cassettes.

Among them is "Watkins Glen Soundcheck Jam" (RealAudio

excerpt), an instrumental recorded in 1973 at the largest rock

festival in U.S. history in Watkins Glen, N.Y. (The festival also featured

The Band and the Allman Brothers.) The jam, in which the band explored

eastern melodies, jazz, country and blues, is famous among Deadheads but

unknown to the outside world.

"The secret subplot to the whole box set is ... 'the ensemble conversation,' "

Silberman, 41, said. "[It's] what [mandolinist and Dead collaborator]

David Grisman once called 'fast composition,' where they're inventing in

the moment, and they're doing it by talking to one another and listening

to one another ... that ability to make your statement in a weaving of

statements among equals."

Silberman, Blair Jackson, late Dead archivist Dick Latvala, and David

Gans (host of radio's "The Grateful Dead Hour") culled 42 tracks from the

band's vast archive of live and studio recordings, with some band input.

"Some of the things were kind of slam dunks," Silberman said. "We [producers]

all thought that they should be there, like the 'Watkins Glen Soundcheck.'

... However, as the set crystallized, it was always a dance between

representing the different eras in the best possible way and coming up

with the ideal versions of the song."

Unlike Latvala's 15-volume Dick's Picks series, which documents

individual Dead concerts in their entirety, So Many Roads traces

the development of one of rock's greatest enigmas — a band that

received little critical acclaim for its studio albums, but whose live

shows were notorious workshops for improvised fusions of numerous flavors

of American music, from blues to bluegrass, jazz to country, acoustic

folk to electronic-infused psychedelia. In the last decade of their career,

the Dead became one of pop music's top-grossing live acts.

The Dead often were viewed as anachronistic purveyors of 1960s countercultural

ideals (the group was the house band at the mid-'60s "Acid Tests," the

first mass experimentations with the then-legal hallucinogenic LSD), but

that element of the group's history is given low priority on So Many

Roads.

The opening track, "Can't Come Down" (RealAudio

excerpt), is an electric folk romp recorded in 1965, before Garcia

unearthed the spooky moniker "Grateful Dead." It was recorded under the

name the Emergency Crew; the band had been calling itself the Warlocks

but discovered that name was already in use. Typical early rock harmonies

accent the chorus, and Garcia raps out a Dylan-esque verse.

An early live track, "Cream Puff War" (1966), exhibits an edgy proto-punk

style atypical of the band's later work.

A 13-minute, live "Bird Song" (RealAudio

excerpt), from 1990, features jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis

on his first date sitting in with the band. Garcia and lyricist Robert

Hunter wrote the song about the late blues-rock singer Janis Joplin

("All I know is something like a bird within her sang/ All I know she

sang a little while and then flew off").

"It was like a milestone," Dead fan Ann Van Gelder, 28, of San Francisco

said. "You can hear [Branford] falling in love with the Dead."

A rare Garcia nugget is a 1993 rehearsal take on the Irish folk ballad

"Whiskey in the Jar" — likely the only song released by both the

Grateful Dead and hard-rockers Metallica. Garcia catches the band by

surprise with the tune, stops to explain what it is, then starts it again.

The rest of the band trickles in, one by one.

One of six tracks from the Dead's final crop of original tunes, the dark,

dissonant "Eternity" (RealAudio

excerpt), was written by Dead guitarist Bob Weir with bassist

Rob Wasserman and blues legend Willie Dixon shortly before Dixon's death.

Bassist Phil Lesh walks down a minor scale and Weir croons with eerie

soul.

Some Deadheads have hoped the surviving members would cobble together a

final studio album from existing tracks, but disc five of the box set

may be the closest they'll get.

Band spokesperson Dennis McNally said the band considered such a project,

but not enough Garcia tracks were in the can, and using a fill-in guitarist

would have been unconscionable. "Without Garcia, there is no last album,"

McNally said.