Customer Reviews

Best of Skeletons From the Closet: Greatest Hits

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This album contains many of the Dead's popular songs, and it was the first album that I bought when I started listening to this band. However, it does not have many of their best songs. For a better listening experience and a more representative sample of the Grateful Dead, try "The Very Best of the Grateful Dead", "American Beauty", or "Workingman's Dead". Any of these three are far, far better than this album, and in my opinion, "American Beauty" is nearly perfect. It is a GREAT album.

When the vinyl version of this record was released in '74, there was almost no way I would have picked up on it. I had a fair amount of Dead albums already (although I wasn't quite the completist some of my friends were). But in principle, I objected to buying "best of" albums in general, especially of artists I basically admired. That was for dilettantes. Or for people on a very limited budget.

Of course, as a poor college student, I probably should have been on a budget and was sort of on a de facto one, always INTENDING to pick up this or that record eventually. There were any number of Dead albums I never did manage to buy. Still, I at least got to hear pretty much all the Dead I wanted in friends' apartments or dorm rooms. It was like the wallpaper. Getting a "Best Of" release seemed kinda redundant.

But a lot can change in 34 years. All these format changes (to say nothing of real life budgetary issues) have forced me to look at "best of" and "greatest hits" packages in a new light. And even if I were a much harder core Deadhead than I am, there's so much other Dead product out there now to sample (I've only heard a fraction of Dick's famous Picks, for instance) that maybe I really DON'T want to repurchase every single pre-74 release on CD quite yet.

Besides I got this one on sale for just a couple of bucks. And what a treat it is. I love the fact that it's not sequenced chronologically. It begins with "Golden Road" from the very first album but then proceeds on to "Truckin'" from AMERICAN BEAUTY. When I was a kid, I might have been upset that over six years of musical history was seemingly blithely ignored in this sequencing. Now I see it as quite canny marketing (in a good way). The entire album's strategy seems to be to wrap the more experimental stuff around the much more accessible tracks from BEAUTY and WORKINGMAN'S. That might have offended me back when I was a 22 year old purist. In my 50s, I'm a heck of a lot cooler with it.

Some might find that too much emphasis is placed on the more "commercial" early 70s Dead product. But there's live stuff too--which is important for any accurate representation of the Dead. AND bits of weirdness like "Rosemary" from AOXOMOXOA. It would have been nice to see a selection or two from MY own personal favorite Dead LP, ANTHEM OF THE SUN. But that album is pretty much all of a piece, and it'd be next to impossible to isolate a single representative track from it.

In fact, the album seems to have an almost "concert like" flow--as opposed to "historical." Whoever sequenced it seems to have been thinking, "What works best with what?" They chose well. It all keeps truckin' along rather nicely and makes for a rather nice "nostalgia trip" (for some of us--albeit a "short and not all THAT strange a one." And, of course, it could serve as an effective introductory Grateful Dead course for others, especially given since it has so much from the most "tuneful" era.

Win-win, I guess. Veterans will understand--and newbies should keep in mind--that this collection just scratches the surface. But what a surface.

Chances are, if your reading this review your looking for one "best" Grateful Dead cd, compilation or not. Even if this was twice as long you would still be missing many essential Dead tracks. However, if you really do want just one disc, the newer "Very Best of Grateful Dead" is better than this. It has 17 remastered tracks, some that are missing here. Of course what's on here is all great. There is also the "What a long strange trip it's been" best of. That's 2 discs but needs remastering bad. If you wanted just ONE live disc, which is hard to come by, I would suggest "Dead Set". That's a good 14 track selection. You could always just get one of the classic studio albums. Of those, my favorites are "American Beauty", "Mars Hotel", and "Workingman's Dead", in that order. Just remember, when in doubt, play Dead.

Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead was the first compilation album from the Grateful Dead and was released 1974. The album was met by surprisingly low marks from the critics. Allmusic gave it 3.5/5 and Rolling Stone gave it a mixed review. To me this is too low and 4/5 is more a fair mark. The booklet contains no lyrics and is very sparse with no photographs and just one picture on the front. Even so this is Grateful Dead 101 at its best and I would recommend it to people interested in listening to the Dead. 4/5.

I'm not a big fan of the Grateful Dead, but I purchased Skeletons from the Closet for "Truckin" and "Casey Jones", and those are the only songs that I cared for from this cd.

The songs are great but they are in better form live or on the album they origionally came from.to my ear the sound of a live song done right blows doors over a greatest hits,buts I had the vinyl when it came out and its well o.k Peace Larry