Grateful Dead Giving Away 30 Free Downloads

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The Dead are giving away free music throughout the month of November

Just as they did a year ago, the Grateful Dead are offering 30 free MP3 downloads to fans over the course of this month: one song per day, all of it previously unreleased.

A notice on the Dead’s website, reads, “Consider this our gift to you for being so darn loyal… Each day in November we will be giving away a high-quality 320Kbps MP3 download. That’s 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, selected by Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux! Intrigued?”

In addition, the site is turning the giveaway into a trivia contest: “We’re also going to put your knowledge to the test and give you the chance to win a pack of Grateful Dead Holiday Cards. Most of you know the drill by now,” they explain, “but for those, that don’t, here’s the deal: You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C’s, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic ‘comeback’ tour from a spacey ’70s show? Each day we’ll post a free download from one of the Dead’s coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in ’93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen’s harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? Step right up and try your hand all November long and win a prize while you’re at it.”

The Grateful Dead in the late ’70s: Clockwise from left, that’s Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and Brent Mydland

The Dead have always been the most generous band on the planet when it comes to sharing their music with their voracious fans. At the peak of their popularity, the band—which never repeated the same setlist twice—recognized that fans were surreptitiously recording their concerts and trading tapes among themselves. Rather than discourage the practice, they set up a taping section at each concert and invited fans to haul their recording equipment to their concerts. In addition, the Dead also made their own professional recordings of each concert and, since the band’s demise in 1995, upon the death of Jerry Garcia, they’ve been releasing complete concerts at a prolific rate.

The website is stockpiling the daily downloads, so Dead Heads can collect all of the songs released since Nov. 1.

Watch the Dead perform “Sunshine Daydream” in 1978