# The Very Best of Grateful Dead

The Very Best of Grateful Dead is a single-CD compilation album chronicling all the years of the San Francisco psychedelic band the Grateful Dead. It is the first release to document every label the band recorded on: Warner Bros. Records, Grateful Dead Records/United Artists Records and Arista Records. It was released on September 16, 2003.
A songbook under the same name was released alongside this album which provides lyrics and musical tablature.

## Critical reception

Professional ratings :
| Review scores ||
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
On AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said, "The Very Best of Grateful Dead marks the first attempt to do a thorough single-disc overview of the group's career, encompassing not just their classic Warner albums but also the records they cut for their own Grateful Dead/UA and Arista. As always with the Dead, it's hard to condense the band's free-ranging, freewheeling output onto one disc [..] but the 17 tracks here do present nearly all sides of the Dead while hitting their biggest songs. [..] The collection would have been better if sequenced a little more chronologically, but nevertheless it provides a first-class introduction to a band whose catalog can often seem a little unwieldy."

## Track listing

* "Truckin'" (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir) – 5:08
** Originally released on the 1970 album American Beauty
* "Touch of Grey" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:50
** Originally released on the 1987 album In the Dark
* "Sugar Magnolia" (Hunter, Weir) – 3:19
** Originally released on American Beauty
* "Casey Jones" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:28
** Originally released on the 1970 album Workingman's Dead
* "Uncle John's Band" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:46
** Originally released on Workingman's Dead
* "Friend of the Devil" (Dawson, Garcia, Hunter) – 3:24
** Originally released on American Beauty
* "Franklin's Tower" (Garcia, Hunter, Bill Kreutzmann) – 4:33
** Originally released on the 1975 album Blues for Allah
* "Estimated Prophet" (John Perry Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
** Originally released on the 1977 album Terrapin Station
* "Eyes of the World" (Garcia, Hunter) – 5:20
** Originally released on the 1973 album Wake of the Flood
* "Box of Rain" (Hunter, Lesh) – 5:20
** Originally released on American Beauty
* "U.S. Blues" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:40
** Originally released on the 1974 album From the Mars Hotel
* "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" (Garcia) – 2:12
** Originally released on the 1967 album The Grateful Dead
* "One More Saturday Night" (Weir) – 4:50
** Originally released on the 1972 live album Europe '72
* "Fire on the Mountain" (Mickey Hart, Hunter) – 3:48
** Originally released on the 1978 album Shakedown Street
* "The Music Never Stopped" (Barlow, Weir) – 4:35
** Originally released on Blues for Allah
* "Hell in a Bucket" (Barlow, Weir) – 5:38
** Originally released on In the Dark
* "Ripple" (Garcia, Hunter) – 4:10
** Originally released on American Beauty

## Personnel

Technical personnel
* James Austin – compilation producer
* David Lemieux – compilation producer
* Cameron Sears – album coordination
* Robin Hurley – associate producer
* Jimmy Edwards – product manager
* Joe Gastwirt – remastering
* Gary Peterson – discographical annotation
* Vanessa Atkins – editorial supervision
* Stanley Mouse – cover art, lettering
* Hugh Brown – art direction
* Linda Cobb – design
* Michael Ochs Archive – photography
* Bob Seidemann – photography
* Herb Greene – photography
* Bruce Polonsky – photography
* Fred Ordower – photography
* Hale Milgrim – project assistant
* Kevin Gore – project assistant
* Scott Pascucci – project assistant
Mark Pinkus – project assistant
* Tim Scanlin – project assistant
* Steven Chean – project assistant
* Dennis McNally – project assistant
* Jeffrey Norman – project assistant

## Charts

Album - Billboard
| Year | Chart | Position |
| 2003 | The Billboard 200 | 69 |
* The album debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart on October 4, 2003. It spent 4 weeks on the chart.