DMB has long been popular among bootleggers, and the rush of live releases is partly an effort to keep up with the tapers, but it's worth waiting for the band to expand their onstage catalog with material to challenge their inventive nature before saturating the market with live retreads. Get a life. There are at least two distinctly polar ways to enjoy So Many Roads . Or you can come at it like I did, one song at a time as the discs play in succession, discovering each subsequent track like an unraveling set list at a live show, knowing there's no way to skip to the end of the story before the band, the playwrights in an unscripted drama, capture the moment fresh and unexpectedly. This is not the kind of greatest hits, definitive box set that will please new fans and serve as the standard of the selected songs and as the self-contained musical history of the Grateful Dead.
Every cut is a winner, full of interest, both from the musicians and in the listener.
It's an excellent, huge, unusually comprehensive addition to the canon, a must-have for completists, but by no means a complete anything. Well, OK, maybe not crazy, but pretty damn folksy.