Grateful Dead (1967)

Grateful Dead is the debut studio album of the Grateful Dead. It was released by Warner Bros. Records in March 1967.
On the originally prepared artwork, the writing for the top of the album cover read "In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead", a passage taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. As the book had become more widely read, some had mistakenly assumed that the band had taken their name from the quote: "We now return our souls to the creator, as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness. Let our chant fill the void in order that others may know. In the land of the night, the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead." They hadn't, and because Garcia worried that it seemed "pretentious", and the band were uneasy about being seen as beholden to any specific philosophy or doctrine, they asked the artist, Stanley Mouse, to stylize the script so that all but the band name were illegible. The central image depicts a 12th-century Chola sculpture of Yoga-Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu. The sculpture is currently housed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
A remastered version with the full versions of five album tracks, plus six bonus tracks, was released by Rhino as part of the box set The Golden Road (1965–1973) in 2001, and as a separate album in 2003. Album outtake "Alice D. Millionaire" was inspired by an autumn 1966 newspaper headline "LSD Millionaire", about the Dead's sound engineer and benefactor Owsley Stanley.
The album was reissued for Record Store Day 2011 on 180g vinyl cut from the original analog/mono masters from 1967 – the first time in over 40 years it had been released in this form. The 2013 high-definition digital, remastered release features the edited versions, as originally released, of the four tracks which were extended for the 2003 Rhino release.
This edition was given a new version for the album's 50th anniversary in 2017, including a second CD featuring live material from a pair of July 1966 concerts in the Garden Auditorium, Vancouver, Canada. The second CD was released on vinyl as a stand-alone double LP on Record Store Day 2017
Tracks:
1. The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) 00:00
2. Beat It on Down the Line 02:32
3. Good Morning Little School Girl (full-length version) 4:46
4. Cold Rain and Snow 11:23
5. Sitting on Top of the World (full-length version) 13:55
6. Cream Puff War (full-length version) 16:44
7. Morning Dew 20:07
8. New, New Minglewood Blues (full-length version) 25:28
9. Viola Lee Blues 28:14
Bonus Tracks
10. Alice D. Millionaire 38:40
11. Overseas Stomp (the Lindy) 41:07
12. Tastebud 43:36
13. Death Don't Have No Mercy 48:00
14. Viola Lee Blues (edited version) 53:26
15. Viola Lee Blues (live) 56:33