Fifty years on, ‘Steal Your Face’ is getting the treatment it deserves.
The Grateful Dead’s 1976 double-live album, drawn from the legendary five-show “farewell” run at Winterland in October 1974, arrives June 26 as a newly remastered 2LP set marking its 50th anniversary. The edition was mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer David Glasser at Airshow Mastering, sourced from Plangent Processes restored and speed-corrected tapes, with lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. The vinyl arrives in the band’s official Pantone colors, Grateful Red and Stealie Blue, with an exclusive “Off Your Head” variant available through Dead.net splitting the colors half-and-half with black splatter across both discs. A remastered version of “Black-Throated Wind” is available to stream now ahead of the June 26 release, which is open for pre-order today.
The story behind ‘Steal Your Face’ is as compelling as the music. The Winterland run marked the end of the band’s Wall of Sound era, the most ambitious live audio system ever deployed at the time, a 75-ton modular structure requiring four semi-trailers and 21 crew members that revolutionized concert audio as essentially the first large-scale line array in modern concert history. After those final shows, Jerry Garcia spent the next three years editing The Grateful Dead Movie while Phil Lesh and Owsley “Bear” Stanley mined the 16-track tapes for a live record. The resulting album balanced road-tested rockers like “U.S. Blues” and “Promised Land” with standout solo album tracks, including “Sugaree” and “Black-Throated Wind,” and choice covers in “Big River” and “El Paso.” It arrived in June 1976, the same month the band returned to the road. “Black-Throated Wind is widely considered one of Bob Weir’s finest compositions,” says Grateful Dead legacy Manager and Audio Archivist David Lemieux. “This is the definitive Grateful Dead recording of this gem.”
‘Steal Your Face’ also holds the distinction of being the last album released on the band’s independent Grateful Dead Records label, closing out one of the most creatively and logistically ambitious chapters in rock history.
‘Steal Your Face’ (50th Anniversary Remaster) 2LP Tracklist:
Side One
“Promised Land”
“Cold Rain And Snow”
“Around And Around”
“Stella Blue”
Side Two
“Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”
“Ship Of Fools”
“Beat It On Down The Line”
Side Three
“Big River”
“Black-Throated Wind”
“U.S. Blues”
“El Paso”
Side Four
“Sugaree”
“It Must Have Been The Roses”
“Casey Jones”