What was the Grateful Dead’s best-selling album?
The popularity of the Grateful Dead is difficult to quantify. While they have great songs, much of their success comes from something much deeper than that, something that taps into our psyche, mind, and soul. Grateful Dead fans don’t quantify their love for the band; they just live it. They go to gigs even now, years after Jerry Garcia passed, to live in their fandom for whatever seconds, minutes, or hours they can.
The idea of a best-selling album for a band so difficult to define seems moot. When there are more elements to a band than just their sound alone, the album becomes a small facet of their existence, more a pillar that helps hold the community up as opposed to the foundation upon which the whole thing is built. For many bands, the best-selling album indicates their best and most popular work, but that’s not true for the Grateful Dead.
They’re one of the most popular bands on the planet, but their success comes from not only their music but also the way they interpret it. Their live shows have always been an extension of the room they’re performing in and the people who occupy the space. Their music is a beautiful reflection of them as individuals and as a band.
Lenny Kaye once spoke about their album Live / Dead and how it’s a reflection of some of the best music out there. “Live / Dead explains why the Dead are one of the best-performing bands in America,” said Kaye, “Why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.”
He put into words something that a lot of Grateful Dead fans struggle with. It’s not just the music but the entire atmosphere of their shows. “Live / Dead also exhibits the group’s quite considerable ability in tying together different song threads, letting them pass naturally into one another, almost as if they had been specially designed for such a move,” he said, “A jamming band has to rely on its sense of flow, on its talent in taking that small series of steps which will ultimately bring it to some entirely different place from where it started.”
Live / Dead might be a good representation of what people love about the band, but it’s not their best-selling record. A lot of fans turn to Dicks Picks when they listen to live sets of the Grateful Dead as the archivist was able to capture a range of different gigs over his travels with the band; as such, despite the live aspect being so appealing, their best-selling album was never going to be a live record given there is so much choice for people to listen to.
So, what is the Grateful Dead’s best-selling album?
A band that is hard to define. People love different songs, people feel different things at their shows, and the band appeals for a variety of reasons. The only consistent thing that connects each fan is the band themselves; the layers apply to them in different ways. As such, it only seems fitting that their most popular album of all time is a compilation, which is the closest thing that can capture all of these different layers and present them in a cohesive way.
Their best-selling record is 1974’s Skeletons From the Closet: Best Of The Grateful Dead. Due to the band’s massive back catalogue, it made sense to put together a compilation album, and fans everywhere wanted to listen to it. It remains their most popular record, even though different archived sound does well and live albums still fly out the door. The ’74 compilation, with 4,000,000 copies sold under its belt, is at the top of the list.
