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Take a group of stellar, improvisational and adventurous musicians, erase the boundaries, present them in a Wall of Sound (the tour’s name, apologies to Phil Spector), designed by the Left Coast’s resident counterculture mad scientist, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and what do you have? The Grateful Dead, as never seen or heard before. The 1200 square foot sound system was every bit as esoteric and groovy as Owsley’s famed acid, and was so sophisticated that, par exemple, each of Phil Lesh’s guitar strings had its own separate speaker.

Most music fits into neat little boxes, or genres, immediately identifiable by the beat, the twang of the guitar or the voice, and so on. The Grateful Dead, if not a separate genre all its own, should be. The Dead were so tight, so used to one another, that they could take the same song and play it in two distinctly different ways, including length, signaling to each other merely by a shrug or head-nod as they improvise, turning a five-minute song into a 25-minute anthem, as they do with the highly popular, “Playing In The Band,” the opening cut of this four-disc set. Dick’s Picks 31 is one perfect pearl in a long string of them.

– Lou Novacheck