Photo Credit: Bill Kelly

Bobby Weir has announced the impending special edition deluxe release of his beloved solo debut, Ace, fittingly titled Ace: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, due on Jan. 13. Included in the double-CD winter drop is a remastered new mix of the original 8-track LP, as well as live recordings from Weir’s Radio City Music Hall performance on April 3, 2022. As a preview, Weir has shared an updated take on “Cassidy.” Listen now.

On the same day as the CD drop, Dead.net will offer the collection on custom “high roller” pearl white vinyl. Then, on Feb. 3, 2023, they’ll provide a black vinyl version of the album. Weir’s updated collection was remixed by David Glasser and remastered through the work of Grammy-award-winning sound engineer Derek Featherstone.

Included in the upcoming drop is the 2023 remastered mix of Weir’s original 1972 material, which features beloved numbers such as “Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Black-Throated Wind,” “Walk In The Sunshine,” “Playing In The Band,” “Looks Like Rain,” “Mexicali Blues,” “One More Saturday Night” and “Cassidy.” 

Moreover, disc two, Live at Radio City Music Hall, New York, N.Y. (4/3/22), boasts the same tracking list as Ace, only live and featuring Weir’s 50th-anniversary concert guests from his April 3 stand at Radio City Music Hall in New York, with Tyler Childers assisting on “Black-Throated Wind,” and Brittney Spencer adding her vocals to the breakup epic and emotionally infused “Looks Like Rain.”

The new anniversary edition also includes liner notes written by Jesse Jarnow, co-host of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast and author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. In the notes, Jarnow looks back on the last fifty years of Weir’s career, which led to the imagined dream of integrating a strings and horns section into his live performances. 

Jarnow offers, “By the time they played a pair of nights at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in April 2022 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ace, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring The Wolfpack had found their flow at the thrilling, porous border of improvisation and arrangement. In the eternal present-tense of the Grateful Dead’s music, none of the songs had stopped evolving in the previous 50 years… At Radio City, everything was heard in its newest (and perhaps already outdated) incarnations, the evolutions acting as a progress report on the ensuing half-century of Weir’s life, musical and otherwise.”

On Friday, Weir will also share the live rendition of “Black-Throated Wind” from Radio City Music Hall as a part of a benefit compilation on Bandcamp entitled Good Music To Save Abortion Access For All. Learn more about the Bandcamp compilation featuring Weir, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., David Byrne, and other additional musicians here. 

Pre-order Ace: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition now.

Listen to the updated take on “Cassidy.”