According to the biographies of both bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann, the band released the album as San Francisco's Grateful Dead.

The name was a misrendering of "Skujellifeddy", a character in Kenneth Patchen's comic novel The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, plus the name of then-frontman Pigpen's cat.

[6] In an era where true authorship (or public domain status) was more difficult to ascertain, "Cold Rain and Snow" and "New, New Minglewood Blues" were originally credited as band compositions, though they were adaptations of existing songs.

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.

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.

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.

In a piece accompanying the list, Robert Christgau wrote of the album: One of the year's few supposedly psychedelic LPs that wasn't actually a pop LP (cf Sgt.

Pepper, Forever Changes, Mellow Yellow), the already legendary San Francisco band-collective's debut stood out and stands tall because its boogieing folk rock epitomizes the San Francisco ballroom ethos — blues-based tunes played by musicians who came to rhythm late, expanded so they were equally suitable for dancing and for tripping out.