Grateful Dead Calendar: 1972-1974 Shows, Releases, and SYF Mixes

The calendar above shows all the dates on which The Grateful Dead played a concert between their Europe 1972 tour and their last show of 1974.

  • Black-boxed date: A show
  • Green highlighting: An official release (in whole, or a significant, curated part)
  • Yellow highlighting: A Save Your Face mixtape (including a significant portion of the show)

Note on the highlighting: If it is not absolutely obviously green, it is yellow.

Note on the black boxes: Look also for a dot below the date. A few dates got boxed by the shows around them, but were not show dates.

Quite a few dates have turned green since I first used this tool to track my 1972-1974 listening/curation project, three-five years ago. Additional Save Your Face mixes since then have turned numerous other dates yellow (Fall ’72 and September '74, mainly).

Credit to Dave Lemieux for dropping pins into spaces that were previously empty in the official release category. The only clusters of shows that are not well represented by official releases (green) are the last three months of 1972, likely due to poor soundboard mixes, and early 1973, likely due to sloppy playing. (Jams were great at both times, however.) Also, most September 1973 shows featured the horn section, which is both their appeal and a barrier to their release.

You can align dates with specific releases using this handy tool

Seeing the entirety of performances from this period (black boxed dates), all at once, always shocks me. For me, it’s the era of infinity Dead. Strange to see it rendered so finitely, with so many months with zero or few shows. 

Speaking of infinity, if you’re a 1972-1974 Head, SYF has some more esoteric comps to check out - just China>Rider jams, all the era’s Spanish & MLB jams, vast Dark Star mashups, summer ’73 Phil Jazz Jams, etc. There’s no way to put those on the calendar, but you can find most of them in the Thematic Exploration category of the library.