DeadBase by John Scott, Mike Dolgushkin and Stu Nixon

Cover of Deadbase: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Song Lists

Photo of Deadbase 1971: Grateful Dead Setlists

Photo of stats of 1974 from Deadbase: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Setlists

Photo of statistics for songs from Deadbase: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Setlists

Photo of 1981 setlists from Deadbase: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Setlists

Photo of Cover of Deadbase: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Setlists

Self-Published 1987

"Herein lies a weath of information."

Game changer. Within Deadhead subculture, a dedicated segment of backyard archivists, sleuths and scribes set out to chronicle the setlist of every show. In the hope of fully weaving the musical narrative, folks duplicated tapes and pored over microfiche at libraries to corroborate whether the band actually performed in Lima, Ohio, and determine if the 2/21/69 and 2/22/69 shows at the Dream Bowl really took place in Vallejo, California, or if the venue was actually eight miles north in Napa County. By the mid-to-late ’80s, an even smaller group of these chroniclers began exploring the early sketches of what would evolve into the World Wide Web, tapping into listservs and The WELL in search of dates, venues and setlists.

Then came DeadBase.

With the band’s blessing in 1987, Mike Dolgushkin, Stu Nixon and John Scott published what quickly became the Rosetta Stone of Grateful Dead scholarship. For me, and for other data-minded devotees, DeadBase felt like a holy book, a fusion of rigorous research and crowd-sourced wisdom. Cracking the cover, your relationship to the band’s history changed immediately.

Here, the seemingly infinite sprawl of live shows, mislabeled cassettes and cryptic scribbles on J-card inserts could be cross-checked and verified. You could trace the arc of when “Scarlet Begonias” first danced into “Fire on the Mountain” on a March night at the Winterland or when “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider” disappeared, and when it triumphantly returned. DeadBase offered structure and turned fandom into scholarship.

If the Grateful Dead were about exploration and impermanence, DeadBase was an attempt to chart that territory. Listening became a form of amateur archaeology. For the number-minded, tape-trading Deadhead, it validated late-night debates that unfolded while dubbing shows from the Manhattan Center or the Miami Pop Festival.

The initial volume, released in 1987, includes performance dates for 1,623 shows known by the end of 1986. Setlists for the early years are often sparse. For example, of the 109 concerts in 1967, only 11 have partial setlists. At the time, the blank space did not read as a flaw. It read as proof there was history to recover and like-minded tape hounds were working to stitch it together.

Beyond the show listings and setlists, the 8.5” x 11” guide also cataloged venues played and included tables tracking how many times each song was performed in a given year. The lone element that did not feel in service to the larger narrative was the anagrams. Using Ars Magna software, the names of songs or band members produced long lists of oddball word combinations. “Scarlet Begonias,” for instance, generated 336,854 options, including “algebraic stones” and “bat gin casserole.” A cute parlor trick, the anagrams never seemed to have a real purpose. That one awkward blip aside, the role of DeadBase in the community cannot be overstated.

As digital databases carry the work forward, DeadBase remains a landmark. It proved fandom could be intellectual and data could be devotional. Behind every jam, segue and venue, there were geeks who cared enough to write it all down.

If you find a copy of any volume (at a price which doesn't break the bank), grab it. I consider DeadBase the single most precious printed treasure ever bestowed upon a Deadhead.

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* This book is out of print and may be only available via scouring the shelves of used bookstores or trawling auction sites. Like tracking down an elusive show on cassette in the before days, the hunt is half the fun.

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