Ba-ba-DAH-da… ba-BAH.
You know the ones.
In this database, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" appears 521 times. That is not an opener count. It is the total number of documented setlist appearances after grouping the exact title with the database's asterisk and greater-than title variants: 514 plain entries, four marked with an asterisk, and three marked with a greater-than sign.
Now for the number that tells the real opening-night story: 356.
That is how many shows with documented setlists begin with "How Sweet It Is." It is still the most common show opener in the collection, by a wide margin. But it is not nearly 400 nights. The larger number comes from counting the song at the beginning of any set, not only at the beginning of the show. It occupies 396 set-opening positions. Forty of those positions begin later sets.
Total plays. Show openers. Set openers. Three different questions, three different answers.
And somehow, the corrected number makes the picture sharper. Across hundreds of nights, the first song written into the setlist was the same one 356 times. Not every appearance carried the job of opening the show. Most did.
THE SHOWS
The collection holds 1,246 show records outside the Grateful Dead name. The "band_name" field ranges across Jerry Garcia Band, acoustic and collaborative lineups, and earlier groups; none of the 1,246 records is labeled Grateful Dead.
The earliest dated record is February 23, 1963: The Wildwood Boys at Top Of The Tangent in Palo Alto. The latest is July 16, 1995. Two records have "Unknown" instead of a date, so the decade totals cover 1,244 dated shows, not the entire collection:
- 15 in the 1960s
- 391 in the 1970s
- 582 in the 1980s
- 256 in the 1990s
- 2 with no known date
That is the first rule of reading this archive: the total can be solid even when every row is not complete. The unknowns belong in the count. They just do not belong in a decade.
WHAT HE PLAYED
There are 13,542 setlist entries across 1,194 shows with at least one documented song. The other 52 show records have no setlist entries in this file.
Song identity needs the same care as opener identity. Read literally, the database contains 785 distinct title strings. Some of those strings are the same title with a trailing asterisk or greater-than sign attached. Group only those trailing variants and the count becomes 641 normalized song titles.
Using that same rule, the five most frequent titles are:
- "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" — 521 setlist appearances
- "Midnight Moonlight" — 422
- "Run For The Roses" — 421
- "Deal" — 403
- "Harder They Come" — 385
One appearance separates second place from third. "How Sweet It Is" sits 99 ahead of second place and 100 ahead of third.
It first appears in the dated records on January 15, 1972, and last appears on April 23, 1995. Its 521 appearances break down as 129 in the 1970s, 289 in the 1980s, and 103 in the 1990s. No 1960s setlist in this database contains it.
Of those 521 appearances, 356 open a show and 65 close one. The song could frame a night from either end, but the opening slot is where the pattern becomes unmistakable.
The closing pattern belongs to another title. "Midnight Moonlight" closes 329 shows. If every set ending is counted, not just the end of the night, it appears in 391 set-closing positions. Again: show closer and set closer are not interchangeable.
THE ROOMS
Venue names repeat, but the database also stores some likely variants as separate labels. I am leaving those labels separate rather than silently merging them.
- The Stone — 121 shows
- Keystone — 112 shows
- The Warfield — 93 shows
- Warfield Theatre — 88 shows
- Keystone Palo Alto — 55 shows
That distinction matters. Adding "The Warfield," "Warfield Theatre," and "Warfield Theater" produces 184 records, but that is a normalization choice, not a literal count for one stored venue label. The cleanest published number is the number the field actually contains.
THE ARCHIVE
The source fields overlap. They are memberships, not separate piles that can be added into a show total.
- 1,241 shows carry the "jerry_radio" source tag
- 639 shows carry the "youtube" tag
- 55 shows carry the "web" tag
- 5 shows carry the "unknown" tag
- 2 shows use direct Internet Archive URLs as their only source value
Most important: 636 shows carry both "jerry_radio" and "youtube". Some of those also carry "web" or "unknown". Saying 1,241 radio-tagged shows and 639 YouTube-tagged shows does not mean there are 1,880 different shows. There are still 1,246 records.
The file's metadata separately reports 1,196 total YouTube videos and a "youtube_info_count" of 749. Those are not show counts, so I would not substitute either one for the 639 records explicitly tagged "youtube".
Completeness is also best reported in the database's own language: 769 records are labeled "single_file", 101 are labeled "multi_track", 374 are labeled "partial", and 2 have no "show_type" value. A "single_file" label does not, by itself, prove that a recording is complete. The JSON supports the label. It does not support upgrading that label into a promise.
That is what this archive gives us: not one perfect number, but a set of answers that become meaningful when the question is precise.
I never got to see him myself. I can still follow the shape left in the records: 1,246 shows, 13,542 setlist entries, and one song returning 521 times. On 356 documented nights, it was the first thing on the page.
Ba-ba-DAH-da… ba-BAH.