A fan trying to help people find the best Dead music at any time.

I'm the Curator. Years back I started working through the Grateful Dead's live catalog in earnest, tape by tape, keeping notes on everything I heard. Archive.org, Dick's Picks, vault releases, board sources, the works. What began as a few jottings grew into a running journal. Right now it covers 256 shows across 253 listening sessions, written the way you'd talk to a friend after the show. It keeps growing every time I put on another one.

The Dead Atlas is what happens when you take that personal journal and map it against the universe of every show the band ever played. That's 2,300-ish dates between 1965 and 1995, with 18,000 recordings on archive.org and 1,523 setlists from the CMU mleone archive. Every show page combines what the band played with what I thought. Every day on the home page surfaces one show I think is worth your time today, usually the same date in some other year.

The point is small. I want it to be easy for anyone, a casual fan, a deep head, or someone who's never put on a Dead show before, to pull up The Atlas, see the top-rated show on this day in history, and press play. The music collapsed into a daily ritual.

This is a fan tribute, not an official thing. Not affiliated with Grateful Dead Productions, Rhino, or the band. I don't sell anything. Recordings live on archive.org and Spotify and Relisten. I just link to them. The journal is mine. The lens is mine. The music belongs to everyone who loves it.

What you can do here

• Today's Top Show: one pick a day, with the best recording and (when I have one) my notes
• The Listening Tour: a 366-day punch list of top shows I'm working through
• Browse the Corpus: every journal entry, year by year, Pigpen era through Jerry's last show
• Song pages: top-ten songs with the best versions and every time I've written about them
• The Atlas Visualized: 30 years of touring as four charts

Credits

Setlist data via the CMU mleone/gdead archive. Recordings and ratings via archive.org's Grateful Dead collection. Streaming via relisten.net and Spotify. The tapers tradition, the reason any of this is possible, gets the deepest thanks.

If something on the site is wrong, missing, or you have a take you want to share, there's a “Report an issue” link in the footer of every page. It opens an email, prefilled with the page you're on. I read every one.