Interactive

The Lab

An evolving playground for thirty years of Dead. Streak games, deep-cut puzzles, random spins, era scrubbers — each tool a different angle on the data. New ones land as they get built.

Setlist matcher

Which show are you thinking of?

Two ways this is useful: you remember fragments of a show — three or four songs you know were played that night — and you're trying to pin down which night it was. Or you want to hunt the shows that loaded up on your favorite tunes all in one set. Type up to 5songs and the Atlas ranks every show in the catalog by how many of yours it played, Curator-Score sorted within each match tier.

Era timeline

The Atlas across thirty years.

Slide to any year between 1965 and 1995. See where the band was in its story — the era, the lineup, the hiatus, the breakthroughs, the show count, the top night.

1965197019751980198519901995
1977Golden Age64 shows

Highest-rated night

1977-05-08Barton Hall (Cornell U)CS 134

Notable moment

  • 1977-05-08Cornell '77Barton Hall, Cornell University. The most canonized show in the catalog. Open the show →
Browse all 1977 shows

Show roulette

Spin for a random night

Press the button. Get a random show from 30 years of Dead. Use the filters to narrow the era or insist on a soundboard.

Anniversary show

Pick a day. Hear the show.

Pick any date — your birthday, anniversary, the day you saw your first show — and find the highest-rated night the Dead played on that calendar day across all 30 years.

Guess the year

Read the setlist. Place the year.

We'll show you a real setlist with the date stripped out. You pick the year from six options spanning 1965 – 1995. Drums, Space, late-era songs, opener / closer instincts — they're all clues.

First time / last time

When did they play it?

We'll show a song and two real show dates. One of them is the song's actual debut or its final appearance. The other is a plausible-looking decoy from outside the song's rotation window. Pick the right one. Streak resets when you miss.

Most likely set

The most likely song at every slot of a 1977 show

Pick a year. For each setlist position (Set 1 slot 1, Set 1 slot 2, Set 2 slot 1...) we tally the most-played song across every show that year and show its probability. This is a statistical composite, not a real setlist — no Dead show ever played exactly this — but it captures the band's positional tendencies for the year. Coverage starts 1972 when CMU setlist data picks up.

Trivia

Test your Dead knowledge

A randomized round of up to 10 questions sourced from the band's real history and the Atlas data. Multiple choice, instant feedback. Closed-book — but the answers are all somewhere on this site if you want to cheat.

Pick a difficulty