What was the Grateful Dead’s longest-ever show?
The Grateful Dead was more like a lifestyle than a band. If you wanted to be really intense, you could even call them a cult. The devotion of Deadheads makes the BTS army look like casuals, going far beyond what is normally expected of even the most fervent hardcore fanbase. These were people who didn’t just like a few of their tunes. They didn’t just identify with something the band embodied. The love of their hardcore fans went much, much deeper than that.
After all, to have fairweather fans a band must have a few, y’know, hits. Now, I’m sure there are a few Dead songs that appear on rotation on classic rock radio. However, the band’s live draw put them up with the biggest bands of their era. When that includes the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, who both have songs that the average person on the street can hum decades later, the Dead aren’t in the same league.
This isn’t an issue because there’s no such thing as a casual Deadhead. If there are, say, 50,000 Deadheads in any given city in the world, that exact number will come out to see them live. Then another 10% of that number will tag along from the town previously. A lot of that love comes from how the band truly comes alive in concert. The real transition from an unsuspecting music fan to a fully-fledged Deadhead comes from not just seeing them live but joining the community that truly found themselves while going to tens, dozens, sometimes hundreds of Grateful Dead concerts.
Which gives the band a slight issue. There’s no way you can sleepwalk through the hits because, for one thing, there are barely any Grateful Dead hits. More importantly, a good 90% of the audience at any given Dead gig already saw those “hits” upwards of 35 times. Unlike a U2 or a Rolling Stones, they couldn’t count on the fact that the vast majority of any concert audience will care more about seeing ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ or ‘Brown Sugar’ for the first time than seeing an early B-side unearthed for the die-hards.
Those bands will dedicate one, maybe two songs a night to keeping the die-hards coming back. With Jerry Garcia’s hippy extraordinaires, the ratio was completely flipped on its head. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that your average Grateful Dead concert made a Springsteen concert look like an early Ramones gig. Every gig had a number of alterations to the already sizable setlist, and even after that, each song could have gone in an entirely different direction than the previous night.
So much so that multiple times, they could take a song and stretch it to genuinely gobsmacking proportions. Most famously among them was taking their song ‘Playing in the Band’, a song that clocks in at four minutes and 39 seconds on record, and stretching it out so long that an entire live album is dedicated to the 41-minute version of the song they played at Seattle’s Hec Edmundson Pavilion in 1974.
As for the longest individual concert of them all, there are more than a few candidates. Grateful Dead forums are full of maniacs saying things like, “The runtime for that concert was a paltry 238 minutes and 32.16 seconds.” That’s right. A shade under four hours is “Paltry”. However, it’s generally accepted that the band’s June 10th, 1973, concert at Washington DC’s RFK Stadium is the longest headline set the band ever played.
The Deadheads at that gig sure as hell got their money’s worth. The set consisted of an initial hour and forty minutes before a quick break. Then, another two-hour set before an hour-long encore. Coming to an astonishing 281 minutes long. At the very least, with the nature of that fanbase, there was no one in that stadium who was bored. Right?
