What’s the longest concert the Grateful Dead ever played?
The Grateful Dead never knew the meaning of the word ‘concise’. Or if they did, they discarded it time and time again. Even in their recorded form, their songs went far beyond the traditional three-minute mark for easy radio play. But when they got on stage, all sense of time and form went right out of the window as the band lost themselves in lengthy jam sessions.
That’s the only way to describe a Grateful Dead show. They were less like a concert and more like the band jamming out, except with an audience in front of them. They were powered by an improvisational approach where the recorded form of the song was thrown out. Instead, they’d simply feel their way through, extending sections that felt good, adding new bits as they popped into the musicians’ heads and weaving around one another, working like a powerful unit, all buzzing from the one collective mind of the music.
In an interview back in 1966, Jerry Garcia said, “We don’t make up our sets beforehand. We’d rather work off the tops of our heads than off a piece of paper.” So, each audience member in front of the band got a totally unique experience that was always dependent on how the band felt on a given night. There was no guarantee that they would hear the hits. Instead, they worked from an ever-swelling list of over 100 tracks, seeing whichever took their fancy that night and whatever form they might arrive in.
Thanks to this, there are countless stories of Grateful Dead shows. The unique makeup of each night meant that there were tales upon tales of magical musical moments that wowed their crowds. Their long sets were sometimes only made up of less than ten tracks as each song was extended and extended with the band feeling the music too much to stop. But sometimes, if there was no time limit to cut them off and no one there to pull the plug, the shows themselves would extend too, running on for hours upon hours.
So, which was the longest show?
There is some debate over what the longest Grateful Dead set was and when it occurred. It all depends on what is being perceived as an individual concert. Back in their earliest days as a troupe, they would get up on any stage they could. That meant that there were nights where they apparently played up to five sets in one evening. In 1969 and 1970, they were no strangers to doing two shows in one night, meaning that the actual length of time they were playing was long but was technically divided into two normal-length sets.
But the longest show seems to be on 10th June 1973 at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington. Split across three sets, they played 30 songs. It seemed like the band played nearly enough of every song they knew, including their own and covers from Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and beyond. By the end of the night, they essentially became a covers band as they simply didn’t want to get off that stage, so they devolved into teenagers playing their favourite old songs in the garage.
All in all, the show ran on for 281 minutes and 37.06 seconds. That equals four hours, 41 minutes and 37 seconds of music.
Some argue that their show on New Year’s Eve 1978 through to the early hours of New Year’s Day was the longest. The band took on the job of being the final band to play at Winterland in San Francisco as it shut its doors. The band played for hours until a banquet breakfast was served to the revellers who made it through. But the length of the show comes at only 246 minutes and 58.33 seconds, falling 43 minutes short.
