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Poster: Dhamma1 Date: Jun 22, 2007 2:59pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Guide to 1965-79 shows

For the last two years I've been making my way systematically through the Archive, listening to the 3 or 4 most-reviewed or most-downloaded shows from each month, 1965-1979 (before Brent).

Because I'm a librarian by profession, and because printed copies of Deadbase and the Taper's Compendium seemed impossible to find, I made my own catalog as I went along. My goal was to create 1 8x11" page per show.

I entered notes on the venue, setlists (from deadlists.com), recording circumstances, typed in some anecdotes from McNally's volume, Phil's book, and other standard sources, added a couple reviews for each show (usually those that had historical information or by people who were there), and included at least one URL where the show could be heard.

Whenever a thread opened up here on the forum (I'm a faithful lurker but rare poster) about people's best or favorite shows, I would go back to make sure I'd heard and described those shows. And then I excerpted all the same data about the 1965-79 shows available only from the band: Dick's Picks, Download Series, commercial releases, and the studio albums. The guide also has a few appendices -- a list of all shows performed, history of 1961-64 pre-Dead bands, and a background on and a list of the Betty Boards.

The result is a guide to about 350 or 400 shows, late 1965 to early 1979. If you're new to the Archive and bewildered by its riches, this is probably a decent list of the best 20% of shows (up to when Keith and Donna departed in Feb. 1979).

If you have a mature collection but no catalog of it -- bibliography is a peculiar obsession, I know -- this might make a good start; you'd just have to add your own notes to replace mine, and fill my gaps. But at least you'd have some sort of catalog in electronic form; a couple hours of massaging could even turn it into a database for your PDA or smartphone.

The whole document runs to a little more than 400 pages in Word and totals about 2.5MB in electronic form. It's too big to attach to this post, but send me a note at mmiedmonds@gmail.com and I'll attach it to a reply.

Finally, my thanks and best wishes to all of you who have been helpful to me over the last couple years as I asked naive questions and searched for shows elsewhere.

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Poster: Cliff Hucker Date: Jun 22, 2007 4:44pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Very impressive work, you've done a remarkable job!

Thank you for sharing!

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Poster: Dhamma1 Date: Jun 23, 2007 4:16am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Follow-up:

Glad to know that so many folks think they'd find this useful; thanks for your comments and let me know, if you have questions while using it.

I suspect I can also export the data on these 350 or so shows in various database formats, too, since it began in my Palm Pilot with one record per show. Let me know, if that's something you'd like instead of the Word version.

:-)

mmiedmonds@gmail.com

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Poster: Liamfinnegan Date: Jun 23, 2007 8:22am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Grest offer- I e-mailed you already, but I am taking this opportunity to ask you to send it to me in pdf if you can- I am operating windows XP home edition which does not have WORD resident

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Poster: mickmac Date: Jun 22, 2007 8:02pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Thank you very much. It took a little bit to translate to AppleWorks but from what I scanned, very interesting. Like I didn't have enough to keep me up... I'm sure I'll be digging into this the next few nights. Peace. Thanks.

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Poster: tigerbolt Date: Jun 22, 2007 4:22pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

that's sweet plus a big project to do,very kind of you to share that info.the archive may allow you to host it here,have you thought about that?i'm sure they would be hip to you uploading that info.

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Poster: Dhamma1 Date: Jun 22, 2007 4:38pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Thanks, tigerbolt. I thought about that (uploading it) but it seems like that makes the thing into more of a real publication. Since so much of it is not mine but only assembled from other people's work (reviewers here, the deadlists and deadbase people, the bands own PR pages, and lots of other information sources), I don't think it deserves that status. And I'm happy to send it manually to people who take the trouble to contact me.

Cheers,

Michael

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Poster: Scrim Date: Jun 22, 2007 4:42pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Guide to 1965-79 shows

Very nice, thank you for sharing all your work. I really appreciate it.