Grateful Dead - 1965 to 1995
Ask the Dead
anything.
A friend who knows every show, every setlist, every guest, every tape. Ask in plain English. Stream from the Internet Archive. Free.
Start AskingWhat It Does
Every question Deadheads actually ask
No jargon. No search syntax. Just ask like you're talking to someone who was there.
Ask about any show
Full setlists for all 2,336 concerts. What songs they played, in what order, how long each one ran. Every venue, every year.
What was Cornell 5/8/77 like?
Stream instantly
Every answer comes with playable tracks from the Internet Archive. Build playlists, queue up full shows, listen while you browse.
Play the best version of Dark Star
Guest sit-ins, per song
85+ musicians who sat in with the Dead across 30 years. Find which songs they played, which shows, what instruments. Cross-reference any way you want.
When did Branford play with them?
Deep stats, verified facts
Play counts, longest versions, segue history, rarest songs. All pulled from real data - 675,641 tracks, not AI guesswork.
How many times did they play Terrapin?
Curated Playlists
Start here, or ask for your own
Hand-picked shows and moments. Open any playlist and keep listening, or ask the chatbot to build you something custom.
Cornell '77
Barton Hall. The one everyone says is the best. Scarlet into Fire, an unreal Terrapin Station. Judge for yourself.
1968 - 1995Dark Star Through the Ages
The same song across 27 years. Hear how it evolved from the 1968 Carousel Ballroom to the farewell run at Soldier Field.
August 27, 1972Veneta '72
The Deschutes River concert. Garcia's "Sugaree" here is considered one of the finest performances of any Dead song, ever.
Best of the JamsLongest Versions
The epics. Dark Stars over 40 minutes. Playing in the Band that swallowed a whole second set. Pure deep-space territory.
1965 - 1973First Performances
Debut nights for the songs that defined them. The first China Cat, the first Truckin', the night Scarlet Begonias appeared.
July 7, 1989JFK Stadium '89
Brent Mydland era at its peak. Playing in the Band, Terrapin, Truckin' - a stadium show that felt like a small room.
In Action
Questions Deadheads actually ask
See what the chatbot can do.
What shows did the Dead play at Cornell?
Find the longest Dark Star performances
What was the setlist for 5/8/77?
How many times did they play Scarlet into Fire?
Thirty years of music. One conversation.
Free to use. Streams from the Internet Archive. No account required to start.
Open the ChatStanding on Shoulders
Before the graph, there was a book.
In 1987, three Deadheads - John W. Scott, Stu Nixon, and Mike Dolgushkin - published DeadBase, the first catalog of every Grateful Dead show ever played. For two decades it was how Deadheads navigated the tape trading world. Nineteen editions. 992 pages in the final printing. The community's shared canon.
DeadBase documented 2,318 shows and 480 distinct songs. The original database was eventually lost; the final edition exists as scanned PDFs.
DeadGraph picks up where DeadBase left off. Same obsessive cataloging instinct, different era. Ask your question in plain English and get an answer grounded in 675,641 tracks - not AI guesswork.
| DeadBase (1997) | DeadGraph (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows | 2,318 | 2,336 |
| Track data | Setlists | 675,641 tracks |
| Recordings | Notes only | 18,106 with metadata |
| Search | Page flip | Ask in plain English |
| Audio | None | Stream from Archive |
| Cost | $90 | Free |
FAQ
Quick answers
Is it really free?
Yes. 15 questions per day with no account. Sign in with Google to save conversations and playlists. Pro accounts ($8/month) get 500 questions/day. The Dead community always believed music should be shared freely - we feel the same way.
Where does the audio come from?
The Internet Archive. Deadheads have been uploading and sharing audience recordings and soundboards there since 2002 - over 18,000 recordings available under Creative Commons licenses. DeadGraph links directly to Archive.org and streams from there. We don't host or redistribute audio.
How is this different from setlist.fm or deadlists.com?
Those are great for browsing. DeadGraph is for asking. Instead of clicking through pages, you just type the question you actually have - "what songs did they debut in 1972?" or "how many times did Weir play Mexicali Blues without Garcia?" - and get a direct answer with the data to back it up. Plus the audio.
Does it make things up?
We've worked hard to prevent that. Every answer comes from a real database query, not from what an AI "thinks" it remembers. If something isn't in the data, it says so. Musician facts (who played what era, who wrote what song) are hardcoded from verified sources. We're obsessive about this - the Dead community would notice immediately if we got a fact wrong.
For Developers
Connect from Claude Desktop
DeadGraph runs as an MCP server on Cloudflare. Connect it to Claude Desktop for full tool access and higher-quality responses than the web chatbot.
13 MCP Tools
search_shows, get_setlist, search_transitions, guest sit-ins, musician overlap, and more
Edge Deployed
Cloudflare Worker + D1 SQLite with FTS5 full-text search. Zero cold start.
Academic Paper
Full architecture paper covering the pipeline, eval suite (91.5% accuracy), and rights model
Open Source
Pipeline and schema on GitHub. Generalized IaKnowledgeBase pattern reusable for any archive collection.
Connect from Claude Desktop
Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json under mcpServers:
"deadgraph": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["mcp-remote", "https://mcp.deadgraph.com/sse"],
"env": {}
}Restart Claude Desktop after saving. A browser window will open for authentication.