A Data Visualization Study on 60 Years of The Grateful Dead

And ranking their openers based on JAM rating

Hello everyone,

We’re doing another non-sports data visualization today. This weekend in San Francisco is basically the Jam Band Olympics as the world celebrates 60 years of the Grateful Dead. Dead & Company, the quasi-cover GD band that features original members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, are playing 3 shows with three different openers. On Friday August 1, Billy Strings will open for them. On Saturday August 2, Sturgill Simpson is their opener and on Sunday August 3, it’s Trey Anastasio Band.

I’m trying to think of sports terms to convey the magnitude of this event to those who may not listen to any of these bands. In golf terms, this is basically like Scottie Scheffler, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer getting together to play a televised round of golf. Imagine the greatest of any sport you’d like to choose from the past and present getting together for one mega event. Long story short, it looks like the greatest concerts (maybe) ever are about to happen this weekend in San Francisco, and I’m bummed that I won’t be attending.

To bring it all back to data visualization and help cope with my FOMO, I’ve decided to create some data visualizations about these bands. We’re going to analyze just how ‘jammy’ these jam bands are using their setlist data. Come with me on a journey through the wonderful world of comma separated values and JavaScript.

As always, if you’re new here I’d love to have you as a subscriber. If you’re an interesting person looking for interesting stories about interesting datasets, this is the place for you.

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Let’s dive right into this week’s visualizations.

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What is a Jam Band?

I want to make sure we’re all on the same page here before I dive into some extremely specific details. Usually when we attend our favorite concerts, the artist or band we’re seeing is sticking to a setlist. This setlist changes over the years as the band releases new music, or there may be some slight variance here and there based on some context like concert location. As a kid I specifically remember this wave of joy I felt when Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt played their song ‘Orange Juice’ while I saw them at Made in America 2012 on the Parkway in Philly. I was a huge fan of Odd Future and had studied their setlist beforehand, so when they deviated from the original plan and added in a performance for a song off of Earl Sweatshirt’s mixtape, I was ecstatic.

Jam bands create this feeling every single night.

No setlist is the same. Very rarely do they play the same song two shows in a row. On one night, a setlist of 20 songs means that the show lasted 3 hours. On other nights, a setlist of 20 songs means the show lasted 5 hours. Spontaneous guest appearances, encores, and jams occur on a nightly basis. No two shows are the same. Most fans of jam bands don’t play their favorite albums on repeat, they play recordings of their favorite shows on repeat.

For lack of a better word, The Grateful Dead essentially invented this genre. We’re going to dive into 60 years of their concerts and try to create a jam band metric, fully blending two worlds together that have never crossed, jam bands and data science. Exciting, right? I’ve signed up on setlist.fm to receive an API key, and I’ve created a dataset of every song the Grateful Dead, Dead & Company, Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, and Trey Anatasio Band (TAB) have played. I’ve created a few visualizations below that illustrate how diverse their setlists are night in and night out. Here they are for you to enjoy:

Lava Lamp Charts

I’ve created some circular packing charts that show the amount of times a song is played by these bands. The bigger and darker the circle, the more they plays the song has at their concerts. I think they ended up looking like the bubbles inside lava lamps, so I’m calling them lava lamp charts. They don’t give us much statistical insight, but we’ll get some later. For now, just check out how cool these look. Honestly, the quickest way to share these large GIFs was through Twitter, so here’s some links:

Here’s the lava lamp chart for The Grateful Dead.

The lava lamp chart for Dead & Co.

For Billy Strings.

Sturgill Simpson.

And Trey Anastasio Band.

Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t let me a) embed tweets or b) post these large GIFs. Sorry about that, folks. I promise following those links is worth it. Here’s a GIF of the first 30 seconds of one of those lava lamps:

JAM Ratings

I’ve created a simple linear regression on all of these setlists that’s measuring how unexpected each band’s song choices are based on their previous bodies of work. Based on each band’s previous shows, we’re trying to pinpoint exactly which location in the next show’s setlist the previous songs will be played. If a band plays new songs or the same songs in much different orders, then their JAM rating goes up. A band that plays the same songs in the same order every night would have a low JAM rating. A band that never repeats songs or song positions would have a high JAM rating.

In essence, we’re grabbing the r-squared for each band and trying to explain the variance of each setlist. The bands that are more unpredictable rank higher. Here is how they rank in order:

1. Billy Strings

2. TAB

3. Grateful Dead

4. Sturgill Simpson

5. Dead & Co.

As seen in the lava lamp charts, Billy Strings plays the most songs out of everyone. Here’s a violin chart for each band’s jam rating, and an attempt to find their jammiest show:

I’m absolutely missing the crown jewel of what would be a future good endeavor, the actual show and individual song lengths. If anyone has a lead on that data, it would be greatly appreciated.

As for covers of the Grateful Dead, Billy Strings leads the pack again with 235 covers (although this includes his shows played with Bob Weir in the count), followed by Trey Anastasio band covering the Dead 6 times (note: I’m sure this number would be higher if I included Phish shows in the count) followed by Sturgill Simpson with one instance of covering Ripple live.

Are any of my subscribers attending this weekend in San Francisco? Anyone a fan of these bands? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!