XLIIs vs Dead Sets

Every three months, XLIIs acquires four collections of Grateful Dead live recordings on loan from collectors around the world. Each collector has spent years — sometimes decades — assembling a set of tapes around a single idea: a particular era of the band, a run of shows that changed something, a sound engineer whose work defined how the Dead were heard. They traded for multiple recordings of every show until they had the best-sounding version. That's the tape that appears here. We photograph every collector's original cassettes and J-card inserts, written in their native language. Our archivists consult over a hundred research sources per collection to write liner notes for each show — the venue, the setlist, what was happening on the tour, and why that night mattered. Each season, we commission an artist to create original artwork for all four collections. SPRING 2026 Cornell and Company — 42 shows from 1977. Rhys Morgan, Cardiff, Wales. Six Hundred Four — 37 shows from the Wall of Sound year, 1974. Anonymous, Hungary. Young Bettys — 58 shows, 1969–1973. Andrei Petrescu, Bucharest, Romania. New Animal — 33 shows, 1979–1980. Hendrik Tamm, Estonia. 170 shows. Full recordings, start to finish. Turn your phone sideways to see the J-card. Read the liner notes while you listen. Free. No ads. No account. Just tapes.

Every Grateful Dead setlist. And now, the music. Dead Sets is the fastest way to dive into the Dead's live catalog: 1,600+ shows from 1972 to 1995, every setlist searchable by song, venue, city, or year — entirely offline, no account, no ads. LISTEN — Almost every show links to its recordings in the archive.org Grateful Dead collection. Dead Sets auto-picks the best-rated soundboard and streams it right on the setlist page — or flip between every tape of the night, soundboards, audience recordings, and matrixes, even mid-song. The mini-player follows you through the app, and playback continues with the screen locked. SEARCH — Type "Scarlet Begonias" and see every performance. Filter by year, state, or country. Tap any song in a setlist to trace it across two decades. TODAY IN DEAD HISTORY — What did the band play on this date in '77? In '89? One tab, every year. SAVED — Heart your favorite shows, and mark the ones you attended with a ticket stub. Your whole trip, tallied, stored only on your device. CHAT WITH A DEAD HEAD (subscription) — A virtual dead head who's seen 300+ shows and followed the whole Europe '72 tour. Ask him anything — "best Dark Star of '73?", "what happened today in Dead history?" — and tap the shows he mentions to jump right to them. $1.99/month after a 7-day free trial, 30 messages a day, cancel anytime. Setlist data from the Grateful Dead Setlist Archive (cs.cmu.edu), cross-checked against archive.org and setlist.fm, with hundreds of hand-restored corrections. Recordings stream from the archive.org Grateful Dead collection, where the band has long blessed fan recordings. Not affiliated with Grateful Dead Productions. Just built by someone who gets it. Terms of Use: https://bowtiedjungle.dev/terms Privacy Policy: https://bowtiedjungle.dev/privacy