Between Passover, Bicycle Day, Easter Sunday, and 4/20, this coming weekend is a holy one for many. To celebrate the occasion, the Grateful Dead shared a curated playlist with top picks from Sunday shows throughout the band’s career. The nearly four-hour Never Miss A Sunday Show playlist fittingly kicks off with “Samson and Delilah”, a song practically required at the Dead’s Sunday spectacles.
Looking through the Never Miss A Sunday Show playlist, it’s not hard to see why the notion has become a nauseatingly repeated catchphrase within the jam community. The “Samson and Delilah” that kicks off the playlist comes from the Grateful Dead’s five-hour, three-set New Year’s Eve 1978 sendoff to Bill Graham‘s Winterland Ballroom, later released as The Closing of Winterland. Scroll further down the playlist, and you’ll find “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain” from May 8th, 1977 at Cornell University‘s Barton Hall, widely hailed by many as the finest Grateful Dead concert of them all. Then there’s October 8th, 1989, when the Grateful Dead surreptitiously took the stage at Hampton Coliseum under their former band name The Warlocks, officially released in 2010 as Formerly The Warlocks.
Beyond those legendary live concerts, there are a staggering number of chestnuts from Sunday shows. On Sunday, September 17th, 1972, the Dead delivered a blistering 39-minute “The Other One” in Baltimore, MD, immortalized on Dick’s Picks Vol. 23. A classic Primal Dead sequence of “Alligator”, “Drums”, “Jam”, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)”, and “Feedback” went down at Fillmore West on March 2nd, 1969, followed the next month by a 26-minute “Dark Star” on April 27th in Minneapolis. Thumbing through a cataclysmic, show-opening 1973 “Morning Dew”, a 15-minute “Sugaree” from 1977, and a stellar Europe ’72 “Playing in the Band” proves that Never Miss A Sunday Show is much more than a marketing ploy to get folks to buy tickets on a work night.
Stream the Never Miss A Sunday Show playlist below or on your preferred platform. Despite having four weekends to go at Sphere, Dead & Company have opted for only one Sunday show (May 11th) and instead play the rest of their runs Thursday–Saturday. Find tickets and a full list of Dead Forever dates here.
Grateful Dead — Never Miss A Sunday Show [Full Playlist]