I’ve long kept a text file with a list of all of the concerts I’ve seen, but over the past couple of weeks I decided I wanted to catalog each individual show, including date, location, and notes. It ended up being a process of searching a few different places for shows I may have missed or forgotten about and then figuring out the specific date I saw them.

Sadly, venue sites and concert listing aggregators are basically worthless for historical information (though the Wayback Machine with a venue site can sometimes turn something up if you have a general idea of when and what you’re looking for). Similarly, it’s a rare official artist site that has historical tour information further back than a year or so. Maybe an obsessive fan site might be able to help.

There are a few resources I found most useful. They got me about 90% of the way there:

  • Ticket stubs that I saved
  • E-mail receipts (sometimes searching for the venue name and “your order” or “receipt” or, more generally, “your tickets”)
  • Blog/social media posts I wrote (search by venue name, “concert,” “show,” etc.)
  • setlist.fm for determining specific dates, even back to the 80s, with the bonus of possibly getting an actual setlist of the show you saw
  • Newspaper archives can help narrow down when a show was in a specific city and who else may have performed

It was nice to see a couple hundred artists I’d seen gathered together in one spreadsheet, split out by genre. I italicized the name of anyone I met or interviewed and added memories to the “notes” field about the shows (like the time Kool Keith tossed out Ziploc baggies of Caprisun and fried chicken into the crowd).

While I was never one to see a show every weekend, I’ve had a pretty rich concert life. It’s been a fun exercise to research and catalog it.