Version 12/12/12
If you have old ticket stubs, if you attended a show that's not listed, or if you are interested in doing research in old newspapers, please let me know.
Dates are in the format Year/Month/Day. So 72/10/31 is October 31, 1972. Incomplete dates are out of order, at the beginning of the month or year.
Some European cities have different names in English and in the local language. In such cases, I have used the English name.
I have attempted to list the actual municipality in which the venue was located, even if it is a suburb of a larger city. For example, Upper Darby is not part of Philadelphia, so Tower Theater gigs are listed under Upper Darby. On the other hand, both Hollywood and Venice are part of Los Angeles, so Whisky à Go-Go and Cheetah gigs are listed under Los Angeles.
To avoid accented characters, I have replaced umlauts with e (e.g. Düsseldorf > Duesseldorf) and omitted other diacritics (e.g. Montréal > Montreal).
If you can't find the city you're looking for, check the guide to alternate city names.
Concerts in the USA are located by city and state. Concerts in Canada are located by city and province. See the guide to state abbreviations.
If a show is marked CONFIRMED in the Status field, that means that the date is verified by printed evidence from the year of the show, such as ticket stubs, advertisements, or newspaper reviews. The nature of the confirming evidence is (usually) indicated in the Comments field.
Shows marked CONFIRMED on the basis of tickets or ads may still turn out to have been canceled or rescheduled. Shows marked CONFIRMED on the basis of reviews should be pretty secure.
If the Status field is blank, it doesn't mean that I doubt the existence of such a concert. It just means that it hasn't yet been demonstrated that the concert in that city took place on that particular day. The fact that an audio recording is in circulation does not constitute evidence that a concert occurred in a particular city on a particular date. Some tapes have been mislabeled. For example, the recording circulating as "Butte, Montana, 1970 or 1971" was not recorded in Butte, Montana--or even at a concert. It is a studio recording. Even some official releases contain incorrect dates. For example, the booklet of Ahead Of Their Time gives the recording date as October 28, 1968, but both an advertisement printed before the concerts and a review printed afterwards indicate that the Royal Festival Hall concerts were actually on October 25, 1968.
If you attended a concert and didn't keep your ticket stub, a blank Status field doesn't mean that I think you're a liar, so please don't take it personally. I have spent many hours in the library, looking through old newspapers on microfilm in order to confirm dates for dozens of shows, in several countries. Perhaps you could do the same for a few shows that you attended. I'd be glad to give you help in determining when a concert might have occurred.
Shows with SPURIOUS or CANCELED in the Status field did not happen.
Shows with QUESTIONABLE in the Status field or "conflicts with xxx" in the Comments field may not have happened.
At the top of each page (in the pink table), there are links to band line-ups (on The Planet Of My Dreams) and setlists (on Jon Naurin and Oscar Bianco's FZShows) for each tour that year. Or you could go to Circular Motion, which integrates the Frank Zappa Gig List and FZShows into a single interactive site.
I am constantly updating the database of FZ concerts on my own computer. I upload new versions of the giglist to The Planet Of My Dreams as changes warrant and as time permits.
Versions are named by date, in the format Year/Month/Day (the same format as concert dates). So version 05/06/07 was uploaded on June 7, 2005.
The giglist started as a text document, which was posted to alt.fan.frank-zappa on June 3, 1998. The first HTML version was uploaded to The Planet Of My Dreams on February 6, 1999. The first version to be given a version number was version 00/01/11 (January 11, 2000).
I don't have space to host images of ticket stubs and posters on The Planet Of My Dreams (except those from the Grand Wazoo and Petit Wazoo tours). Ticket stubs and posters from some of the shows listed here can be found at Fredunzel's website, PlanetZappa, or Circular Motion.
Holiday shows (Mother's Day, Halloween, New Year's Eve)
Some touring statistics: Regions visited | Countries by year | Cities and engagements | Furthest cities | Distances traveled
Plain text version 12/12/12. Download and open with a database or word processor. Fields are separated by tabs, and records are separated by returns.
HTML version 12/12/12: 1965-1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1984 1988
Copyright © 2012 by Charles Ulrich. All rights reserved.