We are in the process of creating the MF Timeline, which is a listing of his tour dates going back to at least 1968, along with setlists and related articles and photos where available.

I first got the idea when reading the Steve Ray Vaughan bio, "Day After Day, Night After Night". It's an amazing assemblage of all his tour dates, photos and everything you can imagine. I said to my wife, "Somebody ought to write a book like this for MF." She said, "Why don't you do it?" For a few weeks I seriously entertained the idea, but the cost of publishing something that elaborate seemed prohibitive, especially when you consider that the last paperback MF book only sold a few hundred copies. Plus it seemed like a helluva lot of work. So I abandoned any idea of a book* and settled on the idea of putting together the tour dates timeline. For starters, 1976 is done, and more years are coming soon. Basically I got 20 years worth assembled over the summer by photographing MF’s and Ernie Garside’s calendars page by page, and then comparing them against each other and against the newsletters. The resulting dates were entered into a Word document. At this point, the logjam is getting it onto the web! Digital .jpg's of the actual pages (most of it in MF's handwriting including venue, band fee, travel route, etc) will follow before too long.

Thanks to

Kevin Seeley for a ton of stuff.
Dan Potts for a ton of stuff.
Bill Collins for giving me after-hours access to MF's calendars at the Sherman Jazz Museum in June.
Ernie Garside for loaning out his own tour calendars.
Pat Palumbo for his great collection of memorabilia.
Dave Luepke for photographing the two calendars I didn't have time for.
Tom Doyle, Stephen Lovelady, RussellP for various contributions.

MF’s personal gig calendars were available for the following years: 74 (latter half), 75 (early half), 76, 77 (first quarter only), 78, 79, 80-85, 86 (June – Dec only) 88-92, 93 (latter half), 94, 96, 05(Nov/Dec only), 06 Ernie Garside’s calendars covered ’68 to ’75. His generosity in mailing them to me from England helped fill in a bunch of gaps in the late 60s and early 70s. We are still missing sections of ’73 and ’77.

Remaining gaps were filled in from newsletters and/or articles. It won’t take you long to figure out that the newsletters were only about 60% accurate. If a January issue came out listing dates for January to March, often it would be missing the first couple of weeks of January dates, and the March dates would be very spotty. When the April issue came out, the March dates were already over, and so you’d never find out what dates had been added. It was a shame to see how many times MF was in my area and I never knew about it. On the other hand, there were performances that are missing from both the calendars and the newsletters. Obviously, without calendars the years ’97 – ’04 are missing a lot of info, but I concentrated more on the 70s and 80s. If someone wants to contact Ed Sargent/Bruce Galloway/alumni/etc for info on the later dates, be my guest!

*Never fear; Wilder and Ernie Garside are working on their own books!