Summer 2026 out-jammed every full-length tour since Fall ’97

Summer 2026 is in the books, and it was definitely a memorable one. The tour brought us the biggest bustout ever (Melt the Guns at Fenway), a drum-kit revival, and 90s theme nights at MSG. But after running the numbers, one thing stands out to me above the rest: across 21 shows, the band jammed longer on average than on any full-length tour since Fall ’97.

Second only to Fall ’97

The average summer jam ran 8:27, against 8:37 for Fall ’97 (the only full-length tour ahead of it). That on its own would be an impressive number, but it gets even better once we take into account that 2026 got there on fuller setlists: 17.5 songs a show to 1997's 16.1.

Of course, there’s only one way that the band can play equally-long jams AND more songs: the band’s shows today are significantly longer than they were in ’97. 2026 averaged 2 hours 58 minutes of music a night to 1997's 2:38, and gave a slightly larger share of it to improvisation: 58% of the night's music, against 55% in ’97.

Minutes per show

Total improvisation per show tells the other half of the story, and here 2026 is second again. This time, it trails the 2024 Summer Tour, which packed 107.9 minutes of total jam time into each night compared to 2026's 104.2. But 2024 got there in a different way: by playing more jams (14.9 a show) that were shorter (7:15 on average). 2026 nearly matched the total with fewer, longer jams.

The long arc

Track the average jam length year by year and the distance from the start of 3.0 is stark: 5:37 in 2009, against 8:21 in 2026 to date (including Mexico and Sphere). The summer tour on its own ran a notch higher at 8:27. The share of the night spent improvising has moved the same way: 58% across the summer run, against 45% in 2009.

Five songs past fifteen minutes

Five songs set new all-time jam records past fifteen minutes this summer. Carini’s jam stretched past 37 minutes at Merriweather, eleven-plus minutes beyond its old mark. Similarly, The Wedge went from an 11:09 ceiling that had stood since the ‘summer of Wedge’ in 2014 to 23:08, more than doubling its record. Split Open and Melt, jammed more than 330 times since the late '80s, broke a record that had stood since 2004, and Down with Disease, jammed over 300, set a new best at Dick's on 9/4 (31:43, past its 30:38 from 2024).

6 more set jam-length records without reaching fifteen minutes: Roggae (9:13), Vultures (9:02), Turtle in the Clouds (8:47), Bug (8:31), 555 (7:15), and Evolve (6:49). The margins there are slimmer (Vultures beat a 1997 mark by 11 seconds), and of course, the newer songs had shorter histories to beat.

Even the songs that never jam

Two songs make the point better than the averages do. Bouncing Around the Room and Horn are among the most reliably compact songs in the catalog, and both got stretched this summer.

It goes deeper than those two. On July 17 at Walnut Creek, both The Lizards and Golgi Apparatus hit their longest versions ever on the same night: 18:42 for the Lizards, past a mark that had stood since 1998, and 12:11 for Golgi, which had never gone beyond 10:34 in 451 performances. The next night at Merriweather, Contact ran 9:59, beating a record from 1992.

The longest jams of the run

The peaks were spread across the whole summer.