A lot of the early setlists are incomplete, so we don't really know what they played. In '69 and early '70 there were probably more short performances opening for other bands, mixed in with longer free gigs and things as they built up their chemistry and their following. If you look at the ABBbase, there's only one setlist from 1969 that even kind of looks like it could have been a full performance. Whipping Post is on the first album, so there's no way they didn't play it regularly, and we know that once they picked a set list for a particular tour, they didn't change it very much. Elizabeth Reed wasn't written until a little bit later, but once it was finished they played it almost every night. Dreams was never performed that often, maybe because they didn't want to play too many slow songs. Mountain Jam probably got saved for gigs where they had a ton of time to stretch out, and Blue Sky wasn't written until mid-1971 because they started playing it live in August. Once those songs became the fan favorites, things changed and they made sure to play at least some of those songs every night.

The reason I was surprised is I was looking at set lists from the '90's. Obviously by then they had a lot more material to pick from but I thought at least one of those three classics would be included every night.

Not typical, but not a huge shock. They were working "Nobody Knows", "True Gravity", and "Kind of Bird" in as instrumental set pieces. You add the acoustic sets and that limits even regular tunes like "Liz Reed", "WP" and "Dreams" in the rotation.

The absence of "Blue Sky" is a surprise, since, with the exception of some Dickey-less shows in 1993, that was almost always at the top of the lineup in the 1990s. "Mountain Jam", on the other hand, was relegated to teases within "Jessica" and "True Gravity" and didn't really return until Summer 2000.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the info.