Say Goodbye's signature Carter solo intro debuted (as far as we know) on 7.27.94 in Baltimore a week into DMB's tour post-Under the Table and Dreaming sessions. No performance of the song in the first several years was longer than nine minutes, and it took until the end of the 1997 Summer Tour for the intro to grow into Carter's signature showpiece. While the 7.7.97 performance (complete with lyrics about "exchanging fluids") doesn't make our list below, the intro clocked in 4:47 when it hadn't previously topped three minutes signaling what was to come over the next few years.

Summer 1997 through Summer 2000 marked a golden era for Say Goodbye introductions. While Carter is rightly spotlighted, the performances below are filled with duets with LeRoi who sometimes started the song with his flute, often times with Butch Taylor playing percussion on the keys also. The longest Say Goodbye on record 8.23.98 had Bill Summers of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters guest on percussion. While this version is the longest complete Say Goodbye by ten seconds, ironically the intro of 9.4.11 tops this list at 37 seconds longer - the band comes in around 116 beats per minute on the 9.4.11 vs. only 102 BPM on 8.23.98!

With the exception of a three-year run between 2010 and 2012, the intro pulled back into a more functional role. The intros from 2001 to 2009 averaged just 2:27, while those from 2013 to 2019 came in at a healthy 3:29 average. Post-COVID 2021 - present (as of the update stamp), the intro has averaged just a minute and a half including the first performance after the break on 8.21.21 when it was played without a formal intro and sort of faded in.

Disclaimers: As with any timing here on the site, the accuracy of our timing is limited by our ability to hear exact stops and starts. Say Goodbye can sometimes start with lighter percussion and it ends with a cymbal fade. A lot of these performances could time a second or two differently depending on the recording and the listener. For this reason, we listed an additional untied performance at the bottom.

There are performances of the song that do not have a recording. Most of these missing performances are from before 1997 and wouldn't challenge this list. We do acknowledge two smaller Canada shows from Fall 1998 that don't have recordings: 11.7 and 11.11. While it's also unlikely that these make our list, 11.5.98's intro did clock in at over 4 minutes. Otherwise all public performances of the song from 1997 to 2022 (and hopefully beyond) have been documented.