Europe '72: France

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead For The Committed And The Curious.

Ladies and gargoyles, crepe enthusiasts, welcome back to season five of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host Rich Mahan. Thanks for coming along on this journey as we time travel across the pond to 50 years ago and travel with the Grateful Dead on their historic Europe 72 Tour. We are bringing new episodes of the Deadcast to you weekly this season. Each episode covers the shows that took place on the Europe 72 Tour 50 years to the week after they happened.

Visit us at our website, dead.net/deadcast and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour for this episode. In fact, we are releasing a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during Season 5 for you to sample. So there will be new content for you on the regular. Make sure to check your social media. You never know when something cool is going to pop up. Also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes from Seasons 1 through 4 And you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform and listen where you'd like to listen. Did you attend any of the shows on the Europe 72 Tour? Do you know somebody who did? Well, get them over to stories.dead.net and record any tales you have about the tour. We're especially interested in hearing from somebody who attended the Netherlands or the Munich shows. There's still time to get you into future episodes covering those. So head on over, we need your stories.

How about some Europe 72 music for your collection? July 29th will bring Lysium 1972, the complete recordings limited edition, a 24 LP box set with four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour, available exclusively at dead.net. This one is selling fast folks. If you think you might want to get it, I suggest jumping on it soon.

And there's also a newly remastered version of the original Europe 72 album. It'll be available on CD, LP and digitally also on July 29th.

Well, this week, we travel to the City of Lights, Paris, France, for two shows at the famed Olympia Theater on May 3rd and May 4th, with a third show scheduled that, well, you'll just have to stay tuned to see what happens, won't you? Don your berets, grab a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, and let's all follow Jesse Jarnow for a stroll along the sand.

Jesse Jarnow (3:20)

Late on May Day 1972, the Grateful Dead arrived in France. They'd been in Europe for exactly a month and had plenty of adventures and made some fantastic music. But in the course of the tour's first 10 performances, they'd only caught two songs that would make it to the original Europe 72 Triple LP. That would change significantly when they got to Paris, where, in the comfortable confines of the Olympia Theater, they found a welcoming crowd of heads and captured more than twice that. Five live dead recordings that virtually every head knows. But to paraphrase the great music documentarian Marty DeBergey, they got more.

A lot more.

Bozo Bus and the Bolo Bus took the two-day overland route from Hamburg to Paris with an overnight stop in Connigswinter. As always, we're standing on the shoulders of heads, and specifically David Gans. This next bit of Bob Weir comes from David and Marty Martinez's 1995 interview with him, and it's followed by an interview David did with The Dead's late manager, John McIntyre. Check out David's books at perfectible.net.

Bob Weir (4:32)

We'd hit multiple and varied truck stops to the amazement and consternation of the locals.

John McIntyre (4:38)

We had two buses, like 52 people.

And so one of the things that I just remember, I guess Rosie wasn't there because Rosie speaks, is French and therefore, Martin Peres speaks fluent French. But she must not have been there because I remember a lot of times driving through France and these two buses with 52 hippies and we would be, it'd be four in the afternoon and we'd be really hungry. And when people like us are really hungry, it's like not a good idea to let that hunger go on any longer because it might burst out in ways that you're not really comfortable with.

And so we'd have to go to some little countryside French place and of course, all of France closes down between 2.3 and 7 for food, you just don't, it's just, it's not like in this country where there are things that are open all the time and you can eat, you know, you can eat whenever. No, that doesn't happen in France. You eat when the meals are cooked and served. And so I would have to go in there with my small knowledge of French, try to talk them into serving 52 really weird looking people who will be very grateful if they were fed at a time when no one is eating in the entire country. And that happened a lot.