Europe ‘72: Prelude

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 gentlemen, friends across the globe, welcome to season five of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host, Rich Mahan, and we are happy to be back with another season of Deadcast episodes for you to dive into, and boy is the pool a deep one this time. Pool, should we say pond? Pool, pond, pond would be good for you, especially as we go across the pond in a time machine and explore the magnificent and brilliantly executed Europe 72 Tour that the Grateful Dead embarked upon 50 years ago. April and May 1972 found 52 bozos and bolos from the San Francisco Bay Area trekking across Europe, bringing psychedelic merriment and a whole bunch of new Grateful Dead songs to the old world. We're bringing new episodes of the Deadcast to you weekly this season. Each episode will cover the shows that happened on the Europe 72 Tour 50 years to the week after they went down. Jesse and I interviewed more people for this season of the Deadcast than ever before, and we're very excited to share all of the tales from the European Golden Road with you. Speaking of Jesse, his highly acclaimed book, HEADS, A Biography of Psychedelic America, is coming out as an audiobook read by the author himself on April 12th via Hachette Audio, wherever you get your audiobooks. Check it out.

Visit us at our website, dead.net/deadcast, and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour this episode. In fact, we'll be releasing a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during season five for you to sample, so there will be new content for you on the regular. Also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes of the Deadcast, including the complete seasons one through four, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Did you attend any of the shows on the Europe 72 tour? Know somebody who did? Well, get over to dead.net and record those stories about Europe 72 You could hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. Tell your friends.

Looking to add some Europe 72 to your music collection? Well, we've got you covered. July 29th will bring Lysium 1972, the complete recordings limited edition. It's a 24 LP box set with four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour, available exclusively at dead.net.

And a newly remastered version of the original Europe 72 album will also be available on CD, LP and digitally, also on July 29th, with a limited edition 3LP rainbow vinyl version arriving early on June 3rd, only at dead.net.

The Grateful Dead's European 1972 tour was a massive undertaking. The band played 22 shows across the continent, traveling as a 52 person entourage in two buses and as tour architect Sam Cutler says, we didn't lose one of them. Just how did the Europe 72 tour come to be? Where did the concept come from? And who were the people that helped make the dream become reality? Climb on the bus and take your seat because we are pulling out of the station and going on tour together through the 22 shows that make up the Grateful Dead's Europe 72 tour. Ladies and gentlemen, your bus driver, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (4:18)

Thank For the third time in four years, the Grateful Dead found themselves making a live album, as Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir reminded the crowd on 29 April 1972 in Hamburg, Germany.

Jerry Garcia (4:29)

Don't worry, everything's gonna be all right.

Rich Mahan (4:32)

You betcha.

Jerry Garcia (4:33)

See, we're making a record. This is a record. This is all gonna be a record someday. So we're doing songs that a lot of people haven't ever heard before.

You know how it is. Can't do the same stuff forever.

John Morris (4:49)

You end up going color blind.

Rock Scully (4:56)

Take a shift at the mine.

Jesse Jarnow (5:22)

There is perhaps no better example of the Grateful Dead preventing color blindness and doing it their way than Europe 72, the monumental tour and resultant live album released in the fall of that year.

As the music industry was embracing the double live LP as a souvenir of rock and roll glory, the Dead upped the stakes, a triple live set, featuring not only big jams and some of their most popular songs, but mixed alongside nearly a full discs worth of fantastic new material played through their highly customized gear and recorded by their dedicated sound team, hand made at every stage until manufacture. The songs became not only deadhead favorites, but some of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's most enduring work. One fan who saw them for the first time on the Europe 72 tour was none other than Elvis Costello.