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Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.
Jesse Jarno
Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.
Rich Mahan
Ale in your neck of the woods.
Jesse Jarno
Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware.
Rich Mahan
Please drink responsibly.
Jesse Jarno
The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow virtual pond hoppers, welcome back to season five of the good old Grateful Dead Cast. 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 join the Grateful Dead on their Europe 72 tour. We are bringing new episodes of the Dead Cast to you weekly during season five and each episode will cover the shows that took place on the Europe 72 tour 50 years to the week after they happened. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour for this episode. In fact, we will be releasing a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during season five for you to sample, so there will be new content for you every day. Also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes, 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? Do you know somebody who did? Well, get over to stories.dead.net and record those tales about Europe 72. You could hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. How about some Europe 72 music for your collection? July 29th will bring Lyceum 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@dead.net and there's a newly remastered version of the original Europe 72 album. It'll also be available on CD, LP and digitally on July 29th, with a limited edition 3LP Rainbow vinyl version arriving early on June 3rd. Also only@dead.net well, welcome to 1972 in jolly old England.
Rich Mahan
You've just touched down at Heathrow Airport in London.
Jesse Jarno
You've got a few days to Overcome the jet lag. And then we've got three shows this.
Rich Mahan
Week, two at the Wembley Empire Pool.
Jesse Jarno
On April 7th and 8th, and then to the north of England for a show in Newcastle at City hall on April 11. Time to hand this off to our tour guide, Jesse Jono.
Rich Mahan
On April Fool's Day, 1972, the Grateful Dead and three dozen family members departed from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, bound for London and the Europe 72 tour. Joe Smith, the Warner Brothers executive who helped sponsor the tour, told Robert Greenfield, when I send them to Europe, I wanted to write a book, how we did Europe on $5,000 a day. It would produce one of the classic live albums of all time. Welcome back, Mountain Girl.
Jesse Jarno
Yeah, we were all on the same big plane. I remember how really taken aback the staff was on the plane because every five minutes somebody would be smoking a joint somewhere on the plane and have to be chastised and talked to sternly behave ourselves. So, you know, I think the. We. We really had a lot of fun on that flight, and there was quite a lot going on. So we. But we did get there. I remember we landed, like, at the. At the first blink of dawn. And I think we were in England first in London.
Rich Mahan
And welcome back, Donna Jean. God show McKay.
Jesse Jarno
It was a comedy routine, and it was made up of the most different, unpredictable, lovable, unique convergence of people that you could imagine. And even to be in it, you had to be of it. And to be of it, you had to be open, really, to a plethora of universes and an ability to navigate through all of them. So there was a little bit of sink or swim with a whole lot of we take care of each other kind of dichotomies that were abounding. But it was all part of the unspoken GD philosophy. It was amazing. The whole scene was amazing. With everything that's been written and said and recorded about it, it's one of those things where you really have to be there. It was amazing.
Rich Mahan
Ben Haller was a member of the new lighting crew, already living in London, where he'd been working at the recently closed Rainbow Theater, which we heard about last episode.
Jesse Jarno
April 1st, they arrive. So I go out to Heathrow. I was Gatwick boy. I like to go to. Gatwick was a much friendlier airport and you could take the train back and forth. Heathrow is an insane problem. So anyway, I get there, the crew gets off, the passengers get off. I'm going, okay. They get off now. No, a Boy Scout troop gets off and I'm beginning to think it's April 1st. Maybe I've been pranked so. But no, then out comes Big Pen and Jerry and you know, the boys. And we had a good laugh about it outside.
Rich Mahan
It was Easter Sunday and it was off to the fabulous Kensington Palace Hotel across from Kensington Gardens. Also along on the tour were members of the so called Pleasure Crew, a group of well to do deadheads that sometimes traveled with the band's inner circle. According to Phil Lesh's memoir, Searching for the Sound, this included Marina, an oil heiress from New York. Marina was so used to instant service that when we got to our hotel in London, she mistook Garcia for a bellboy and imperiously ordered him to bring her luggage in from the bus. Jerry, all around good guy that he was, never even blinked. And we all cracked up at the sight of him staggering into the lobby loaded down with matching Louis Vuitton suitcases.
Jesse Jarno
So everybody landed, we were starving. And we get into this hotel and it's like 9 o' clock in the morning. And of course at that hour they're not making food, you know, that's it, you're. Oh, you'll have to wait. So Jerry and I went out to the park across the street, which is some well known gathering place for, for interesting people. And there was a couple of lunch carts out there. This is probably about, you know, noon or something like that. We've been up all night and feeling kind of fuzzy. And the place says hamburgers, right? We're going, oh, thank God. It's a place that sells hamburgers. I mean, trotting over there a couple of blocks and pulled in there and ordered two hamburgers. And the guy behind the counter and this like, it's like a trailer selling thing and he reaches down into this pot of boiling water and pulls out two large boiled patties of diced ham and puts them on, on buns, nice little English buns, and gives them to us and we're going, what's this? You know what we're looking at each other going, Hamburgers. Okay? And we paid and left. This wasn't what we were looking for at all, you know, moment of complete disappointment.
Rich Mahan
Somehow Jerry and Mountain Girl walked right into a Simpsons punchline that didn't exist for another quarter century.
Jesse Jarno
Oh no, I said steamed hams.
Rich Mahan
The band made camp at the Kensington Palace Hotel, which, in the memorable words of Alan Trist, held the dead's madness in its middle class velvet glove. The band established its base of operation. Sam Cutler at the helm on this season of the good ol Grateful Dead cast. We're slightly dizzy to also be able to really represent Pigpen, of course. Pigpen died tragically less than a year after the Europe 72 tour. On the episode about Operator during our American Beauty season, we spoke with Jim Sullivan, AKA Sully, the family friend who is the keeper of the archive of the late Ron Pigpen. McKernan. Part of that archive is a stash of incredibly detailed letters Pigpen sent home to his family. Thank you so so much for preserving and sharing these. Sully.
Jesse Jarno
He was very close with his family, talking about how things were on the road. He actually sounds really kind of lonely. It's just really an interesting side of things that you really don't necessarily think is part of that. I mean, everybody thinks of the rock and roll star as big drama, dynamic life and trash and rooms and shit like that. But those letters tell a different story.
Rich Mahan
Pigpen had spent much of fall 1971 off the road, recuperating from a perforated ulcer and hepatitis. He lost weight and stopped drinking. But his creativity and desire to make music and be part of the Grateful Dead only seemed to grow over late 1971 and early 1972. He introduced a number of new originals to the band's repertoire and went deeper than ever into old standbys. One subplot we'll explore in more depth as we go along this season is how Pigpen was starting to come into his own.
Jesse Jarno
Kensington Palace Hotel Sunday, April 2, 1972, 11:30pm hi. Safe and somewhat sound in London. The time change is somewhat more drastic than SF to New York City, but we have a few days to get used to it. The steam heat doesn't work so hot, so they brought up an electric fire heater and rooms, closet, beds, a postage stamp I'm changing tomorrow. We had no trouble with British customs. They put all the bags on carts and wheeled everything out. No search, nothing. I got searched in New York City because I registered high on their Snooper scope Don't know why the weather's overcast low 50s hotels on the west end of Hyde park in Kensington, Chelsea area. Tomorrow's a bank holiday and almost nothing's open. They're celebrating Easter Monday Got a few days to get used to things before playing British TV stinks and the radios piped into the rooms two channels each no rock or pop music, you take it or leave it. Good time to sleep to adjust to local time. Think I'll take a hot bath Tubs long and deep with a soap rack that crosses from side to side and is movable. Sam and Garcia have spacious rooms with a view of the park and king size beds. Superstars, managers, special privileges. We'll see new room for me tomorrow. Not king size, just a plain double. Well, off to Bath Later, Ron.
Rich Mahan
Lots more from Pigpen. To come. With the band was their old friend, Alan Trist, head of Ice9 Publishing. It was in Alan's family flat near Kensington Gardens that Robert Hunter penned the lyrics for Ripple, Broke down palace and To Lay Me down in One burst in spring 1970, a story we told in our American Beauty season. Alan spent parts of 1971 laying groundwork for Europe 72, which we heard about last time. Welcome back, Alan.
Jesse Jarno
Well, the family flat was no more. By 1972, I was two years out from having lived in London. I'd left England, so I definitely stayed at the Kensington Palace Hotel. Sam was the road manager, but I was his kind of English second in command as needed. It was nearly always to do with the press issues, because what I had set up the previous year then started going into action. And in London there was the New Musical Express Timeout. All of the English underground press then came down to the hotel and there was a couple of days, couple of afternoons of interviews and so on at that time. And so I was on the phone to the press and so on. That was what I was doing most of the time. There were other things because I did have a network in London, the press and the radio people, which were also very much part of the underground music scene at that time, Radio Luxembourg and the offshore illegal radio stations and so on.
Rich Mahan
And in fact, the band did have a brand new single to promote, featuring a brand new song recorded only a few weeks before their departure at Wally Heiders in San Francisco. What's more, for one of the only times in their entire career, the band would play that single nearly every night in the wake of its release and promote it across Europe on radio and television.
Jesse Jarno
I went down to the mountain I was drinking some wine look up in the heavens While I saw my son written Fire across the heaven Plane is black and white get prepared let's go Be upon it tonight hey, Saturday night hey, one more Saturday night Hey, Saturday.
Rich Mahan
Night As the story goes, when the other members of the Grateful Dead heard that Bob Weir was getting ready to record his solo debut, Ace, in February 1972, they each individually volunteered to play on it. The album would hit the streets in May as Weir's solo debut, with the Dead as his backing band. But in advance of the tour. Warner Bros. Released One More Saturday Night as a standalone Grateful Dead single in the uk, France and Germany with a B side of Bertha from 1971's Skull and Roses. The A side was credited to the Grateful Dead featuring Bobby Ace. Place a bookmark here. We'll have to get back to the story of Ace another day For a few days, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Pigpen entertained the press. Somewhat unusual for the latter two. Pigpen told Rosalind Russell of Disc garcia generally speaks for all of us because he's the most articulate guy in the group. So what he says goes. It baffles me the superhero reputation. We keep hearing reports of this, but we've only been here once before and I don't think we sold so many records. We ain't superstars over in the States. We're just another medium to well known band. We're no Three Dog Night or Credence. We just consider ourselves general folks. Coming to Britain is just an opportunity for us to see Europe, pig continued. I don't personally care if I come home with no money as long as we cover what we put out. We've been trying to have the ticket prices put down for the concerts here because we don't like to burn people. I don't mind having more dollars in my pocket, but that's not primarily a reason for being here. We've posted links to these interviews@dead.net Deadcast Pigpen told the infamous Mick Farren of the International just folks, that's all we can relate to. The songs we play are our history the American West. Jerry Garcia told Rock magazine about the plan for the tour. We have new material that'll be new here, he said. It's not new to us. We've been playing it for a while. But our material starts to get life after we've been playing it for a while. But if we play it too long, it loses life. There's a sort of peak optimum and right now we're at one of those peaks. We've got a lot of brand new material. We have material that'll be new that we never recorded. In fact, that's why we're recording these tours. Everybody is really on top of it musically. Bob has been writing a lot of good material, Pigpen has been writing a lot of good songs, and the energy of the piano player and his wife has just been fantastic for us, made it feel really complete. But it certainly wasn't all work. As Alan Trist remembers.
Jesse Jarno
People would ask me sightseeing questions. For instance, what should we see. Where can we go? That's why I mentioned the Kensington Palace Hotel was right by the park. I would take people on walks down to the Serpentine and perhaps go with them to other museums or things like that.
Rich Mahan
There were softball and baseball in Kensington Gardens, rambles through Portobello Road and Piccadilly Circus.
Jesse Jarno
Marianne Meyer was on that tour as a photographer, and she was very much part of the Grateful Dead office scene and also one of the originators of the original light shows in San Francisco.
Rich Mahan
We're featuring Marianne Mayer's work in our daily dose on the Dead social media all spring. Check it out. Ben Haller helped retrieve the band's gear.
Jesse Jarno
Basically, what you have to do is list every piece of equipment you have and you put it on something called a carnet. And then this gets you in and out of every country quickly. Otherwise you're going to sit there. I mean, I. When I first went to England, I had to go down and stay at the docks. Me alone. All this tons and tons of equipment come in and I have to take each piece and show it to customs. It's a whole insane thing. So sometimes stuff gets held up in customs. Generally, if you have a carnet, you can take it through. It's interesting. If you have a box of nails or a box of bolts or light bulbs or anything, you always get a full box because it's easiest to put on the carnet rather than saying, I have 17 nails, you know. No, you know, that don't work.
Rich Mahan
And please welcome back Steve Parish.
Jesse Jarno
When we went to Europe, we weren't going without any marijuana, without any cannabis, and we had the best cannabis connections in the world, man. I'm telling you. Everybody brought to the hate the finest weeds and hashes from the world. We knew everywhere. I knew where every hash came from. The Grateful Dead wrote songs about red Lebanese. We knew about the Becca Valley and the fighting over that, which caused the hash supplies to cut down. Anyway, we bring our own marijuana. They make big fuses. We had a big 600amp service. And there's a big fuse with a replaceable link. I mean, the fuses are this big, you know, and they have a replaceable link and they screw open and they look really frightening. And if you just. If you. So when you open it and show it to customs and you sort of stand back a little, they get nervous and they won't get near. So then you. You take the link out of the fuse and you fill it up with your drugs, or you put the drugs in a speaker cabinet. You know, and you just, you take forever to unscrew the bolt and hold the speaker. They don't bother. We were too weird. We're too long haired. They didn't know what to do with us. And we had this one amplifier, which was one that was just a spare amp that we had. It was really just the top. And we took it apart and we took the transformer out of it and open and put this box in there, right, that fitted perfect. And we cleaned up about 2 pounds of pot and stuffed it in this transformer thing and put it back in there, right? So then when we get to England with our big truck full of all our equipment, right? And so I'm there at the airport with Kid and we're waiting while the customs guys are talking to us and looking at our car day. The carnet was a big deal. That had to be every piece, every history of it when we bought it, all this, you know, and where it came from, where origin, very. And they were looking through all that and then they're looking at all our stuff and we had 70 tons of equipment just about then we brought a PA and all this stuff over. And so guys looking at it and he blew my mind. He says, what's this box right here? And we had it in the case, and that's the case, that's the one amp. He says, pull that out of the truck. So we pull it out of the truck, right? And he has me open the case and pull that, that amp out. And I set it on top of the case. And they're looking at it and they're checking it out of all the cases to look into of all of them. They checked it on the carnet we added on there. Everything was right. I couldn't believe it. Then they said, all right, put it away. And then the guy says to me, what the are you Yanks doing over here? I said, we're gonna play some rock and roll music.
Rich Mahan
What?
Jesse Jarno
We don't need you mothers here, man. We've got the Beatles, you know. He starts on that rap with me, right? And he was none too friendly, but I couldn't believe he pulled that one case out. But never dreamt of having, you know, we didn't have to open the whole thing up where it was buried in there. But that was amazing.
Rich Mahan
The Dead had been booked to open their tour at the Rainbow Theatre in London where Pink Floyd had debuted Dark side of the Moon that February. But by March, the venue closed down. Last episode we discussed how the Rainbow's struggles had led Proprietor John Morris to help create the informal promoters alliance that resulted in the Dead's Europe 72 itinerary. With the Dead helping to imprint a new circuit for other acts to follow. But that still left them without a London gig. John Morris remained their UK promoter.
Jesse Jarno
I immediately wanted to find a place to put to Dead. So I had done a couple of concerts at Wembley and that's just where we turned. And it turned out to be bigger than we expected. More and more people came. It was, I think Wembley was about four or five thousand seats.
Rich Mahan
Alan Trist knew the spot.
Jesse Jarno
I remember the Empire Pool I had as a kid. I'd been there a few times when it was in the wintertime. It was a skating rink, an indoor skating rink, as I remember. So I remember the place. It was a huge cavernous hall. Somehow the band the Engineers made it sound pretty good.
Rich Mahan
Sam Kotler wasn't thrilled. But did we do.
Jesse Jarno
We started off at Wembley, which was a shithole really. I mean, Wembley was an ice rink built for the, I don't know, the 1930s Olympics event in London. I can't remember exactly what year it was. Even I wasn't alive then. Yeah, it was a crap place, a bit like Winterland, you know, not really the greatest place for music. It turned into a fabulous gig.
Rich Mahan
It was the 1938 Olympics. Thanks, Sam. Then known as Empire Pool and more lately known as Wembley arena, where the Dead would return in 1990.
Jesse Jarno
They played this big ice rink and I remember the ice was on underneath the stage and under the chairs and stuff like that. It was so cold, cold in there. It's really, really chilly. And we hadn't really brought our warmies, so it was uncomfortable. Well, I'm telling you, it was really cold in there. They had this way of this floor that rolled out over the ice. Winterland used to be like this in San Francisco, the place where the band used to place. And we weren't that upset about the ice, except that it was already cold, you know, everything was so cold and we just did our best.
Rich Mahan
The previous month at Empire Pool had seen boxing and badminton championships, a few political rallies and a concert by T Rex with Bowlin Mania. Then at its full peak at the Kensington Palace Hotel. The Dead crossed paths with the entourage who'd performed at the Empire Pool immediately prior to them, the fourth annual Two Day International Festival of Country Music. It was a pretty all star lineup featuring Loretta Lynn, Earl Scruggs, the Stonemans, Conway Twitty and more. Weir struck up a conversation with some of the touring musicians which he recounted to the new Musical Express. We were talking about how many nights a year they work. I was telling them we work 50 nights a year. And they were amazed because they work 150 to 200 nights a year and more. I got the hint that they thought we were really lazy and just laying back and making money off a big name. Then it occurred to me to ask them how long they play every night, 45 minutes. Well, we play about three hours a night, so it works out to about the same. You can't carry on 150 or 200 nights a year while playing three or four hours a night and expect to survive. The Rainbow Theater had closed down, which left Joe's Lights, the former Fillmore east light show, adrift in Europe. You couldn't keep them away from the Empire Pool with a tire iron. Welcome back, Alan Arkish.
Jesse Jarno
I remember us being very excited about it and I remember a bunch of meetings about the stage and how we would be working off a scaffolding that was secured to the stage and it having to be thrown together pretty quickly. And we went down there and set up very early on the day before the concert.
Rich Mahan
What this means in practice is that for the Dead's two April shows at Empire Pool, they were backed by not just a full Fillmore east style light show, but the actual Fillmore east light show.
Jesse Jarno
There was not a concert hall and there was no stage there. So all of that had to be built with scaffolding. And the people who did that, I'm guessing, were Chris Langhart, who had designed the Fillmore essentially, and had been a professor of stagecraft at nyu, John Chester, and both of them. Chris had done the Woodstock Festival and he had set up the Rainbow Theater. So he's who you want there. And he was not flaky at all, but it was. He was like. Did you ever read Uncle Scrooge comics? There was a character that they had the second story now. His name was Gyro Gearloose and he was an inventor. That's Chris Langhart. I don't remember if it was because the place actually had tile or. Or what. I'm sure it had tile because they had covered the pool. I'm guessing it was about six or seven or 8,000 people. It had a ceiling like was common in those days of steel arch structure that was in the style of steel, but somewhat ornate. Since it been built for the Olympics, they had put some money in it. So it wasn't like what they would do today, which is just efficiency. There were kind of beams. They were kind of like erector set sections above it going all the way back to hold up the ceiling. Because British laws concerning safety of buildings and all that stuff are ridiculously over the top. So that would be what was up there, which, thank God, it saved the day.
Rich Mahan
On 6th April, the day before the first show, the Grateful Dead convened at Empire Pool for a sound check and rehearsal through their vaunted alembic sound system.
Jesse Jarno
And so they set up their equipment and we were all excited and they start to play. And the sound was dreadful. When they rehearsed, it was like immediately a meeting on the stage, you know, that afternoon, like, what are we going to do? Because it was a Grateful Dead singing in the shower, it was really unlistenable. It would have been Healy, definitely Matthews and John Chester and Chris Langhart, etc. And the decision had been made that the only thing that could save the place was to baffle it, to hang curtains. This is not the days of cell phones or anything. So they knew where you could rent theatrical curtains. So they went to rent every theatrical curtain that they could and hang them against the back wall and then hang them above. These guys are so smart. Figure out how low that they could go so that if you were in the back, you still could see the top of the stage, but higher. Natso wasn't intrusive, but at some point they did not get enough of them. They needed more, so they had them hung. And I guess there was another sound check. And they felt that it was working, but they needed more. But they had every curtain. And that's when someone came up with the idea of going to Army Navy places and getting parachutes. I don't know how that came about, but that was fucking genius. So they brought all these parachutes. Now, every time you hung this stuff, you had to climb up huge ladders or go up into the ceiling and send down ropes and everything. And so you needed all this rope and pulleys and everything. So this is not. This is all being done round the clock. And when they put up the parachutes and we stood on the stage and looked out, it was phenomenal looking because the curtains were dark in the back and the parachutes were light. And it would not be surprised me if they didn't realize the color of the parachutes. Being theater people, and kept them in groupings, whatever the slight difference of color was. These are all basically white. And you looked out and it looked amazing. It looked like a sheik's tent or something. And no longer Looked like Wembley at all. And if you were in the back and I didn't spend much time back there, you. You were like. Your point of view was. Was like Cinemascope. It had been baffled and you could see the edges of all the white stuff. And when they started to play, it was a world of difference. We kept getting lost in the curtains in there. It was very difficult to navigate because they insisted on keeping the curtains closed while they were doing the setup. And so we would have to, like, take pieces of equipment up to the stage and set them on the lip of the stage. And then somebody come out from behind the curtains and take it. While we're doing that, I'm. I'm kind of sitting there, you know, I was between runs or something like that, or I was like, done. And I noticed this guy come in and he just walked straight up to the stage and he picked up one of the pieces of gear and walked straight to the back of the building with somebody's amp. It was headed out the door. He was. He was stealing it. It was like completely wide open. And I thought, oh, this is. We're gonna get used to this. This is a different country. Things work differently here. And the guys caught. They got, you know, I pointed him out and they. They were able to retrieve their amplifier, but. But it was so open.
Rich Mahan
While the band was getting settled and sound checking, so was their recording crew. They'd come to Europe to make a righteous live album, and that started with a righteous recording setup. Please welcome back Janet Fuhrman of Alembec.
Jesse Jarno
We rented a truck and we unpacked all our equipment into the truck and tried to set it up as best we could and make it a little bit homey. We put up some drapes to make a better acoustic environment, and we had a little black and white closed circuit TV monitor that we could put the camera on stage so we could see what was going on there. Because typically the three of us who were the recording crew would be in that truck which would be parked somewhere in an alley behind the venue. And we would just be connected through a snake for the microphones and a power cable and the closed circuit TV feed. And we weren't actually there at the concert. We were watching this on our little tiny black and white tv. We had to keep it closed up because there are a lot of people surging around backstage there. We didn't want them coming in, so we had to kind of try to keep it private. We did have a carpenter that came in and did stuff like anchor the 16 track to keep it from moving around. Built a floor so that everything was kind of the same level. Built us a table. It made it kind of a more comfortable environment. The truck wasn't designed to be a recording truck, but it was an improvised recording truck that worked pretty well. We had a big step down transformer that we carried in the truck so we could convert the 240, I guess it was to the 120 that we needed. Then there was also the issue of the line frequency, which is 50 hertz and we needed 60 hertz. And so we had prepared for that. Ron Wickersham had built a 60 Hz crystal oscillator to use as a very stable 60 Hz reference. And then we used a Macintosh tube amp to amplify that and then took a tap off the output transformer that gave us 120 volts at 60 hertz. That was enough power to run our truck.
Rich Mahan
Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
Jesse Jarno
The sound quality of them start to finish. Incredibly few sonic anomalies. The first night, which you'd expect. They just flown in, they got this whole. They had to build a recording truck. There's Wiz doing that the first night. I think one song was missing and I think one song, only half of it was recorded. I don't know what happened. I think Big Boss man was only half and Casey Jones simply wasn't recorded. In addition to all the multitrack, there are also two track recordings of most of the shows. I think all of them, if not most of them. So in a couple of cases we could fix a cut with the two track and I don't think we did that that much because these, these big reels ran at an hour 35 minutes. But they only had one machine, so there was no overlap on the multi track. In later years and without a net, for instance, they would run two 24 track machines. So as one reel was about to end at the hour long mark, about three minutes before it ended, they'd hit record on the second deck. So if they wanted to ever use that song, there'd be overlap. That didn't happen in Europe 72.
Rich Mahan
The tape was ready to roll. The band was almost ready to play for a new audience. We did our best to find Deadheads, dead freaks and unaffiliated heads who saw the band on the Europe 72 tour. If you saw the band during this tour and the episode about that show hasn't been posted yet, there's probably still time for you to record your stories. For us@stories.dead.net for 17 year old Bob White, seeing the Dead at Empire Pool was truly a local gig.
Jesse Jarno
We could actually see Wembley Stadium from our front window of our house. And it was about three miles or less to Wembley. In those days, buying a ticket four days beforehand through the post wouldn't have been viable. We weren't telephoning bookings. So, yeah, I probably went up there. My dad may have even taken me in the car. I didn't have any friends that liked the Dead. I seem to remember around then Grand Funk were coming in, Grand Funk Railroad and a few other the British bands like Genesis and Yes. And there wasn't anybody that really were into the Dead that I knew, which is still fairly true. But Deadheads bump into each other every so often.
Rich Mahan
Chris Jones I got into the dead.
Jesse Jarno
Around about 67, 68 when their first album came out. A few tracks were played on John Peel's show on the pirate radio stations we used to have then. The BBC wouldn't touch anything like that at the time and he played stuff like that. And that's when I started getting, you know, liking it a bit, you know, I think. Yeah, but there's a lot of competition in the Dead's first album wasn't the best of their releases, but that got me into it a bit. And then when Anthem of the sun came out, it just blew my head off. It really totally did. Adam Gottlie all we really ever got were, you know, occasional articles in the British music press which wasn't terribly west coast orientated. It was all kind of fairly mysterious until the data say organizations were set up, which was a little bit after that. So it was kind of like, oh my God, they're coming over. It was, ah, yeah, we've got to get in on this.
Rich Mahan
Chris Jones I would have gone by.
Jesse Jarno
A combination of bus and what we call the underground, the tube. One of the things about is when you're traveling on a public transport system is that as you get near the venue, it fills up with the heads, you know, and you get more and more. And so you get more of a feel that you're into something exciting. Bob White Wembley itself is a sort of busy town urban area, but there was this park that was built for a big exhibition in the 1920s. The stadium was there and then they cleared around the stadium and built Empire Pool. But it is quite spacious because apart from anything else, they've got big car park there and it then leads off into what, what they call the leafy suburbs. You know, streets and parks and things like that. So, yeah, quite a. Quite an open area close to the busy town of Wembley itself.
Rich Mahan
Chris Jones didn't have tickets, but it wasn't a problem, though. The show was seated and wasn't general admission got them on the door.
Jesse Jarno
It was a fairly big stadium. I mean, the Dead weren't that well known. So it would have been full, but it wouldn't have been, you know, it wouldn't have been bulging at the seams. It was, you know, there would have been a lot of people there. I remember that, but I don't think I had any difficulty getting in. And I probably the second. For the second night, I probably bought a ticket on the same day and got for the next night too. I was living in South London at the time and it was a comparatively easy journey. You could do it, go and see the show and then come back home rather than having to camp out or anything. So a group of us went up to see them and we had seats and it was an absolutely awful venue. It really was.
Rich Mahan
You can forgive Sam Cutler for sounding a little less than energetic by the time the Dead began their Europe 72 tour at Empire Pool on the 7th of April.
Jesse Jarno
Well, we've been trying to get here for a long, long time. And we eventually finally made it. Please welcome the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead.
Rich Mahan
And so they were off charging into Europe with the greatest story ever told, Destined for Weir's soon to be released Ace, written around the rhythm of the pump at Mickey Hart's barn and recently reconfigured for the Dead around Garcia's bouncing Wah Wah guitar. One thing we discovered in Marianne Mayer's tour photos is that the show marked the debut of part of Jerry Garcia's brand new nudie suit by famous Hollywood tailor Nudie Khan. As part of our daily dose over on Grateful Dead's social media, we've posted a cool shot of Jerry in his nudie suit pants from the tour opener at Empire Pool.
Jesse Jarno
Adam Gottlie the acoustics there are pretty awful. My memory is they had some tie dye parachute silts hanging from the ceiling to try and break the echo up. Chris Jones the Wembley Stadium was terrible. It was made for ice hockey and swimming, so it's concrete. You can imagine the acoustics absolutely awful, even with a Grateful Dead sound system. And it was perhaps okay if you're sitting in the front or in just in front of the stage. I was sitting at the other side on some tiered concrete banks. So it was. It sounded muddy, it sounded echoey it was awful, but it was good. It was an experience. It was really, really amazing. And it just blew my mind. I mean, back then, I'd get off listening to 7 inch records, playing on a jukebox or something with a crap sound system, crap speakers, and you can still pick out the music. You can discern it. And that's what happened with Wembley Stadium, I guess. You picked out the bits that you wanted to hear. And, I mean, we were all stoned out of our heads. And so we just got off on the music tour.
Rich Mahan
Architect Sam Cutler.
Jesse Jarno
Nobody really in the hall knew very much about the Grateful Dead. And the Grateful Dead came out and started playing and just, I mean, within five minutes had blown everybody's mind. The Brits were all sitting there like, with their jaws like, what is this? You know, it was a great reaffirmation. I mean, I've spent a long time telling people in England how fucking far out the Grateful Dead were. And people going, yeah, yeah, yeah, a bunch of stone hippies. Well, we all like getting stoned off. This will be pretty good. But people were like, once they heard the Grateful Dead live, were like, yeah, it's beyond description. You know, People just didn't have the words, really, to sum up what they thought about it.
Rich Mahan
David Lemieux the Wembley shows, I think.
Jesse Jarno
Are a statement, and they're just as strong as they would be right in the middle of the tour and just as strong as they would be on 5 26, widely considered one of the best Dead shows ever. And that's the last night of the.
Rich Mahan
Tour until the release of Steppin out with the grateful dead in 2002. Good quality recordings of the tour opener had never circulated among collectors.
Jesse Jarno
When we started working on Steppin out, we put up Four Seven and that Big Truck and other One jam. It shocked me how good it was on the first night of the tour. That's when I really realized that it wasn't just the shows we knew that were good. And oftentimes that's what happens. The best shows get leaked out of the vault. In this case, here's the Dead with an underrated show that nobody knows about. There's nothing. There was. I don't even know if there was an audience tape of 4:7. And it was monumental. One of the best shows I'd ever heard. Chris Jones I lived in London, and it's like any big new major convasion, there's always something happening. So, I mean, at the time, bands which were big were. There was. There's a band called Free. They had a big hit over here with All Right Now. All Right now All Right now Baby, it's all right now all right now Baby, it's all right now the who saw the who. I saw the Stones in the Park. I mean, I saw Cream, I saw Blind Faith. I just saw tons and tons of bands. Whenever I could, I'd go and see music, but there wasn't the same crowd, there wasn't the same numbers, and there wasn't the same feeling of togetherness, if you like community that you got at a Grateful Dead show.
Rich Mahan
Bob Hearn left us a story@stories.dead.net I.
Jesse Jarno
Got on the bus officially on the 7th of April 1972, sitting in block B, row 14, seat 17, at the Empire Pool in Wembley, the first show of the Europe 72 tour. I remember well Bobby introducing Donna Jean at the start of second set, playing in the band. This is Donna, says Bobby, to which he replied, howdy. Long pause, followed by y'. All. This here is Donna. Howdy, y'. All. That is how my pal Steve and I used to greet each other. For years, this was always followed by fits of laughter.
Rich Mahan
And there was, of course, new keyboardist Keith Godshow. He'd never been intended as a replacement for Pigpen, and, like Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel in the band, held musical space for each other. They were also close. Donna Jean, Gadcho, McKay.
Jesse Jarno
Complimentary. And Keith loved it. He loved Pigpen, too. We were just big Pigpen fans. Still are. With the Grateful Dead, it was always a little bit different because they seemed more committed hippies, particularly things like Rolling Stones, that would attract a wide segment of the population, of the youth population. But with the Grateful Dead, it was really Stone Dead hippies who came along. There was a bit more of a brotherhood between everybody. I think you always felt it was. Well, I did anyway, that I was much more relaxed there. You didn't have to worry about people fighting or anything like that. It was all love and peace, man, and smoking. Getting very, very stoned and out of our heads, you know, and that's what we. We like to do back then.
Rich Mahan
In a review in the underground newspaper International Times, McFerrin noted that the triumphal first half ending Casey Jones was treated as an anthem rather than a warning, repeating the chorus over and over, with Joe's lights projecting the lyrics onto the backstage screen. And lacking only a bouncing spot to give it the full seaside concert party, pure pavilion atmosphere, actually, there was a bouncing spot. Elenarchish of Joe's lights.
Jesse Jarno
God, who remembered this? Holy shit. This is the only time that there was ever tension between the Dead roadies and the light show. We thought it would be really cute because it was such a big hit, was the words to Riding that Train High on cocaine. Casey Jones, Tom Shoesmith, had this mirror that he could bend and he would aim something on it. Could be a snowflake, it could be anything. And he could move it like a bird. And he was moving it from word to word, tumbling and so forth. And at some point the roadies noticed that we had cocaine on the screen. And they got really pissed off. And they said, take that down, you guys crazy. And so we took down the verse with the cocaine. Well, we left the other stuff and they got even more angry. They said, we're not around here, you know. It would have been Ramrod or Jackson. Probably Jackson, because he. This is. He was like titular head along with Ramrod. It only happened for about half of a song. I can't believe that somebody remembers that besides me. I was the guy who they had to talk to.
Rich Mahan
Mick Farren, the former leader of the underground rock band the Deviants, who would launch an influential career as a science fiction writer the next year, wrote of the first night, it is hard to talk about a band that one moment is being led by Garcia to sounds that are part of Pink padded tunnels that spiral down the back byways of consciousness, and moments later follows Bob Weir breaking into the John Wayne jukebox reality of Marty Robbins El Paso. It would have been nice to have grown up with the Acid Test band, particularly as there is the sneaking suspicion that if the first London acid had been dropped watching them, rather than the cerebrally isolating the Pink Floyd, we might be a stronger community. It didn't go over with everybody. John Savage, who would become the preeminent historian of punk, wrote, me and my friends wanted to be little hippies. We were very much into the whole idea of the west coast plane for the people, free concerts and festivals. And of course, it was ruined by seeing the Grateful Dead at the Empire Pool. They were completely boring. I wanted proper bloody space rock. I didn't want them doing Johnny B. Goode. For fuck's sake, they didn't do Johnny B. Goode at Empire Pool. But point taken. The Dead woke up to a review in the Guardian that concluded, it is often argued that they are the best live band in America. And last night it was easy to understand why. They can swoop back over the past 15 years of American musical history and blend what they find into their long, varied songs. The good heads and the Dead's tape vault have shared some images of the original reels from the tour. And it was a surprise to find a track list for the first night written out in Jerry Garcia's handwriting. Check it out on Dead social media as part of the Dead cast's daily dose.
Jesse Jarno
The first night sound okay considering what the night was. But by the second night, they had it down.
Rich Mahan
The second night at Empire Pool, 8 April 1972, is now considered one of the classic Dead shows. The same could be said of nearly every show on this tour, and might be. But right now we're talking about the 8th of April. And like Johnny Rotten said, we mean it, man.
Jesse Jarno
Bob White There was a lot of dope going round. It was still the days when you could smoke cigarettes in a big venue. It was a lot of fog as it might be, you know, smoke in the air. But everybody was happy. They were all glad to be there. It was a big thing seeing the Dead. It was only the second night of the tour. It just blew me away. It was an experience that in many ways I don't like. Even today, I don't like big gigs. But somehow Empire Pool, especially as I wasn't too far from the stage, was. It was a good venue.
Rich Mahan
What's more, Bob kept a journal.
Jesse Jarno
At the time, my average entry was about a fifth of a page. And the Dead got four pages of write up, plus an extra one the day after, plus a very naive picture of them that I drew a couple of days later.
Rich Mahan
We'll let Bob and his journal narrate some of this show.
Jesse Jarno
After a certain amount of tuning up and as the hall was engulfing the late arrivals, came the announcement we'd all been waiting for. The Grateful Dead. Friends, the Grateful Dead. And to get off to a rocking start, there was an improved version of Bertha. As the lights danced behind the stage and the sellout audience viewed in anticipation, I had a hard running from the window. It is very apparent that Darcia prefers to play his incredible pieces in the shadow of rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, who shares the vocals with Pig Pen for the most part.
Rich Mahan
Adam Gottlie.
Jesse Jarno
We weren't that far from the stage and what struck me, seeing Pig Pen was how emaciated he looked compared with photographs I'd seen of him in previous years. And of course, tragically, this was his last tour. But my God, what good form he was on. I mean, what really good form he was on. His voice was there. Certainly every show I've heard, he. He was there. Next time you see Me Things won't be the same Next time you see me. Thanks. Things won't be the same if it hurts you, my darling, you only got yourself to blame.
Rich Mahan
Bill Giles.
Jesse Jarno
The memories I have that aren't tape aided, if you like. The real memories from. From there that haven't depended on the recordings. The first half dozen or so songs, it was all good stuff, but, you know, my head was still on my shoulders. And then they hit Cumberland Blues. Just the energy, the electric guitars, the fire, that sort of, you know, with which that took off just, you know, was completely knockout. Which is the version on the Europe 72 album.
Rich Mahan
The first song on the first side of the first LP of Europe 72, Cumberland Blues, was recorded at the tour's first stop, the second night at Empire Pool. This season, when we reach the shows where the album songs were recorded, we'll stop to discuss both the recording and the songs themselves. We're very thankful. We had several opportunities to interview Bob Matthews before his passing last year. Europe 72 came up a few times.
Jesse Jarno
Naturally, before Skull and roses and Europe 72. Live Dead was what started it. And the idea was again, each source, a microphone, a guitar, whatever it was, it had one electronic source and then was transmitted to its appropriate track on the multi track in the back of the truck. There was no interference as far as phase or any other confusion. And it made perfect sense. The most important thing was that it made the music sound like it should.
Rich Mahan
Well, Bob worked the front of house on Europe 72. Out in the recording truck were Betty Cantor, Dennis Leonard, known as wizard, and Jim Fuhrman, now Janet Fuhrman, along with.
Jesse Jarno
The idea of taking a minimalist approach to recording was not to use a recording board, but to just try to do everything as direct to tape as possible. So, for example, there were no mic preamps. Instead each channel of the 16 track had an octal socket that we plugged in there, a step up transformer that served the purpose of stepping up the mic levels to be hot enough to record on tape. So there was no. No preamp noise, no headroom issues. It was all passive. And everything went directly to Tape Wizard. He was kind of the tape librarian.
Rich Mahan
David Lemieux, because there's so much real.
Jesse Jarno
Estate on the can big white label. I think it was primarily Dennis Leonard. Wiz did the labeling and he also did doodles. He did some incredible little doodles beside them. And then after they had finished the tour, they went back to the tapes, went to Alembic and I think Jerry as the kind of band Member in charge of listening. But also Wiz was also listening and I guess Bob and Betty, we listened to the concert as it was happening and we recorded everything. We did a rough mix for Listening in our truck and we recorded that on a Reebok's 2 track. And I think also we recorded cassettes. I have no idea what may have happened to those cassettes, but we did have rough mixes and so that was a little bit easier. We did those live. Probably Betty would have been the one to keep an eye on that. Wiz had this little star ranking system that you'd see an entire track list on a can and there'd be no stars and you'd be like, okay, so it certainly doesn't mean it's bad, it just doesn't mean it's record worthy. And then you get some things with one star and then two and then honestly, they were very conservative with the ranking system. None of the big jams were given three stars. I think that was kind of a more subjective thing where I think they chose the right songs. The truckin and the epilogue and the prelude surrounding the morning dew and the truckin'. So none of the big jams were given three stars. I don't think dark stars and other ones, which I think every night, every version was three stars. I would say, honestly, there's no duds of those things.
Rich Mahan
At the end of the tour, all the starred recordings were assembled onto mixes. We'll flag those performances we go as well. Mostly the band was seeking out performances of their newest songs, with a few exceptions. The Cumberland Blues from Empire Pool is the only starred version from the tour leading off side B of 1970's working man's dead. We went way deep into Cumberland Blues during our season about that album and we'll refer you back there for a fuller conversation about the song. Musically, Cumberland Blues had changed in some important ways since its first recording almost exactly two springs earlier. The prototype for the so called Bakersfield Dead sound, the original recording featured Bob Weir on acoustic guitar and Jerry Garcia on electric lead.
Jesse Jarno
I can't stay much longer Belinda the sun is getting high I can help you with your trouble if you won't help with mine I gotta get down I gotta get down Gotta get down too much.
Rich Mahan
And by the end feature Jerry Garcia on banjo and David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage on high speed, flat picked acoustic guitar.
Jesse Jarno
Blues. He can win for losing Lot of old man got to walk the land Just to pay his union due I don't know now I just don't know if I'm going back again I don't know now I just don't know if I'm going back again.
Rich Mahan
The acoustic performances from 1970 actually did try to mimic this, somewhat minus the banjo, with David Nelson often joining on acoustic guitar and Garcia switching to finger picked electric to mimic the banjo. By 1972, the song was fully electric, driven largely by Phil Lesh's bass. In fact, when played over the years, the tune would often fall outside the range of the usual pattern of alternating songs between Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. And I've sometimes thought of Phil's bass as the song's true lead voice.
Jesse Jarno
I can't stay much longer Melinda the sun is getting high I can't help you with your trouble if you won't help with mine I gotta get down I gotta get I gotta get down too Blues.
Rich Mahan
The vocals on the Europe 72 version of Cumberland Blues are overdubbed, all of them. Often the lead vocalist would overdub their new vocal on a spare track on the tape, leaving the original intact. In fact, it seems as if Cumberland Blues was the first song the band worked on when assembling the album as well, with Garcia adding a lead vocal on July 3, 1972, back home at Alembic in San Francisco in the same room they'd recorded the song originally. Weider and Loesch overed up new vocals on July 31, with Garcia then singing another vocal over his original. So even on Europe 72, the complete recordings box set, all of the Cumberland Blues vocals were added later, but those are the only overdubs, a crackling document of the group dynamic in April 1972. Look Ma, no banjo.
Jesse Jarno
I don't know now I just don't know.
Rich Mahan
Of course, there was something strangely powerful about the Dead planting their deeply American folk roots in London and then putting them on a live album titled Europe 72. We're very happy to welcome to the chorus the eminent music writer, lyricist and scholar Ken Hunt, who would go on to conduct deeply informed interviews with Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Mickey Hart and many others as editor of the British publication Swing 51.
Jesse Jarno
There were a group of friends who went to both of the gigs for the Wembley I got righteously prepared, so I went on the combination of psilocybin, mescaline and a rather fine Pakistani hashish eaten on orange slices. So it would be helpful to have someone to make sure I got back home. Oh yes, it was a long way from anywhere. I knew it wasn't London as I knew it, Jim. The thing that struck me because I was very, I like to think, attuned to the lyrics. In some ways, the way I approached the Grateful Dead was through the lyrics. There came a point when Hunter's lyrics were very, very interesting, and I would say that was mainly with the Working Man's Dead period, when there were some very interesting resonances in those songs, which rang little bells for me with someone from a folk background. And at that time, there was no way of knowing what these things were about, especially at an Ocean Removed. When I interviewed Hunter in London, because he was living in London, I remember saying, you know, Buck Dancer's Choice. What are you referring to? It's a Buck Dancer's choice. My friends better take my advice. You know all the rules by now. And the buyer from the Ice. And he fetched the guitar and played me a snatch of it.
Rich Mahan
That was the New Lost City Ramblers version of Buck dancer's choice from 1963's Gone to the Country.
Jesse Jarno
And then he was talking about the New Lost City Ramblers and things were starting to mesh. But it was not knowing whether these references were deliberate or accidental or. Am I mishearing? So I was going to those concerts with my ears really raging to listen. And then, yeah, imagine in hearing something like Brown Eyed Women, sound of the thunder with the rain falling down, and it looks like your man's head. Was it Brown Eyed Woman or, you know, what was that line? I don't know. It doesn't matter. And. And so it's a. It's a story. It's a little narrative tale. It could have been out of, I don't know, Steinbeck or something, some Depression era, like a Dust bowl ballad or something. And trying to make out anything in this song and hoping that I was getting some of it. But it was First Pass. You know, I heard that song, I really enjoyed it, but I had to wait for the album to come out before I could actually get into it.
Rich Mahan
Another song that might fall into that category in that set is Tennessee Jedi, a four star performance. According to the team in the recording truck, the only other song from Empire Pool besides Cumberland Blues to warrant a rating.
Jesse Jarno
Head back to Tennessee.
Rich Mahan
Actually, that's not totally true. Rewind momentarily.
Jesse Jarno
Now, what I think I'll do is I'll take this opportunity to tell y' all a story.
Rich Mahan
That's Bob Weir. Leading into what Deadheads refer to as the Yellow Dog Joke, a winding story Weir would employ to kill time. In the case of the starred version of the Yellow Dog Joke, it came immediately following Cumberland Blues, meaning that somewhere on the Europe 72 take of Cumberland Blues, what became the opening track of the album, Jerry Garcia pops his string. Can you find it? Perhaps due to the situation, this version of the Yellow Dog Joke earned rare musical accompaniment from Weir's bandmates.
Jesse Jarno
There was this fella sitting down the bar with a big black, slick mean looking dog. Now the fellow down the other side of the bar with a short, fat, squat, ugly little yeller dog said nothing. But the guy with a big black, slick mean looking dog looked down the bar and the guy with a short, fat, squat, ugly little yeller dog said, hey, that sure is an ugly little dog you got there, mister. All short, fat, squat, ugly and yeller.
Rich Mahan
And indeed this version of the Yellow Dog Joke is excellent. Thanks for noting it. Wiz the joke's origins are murky, obviously, but since we're the Dead cast, we'll refer you to the Journal of American Folklore, Volume 76, 299 and Jan Harold Brunvan's article A Classification for Shaggy Dog Stories, where the Yellow Dog Joke receives the classification of B101 with a citation for a 1960 issue of Boy's Life, though Google Books now shows some earlier reference in Brunvant's system. It is cross filed by its punchline.
Jesse Jarno
Yeah, well it used to be a alligator for I cut his tail off and painted him yeller.
Rich Mahan
Foreign. Now back to Bob White's journal.
Jesse Jarno
Playing in the Band was extended brilliantly by an incredible guitar jam all along. The magic piano of Godchild tinkled marvelously, but it was a night for the guitars, mainly Garcia's Sam.
Rich Mahan
Chris Jones in the interval.
Jesse Jarno
I think on the second night a guy came round selling an underground magazine called Oz. There was an issue called School Kids Oz, which was issue number 28 and it was deemed to be pornographic and not being allowed to carry by the post office, so you couldn't post it. And eventually the guys who ran Oz were put in prison briefly for it. Anyway, I I swapped a bit of dope for a copy of Oz. I mean hash, not junk. And so I got that as a takeaway as well. So that still sort of reinforces that shot. I was at that show.
Rich Mahan
I love that little bit of underground commerce hash for an underground magazine. It was time for set 2.
Jesse Jarno
Tracking also involved great improvisation and railroad blues could never have been better. SA.
Rich Mahan
But there was one song that hung in the air.
Jesse Jarno
Adam Gottlie I was only 17, but I was old enough to work out. The music was changing very rapidly. I only have to Listen to, say, Aux and Moxire and Live Dead and then listen to Working Manson and American Beauty. Obviously there was a hell of a lot of new material on that tour that we'd never heard before. All the stuff that a lot of it appeared on Europe 72, like Jack Straw and Tennessee Jed, et cetera, et cetera. Ace hadn't quite come out, so, you know, weird songs on that we didn't know apart from playing in the band. The one thing I really wanted to hear was Dark Star. We get a good Dark Star.
Rich Mahan
Bill Giles, a friend of mine, turned.
Jesse Jarno
Me on to Live dead in early 1970 and that was it really, you know, never heard anything like it. The wonders of rock chamber music, if you like, with Dark Star. The beauty of the sound of Garcia's guitar, the improvisation. You know, one hadn't heard a lot of improvisation at that point. You know, most bands didn't really do it. I was into jazz and indeed I saw Miles Davis in late 71. Many people have been calling for some of the old songs and to my amazement, the Dead obliged with an incredible 40 minute version of Dark Star, culminating in Sugar Magnolia. And from then on in, it was one hell of a jam.
Rich Mahan
Everybody seems to be ready. Are you ready? Please welcome back to the Deadcast our esteemed Dark Star correspondent, Graham Boone, musicology professor from Ohio State University.
Jesse Jarno
They're taking it pretty fast. There's a lot of energy here. They're a little out of tune, although that'll get better. And it's actually going to slow down quite a bit as we go. Here's the beautiful Dark Star progression, and Jerry kind of started off right away with a solo. Sometimes he waits and Bob starts going into another harmony right there. Beautiful. Leaving the Dark Star progression for its second chord, the E minor chord, and then returning to the Dark Star progression.
Rich Mahan
Graham annotated versions of Dark Star last season in our St. Louis 1972 and 1973 episodes, and he's going to talk us through every version of Darkstar in the Europe 72 tour. On April 8, he'll do a complete presentation on the 50th anniversary of this classic version of Darkstar from Empire Pool, which will be available to stream thereafter.
Jesse Jarno
Now, interesting. Really quick triplets from Jerry. One, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three. In keeping with the swing rhythm that marks the beginning of this jam, the.
Rich Mahan
Dead themselves recognize very quickly that the Empire at Pool version of Dark Star was special. After the original Darkstar single in 1968 and the Live Dead version in 1969 Empire Pool would become the third officially released Dark Star before 1972 was over. A story we'll get into in another episode. As this Dark Star gets going. Please also keep in mind that it was accompanied by a full rear projected liquid light show by Joe's Lights, formerly of the Fillmore East. The jam transforms quickly and beautifully, a series of moves that blur and bend musically to go along with whatever other blurring and bending might be occurring.
Jesse Jarno
Can you feel the meter blurring? And now Jerry getting into a new solo. Duple time. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2,. 1, 2. Again, leaving the Dark Star progression. Jared working his way up. Bob beautiful chording on A, on E minor. Philip Lesh going all over the place. Jerry rising up to E, leaning into the E. Can you hear 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And then leaving that behind. A little bit of chromaticism. Cherry coming down. Episode winding down.
Rich Mahan
One of my favorite things about the Dead in this period is the way they could be in outer space. And coalesce into a new set of chord changes. With Bill Kreutzman locking into a new groove to create a new piece of music, this Dark Star generates a number of dramatic moments like that.
Jesse Jarno
Feels like a nice duple meter. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2,. 1, 2, 1, 2', 1, 2. Intensity building. Bob Jemming on some nice, nice Harm harmonies. It's a D minor G bam. Really getting into it. Really strong support from Bill. Reminds me of My Favorite Things by John Coltrane with that two chord vamp in the minor. Great foundation for Jerry's soloing here. Really nice, Keith really opening up.
Rich Mahan
If you want to know what happens next, check out Graham's presentation links@dead.net deadcast the full version of this Dark Star is on both the steppin out with the Grateful Dead set as well as the Europe 72 the complete recordings box. We'll return to Graham in a moment. For the first time in their career, the Dead had their own lighting crew. And that lighting crew brought with them a new trick, one which you better believe they deployed in Darkstar Ken Hunt.
Jesse Jarno
At one point they had a glitter ball and it came on. Now, I'd never seen a glitter ball in my life, but I can assure you, when that comes on for the first time, and for the sake of argument, I'm going to say what the number was. It was Dark Star. At that point, the drugs kicked in beautifully. So there's this glitter ball spinning round. They're singing this remarkable song, which, that said you only knew two versions of which Would have been the LP and the single. And it was rather spectacular.
Rich Mahan
Like crew member Ben Haller.
Jesse Jarno
That was an old vaudeville, old nightclub stuff. Those are everywhere. You find them in usually sleazy old dance halls, you know, where you pay a dollar and you dance with a girl.
Rich Mahan
It's true, they'd been around for nearly a half century, but we have multiple reports of the Dead's disco ball absolutely destroying minds in Europe. I can imagine it in use here.
Jesse Jarno
Beautiful sound joined by Cherry. You can hear Bill picking up the rhythm again. Cherry tremolo on G. And there we go. Beautiful riff from Phil. Great violin style. Accompaniment from Bob. Feels like A minor. Lots of energy from Bill, from Keith, from Phil. Nice funky sound. A little bit of just each of these harmonies. Like a different kind of light shining out from the music. And then back to A minor, back to G. You know, Jerry's on top of all of it, following everything, often leading and then back to. To that great D minor. So important in this jam. I was there with my sister, her boyfriend, who was reasonably into the Dead, and a couple of other people. I think they all glazed over when they heard Dark Star. Obviously it's quite a dark version compared with what they would have heard on Live Dead. To me, it was absolutely fascinating, but I think most of the audience really got into it. But there were obviously some people who just didn't get it.
Rich Mahan
Basically, Bill Giles.
Jesse Jarno
The other thing as a pianist that struck me was seeing Keith Godscher, because, you know, hadn't come across him before at all, really. And I thought he added a lot to the band. And if you listen to. I mean, that Dark Star, there's a piece in the middle that, you know, a sort of jazzy piece that Keith leads, really.
Rich Mahan
Like Graham Boone, Bill Giles has gone deep into this dark star, writing his own essay in 2001 titled Dark Star. April 8, 1972. A musical odd essay which we've linked to at dead.netDeadcast Bill also plays in a Dead band, the Grateful Dudes, preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Europe 72 this summer with a few other bands at a festival in Southern England on the edge of the Cotswold called Playing on the Farm. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast for all you British heads, truly must be one.
Jesse Jarno
Of the greatest pieces of collective improvisation in the late 20th century.
Rich Mahan
For me, and perhaps for you, the selling point is what happens near the end of the jam after Garcia runs through what Tapers call the Tiger Jam. Basically, when he leans into craziness on the wawa pedal While everybody else freaks out. Pull up your bean bag. We're gonna let Graham coo us through the rest of this beautiful dark star.
Jesse Jarno
Super suspenseful chromatic harmony. Great action from Keith, from Amazing, from Bill, Bill from Bob, everybody. Jerry reaching a peak of intensity there at the top of his range. And then something amazing happens. Keith and Bob leaning onto an a major harmony suspended but pointing to something new. Jerry picks up on it. The band picks up on it. All of a sudden we're in a major one and a two and a one, two, three, four. And we're off into a great new jam. Great riff from Bob.
Rich Mahan
Beautiful support from Keith.
Jesse Jarno
And of course, Phil playing his own tune. Where is it going to go? A little turn. Phil hits a flat 7 and a 4. It looks like we're going to a 1741 progression. There we go, settled into it. 1774 1. And Bob here lays in that chromatic line of the mind Left body jam. A little bit of a pause and then what's this? Well, guess what, folks? You've entered into a great folks home. Don't let your deal go down don't let your deal go down Low, low Till your last gold dollar is gonna. And there's the mind left body dramatic line from Bob. Third time through the song Sam through Sam. And Bob just leaps right in with Sugar magnolia. The bands on it Nanoscience second. And we're off to the races with another great song.
Rich Mahan
Truly one of the all time great dead segues. Tune into our dead studies stream with Graham to hear him break down the full version. And then coming out of the end of sugar magnolia, Another all time great dead segue. Hot diggity. If you're keeping score at home. That was a very early appearance by the descending motif, sometimes called the mind Left body jam jam, which we discussed at length last season during our episode about the band's shows later in 1972 at St. Louis's Fox Theatre. Pigpen gets into a little bit of crowd work, but doesn't lean into his freestyling on this version of caution. It's mostly just a big show ending jam channeling the primal. Dead Pig's pretty active on the B3 here in conversation with Garcia and everybody.
Jesse Jarno
Sam.
Rich Mahan
Bob, White.
Jesse Jarno
I think people would have been happy if they just carried on past midnight. But venues like Wembley have a real firm cutoff point. It's on the edge of London or towards the edge, what they call the suburbs. So when people pour out, there's Lots of room for them to go here, there and everywhere, rather than, as can happen in some places, they spew out into a tight street and it can be very difficult. Everybody's coming out and they're singing the songs that they know or, you know, they've picked up. And of course, that whole Europe thing, they released so many new songs which we had not heard. They hadn't been on LP up to then, of course. And back in those days we weren't swapping tapes and stuff, or maybe a few were, but there wasn't the big taper system and brotherhood, sisterhood going on at the time, you know. So it was just what you could carry in your memory. If any of you got any friends that couldn't come tonight because it was sold out, pull up on May 16th on Radio Luxembourg. We're going to do a concert for about three hours. So I think I know you can receive Radio Luxembourg here.
Rich Mahan
So it's on May 16th.
Jesse Jarno
We're going to play there. Send us some energy. We'll need it. Even 24 hours after the event, I'm still overwhelmed. I can't wait to hear the concert ON RADIO Luxembourg, May 16th. I gave up the diary fairly soon afterwards because I don't do diaries that started January 1, 1972, and the last entry is May 1. So I obviously got fed up with it by then. But having said that, it's nice to go back to it because in speaking to you guys, in finding the diary, oh, it's always been easy to find, but in reading it again, I've also revisited other things from that period, the bands I liked at the time, you know, other things that were going on. But I can still honestly say the only thing that got four pages out.
Rich Mahan
Me was the dead archivist, David Lemieux.
Jesse Jarno
I was actually working on Stepping out, the compilation from England 2002, I guess, and Weir walked into the studio. He said, hey, what are you listening to? He said, oh, it's this stuff from Wembley. He goes, Wembley. And he sits down and listens to what we were playing. He said, man, we played like demons at those shows. And it was nice to hear Bob with the specific memory of the Wembley shows.
Rich Mahan
The next morning, Pigpen was up bright and early at 9:30 writing a long letter to his parents. Sully's gonna read part of it.
Jesse Jarno
Kensington Palace Hotel in London. How you folks? Boy, did we knock them dead in London. They leapt up and down, hollered for more and more which of to Sam and Rock they just don't do here the hot English groups don't get that over here, only in the States. Also they got about twice the music from one band than they usually get. Or expect lots of good press too. When we're leaving the concert in the bus, nothing but smiling faces, waving, etc. Sam keeps saying nothing like us ever happened here before. Says the Danes will probably be quieter but German and French go nuts. I don't know about the Swiss, they have Hell's Angels here, but I don't think they're really up to snuff. Not like real American angels. They ain't rowdy enough or big enough or tough enough. Second class angels definitely. We've got a homeopathic doctor here and he works wonders with natural remedies. He's also a physical and md. One of them is good for on the road. Cruds, sore throat, no energy, colds, digestion and generally all over good medicine. It comes in powders and tablets. There's only one chemist shop in the world, you can get it right here. So we're gonna stock up. It's also very good preventative medicine. I can't say the name but it comes from what is commonly called the African poison nut. He also uses flowers, leaves and whatever good stuff. Just had breakfast. I think I'll go back to sleep. It's still early. Time passes. 9am Damn it. Can't sleep. And planning what to do with all my British pounds for Denmark. Want to buy a radio in Germany? Am fm, shortwave, Blau Punk or something. You can't get good music here without your own short range. From the Radio Luxembourg. All the government owned stations play slop. Weir wants to buy a car or 10 in Germany. There's a German lesson on TV in the form of movie interrupted by the teacher with little lessons. I'm getting tired of sitting around here but no one else is up yet. And woe be unto me to check lest I rouse someone's ire. We're supposed to be guests at a castle in Kent today, but the BBC says the road towards Oxford, Kent is closed. A lorry hit a train bridge so maybe a back away pigman.
Rich Mahan
Spent the day wandering around London.
Jesse Jarno
Went out and got some postcards and wrote them but forgot the address of the Hells Angels clubhouse in New York City. Gotta ask Sam. P.S. he said, I met Christine Keiller last night. Yahoo.
Rich Mahan
Ah yes, Christine Keillor who'd caused major scandal in the UK government a decade earlier. You might ask Bill Kreutzman about her.
Jesse Jarno
Today'S pack up day. Stuff everything back in and hope it all fits all gonna carry guitars on the buses and have a high old time Bumping across Europe and meeting people.
Rich Mahan
Janet Fuhrman.
Jesse Jarno
We didn't drive this truck. There were a bunch of truck drivers that drove the three buses and the recording truck. So there's a little convoy of those four vehicles that went to each venue and each one had its own truck driver.
Rich Mahan
Before they left Wembley, though, they'd had to draft a new truck driver, Steve Parrish.
Jesse Jarno
Our truck had been driven by an Englishman that we hired in England, only he got busted before we left the first gig at Wembley for taking book. He was in the fucking. All day long. This guy was in the fucking telephone booth and he was taking betting slips and all this shit and he got arrested right then and there and he's gone. So we put Winslow in the truck and he drove it to France and he didn't know his fucking ass. This boy was raised in Pendleton, Oregon and barely been out on the road for a little bit with us. And it was like putting the most unsophisticated person to European styles and cultures in a truck with his face up against the road everywhere, man. He just got in fights at every border and there were borders all over and arguments and all kinds of stuff. But anyway, he got the truck there.
Rich Mahan
The dad and the crew were loose in Europe while much of the gang headed off for Kent. Alan Trist brought Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl for some cosmic sightseeing.
Jesse Jarno
There were a couple of days off particularly. Phil and Garcia were very interested in Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments in England.
Rich Mahan
The collective reading list included the Art of Memory by Francis Yeats, Falsanelli's Mysteries of the Cathedrals and the View Over Atlantis by John Michel.
Jesse Jarno
John Michel, the English writer who brought to light a lot of the early studies in Earth Energies from England. We were reading his book and that was going around. Other things are going around. And because that had been very much a part of my early life in England, I brought a lot of this information into their reading list at that time in the early 70s, in the course of that early part in England, Phil and McIntyre and I think MG met with John Michel for some reason. I think I was involved with press. I missed out on that meeting. But later on, John Michel introduced Phil and I to our old antiquarian English society called the Research into lost knowledge organization RILCO and we became members 9 and 10. It was very early and. And I still get their newsletters and I expect Phil does too. You know, although, you know, on early duplicating machines to begin with. Very, very interesting stuff, stalking the, the ley lines of England. So I, I hired a car and I, I took those two and MG on this one day ride in which we visited Avebury, the artificial hill and Stonehenge, Wells Cathedral, we climbed to the top of. It's not Avebury, I'm forgetting the name of the conical hill in England. It's sort of pyramid shaped, which was amazing. We climbed to the top of this hill. That was quite a climb.
Rich Mahan
In his memoir, Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh wrote about their visit to Glastonbury. Surmounted by a tower dedicated to the Archangel Michael, it still shows traces of a ritual path spiraling up and around the sides of the hill. It is this labyrinth that Jerry, MG and I found ourselves treading as we climbed laboriously toward the top. The path was very steep. At each doubling back of the maze, one of us would cut corners and climb up to the next level, laughing at the irony of yet again taking shortcuts to spiritual awareness. It's said that in olden times pilgrims would dance and sing their way up this path as a penitential meditation. It's pretty difficult, especially for out of shape hippies, to emulate that degree of commitment.
Jesse Jarno
Then we went and had lunch at Wells Cathedral in the Market Square. That was so interesting because this was a kind of a grand hotel, you know, with linen and silver and so on. And our table was right next to, to whether the Bishop of Wells was having a conference with his, we call it the master of the fabric, which is to say the fabric being the stonework that the cathedral is made of. In other words, the architect who. So they were discussing an issue about repair of the cathedral. And here were the four of us hairy guys and the prelate of the Church of England and his architect right next to us, just three or four feet away. It was a great contrast and quite beautiful actually. And we went on to Stonehenge and Avebury, a couple of other smaller megalithic monuments got back very late. Phil and Alan and Jerry and I, I think we rented a car and went and drove all around the, in there and took the walk up to Stonehenge. And nowadays you can't walk up there, they keep it fenced off. But in those magical moments we were able to, we were able to go look at them up close. It was a beautiful day too, you know, it wasn't raining really nice and can't remember what we were ingesting that day, but it was something nice. And we were wandering amongst the pillars, you know, these ancient thingies that people had set up there, they're really big. Is. Is. I think the lesson to take away these. These stones they're talking about at Stonehenge are enormous and they're much bigger than you think they are. If you've only seen them in a picture, you know, they're colossal. But it was just magical. And there was nobody else there, really had it all to ourselves. And that was pretty good in those days. It was completely open. You know, there was a tourist building there at some point, but there was no restriction or to access to the site, just as it was in Egypt when we went there. You could still go into the great pyramid in 78 without any trouble. Of course. Alan, who is somebody who studies all this stuff, he's telling us about the. The nine different theories about how they got there. You know, they weren't getting all the theories about Stonehenge that they had actually. And he thought they had actually carried them somehow from the quarry, which was really far away, because they can trace the rock by its composition and detail back to where. Where it was quarry. It's all of these amazing details. We just filled it up on great English. English details of the mysteries of that country. And they're. It's mysterious. And then we. I think. Didn't we go up to Scotland after that? Yes, we did. We went to the. We went to the place where. Oh, God, is that Rosicrucian? No, it's a. It's a church there that's really, really old up in Northern England. We went and looked at that. So it was a little bit of an extra few miles on our tour in some way. I wouldn't say that this was the genesis of Egypt, but it was connected to that idea that places of power, which those megalithic monuments in England are and which the pyramid is, were things that were interesting to the band because a place of power is going to influence the musical power that they bring to that site. And they were always curious about how the interaction would occur in the invisible domain, the domain of Earth energies. So that's why they were so interested to go and do that.
Rich Mahan
The next morning, it was time for the Europe 72 tour to hit the road. Pretty much everybody would remember the buses. Pigpen noted the trip in his letter home. It's a pretty long ride to Newcastle, so We leave at 9:30am on the 10th, play the 11th, and then ferry to Denmark. Overnight voyage.
Jesse Jarno
I didn't bring the kids. It just didn't seem like what we needed to do because we were going to be traveling by buses and no kids.
Rich Mahan
Rosie McGee was along for the ride. This is from her 2014 conversation with David Ganz for the great book this Is All a Dream We Dream, which you can order via perfectible.net.
Jesse Jarno
You know, there were two buses. We drove all over. It was a two and a half month tour. It was very, very long time. And again it was the, the family, the tribal thing on the road. That was sweet to have that happen again. It was a little bit of different cast of characters. There was a few, few people that were no longer there and other people that came into it, but it was just a lot of fun. Ben Haller we traveled in two buses for some reason. One bus had a bar and the other bus had a bathroom. Number one. Number two, the two drivers came from different countries and couldn't really talk to one another and we really couldn't talk to them. But we kind of made it around and every once in a while we'd stop. So people can go from one bus to get a drink and the other can go to, you know, the other bus to unload a drink.
Rich Mahan
Or as Pigpen described them in his letter home, a bit of irony. The fancy fast coach with the bar hasn't got a john. The other does, but no bar. All you drinkers, good luck. It's all backwards. Imagine riding in a bus facing rear and on the wrong side of the road.
Jesse Jarno
The two buses kind of divided into the raucous one and the one that was slightly quieter, you know. So the people who wanted to kind of be a bit wild were in one. And the people who were a bit more, I don't want to use the word sophisticated, but you know what I mean. Who read books, for example, wanted to be on the book reading bus. Somebody had been to the costume store, had bought a bunch of clown masks. And we had bozos. So we were going everywhere. Two buses, you know, there was two buses and our bus was the bozo bus. And so we only had bozos on our bus. Ladies and gentlemen, children, bozos. Say, I'm a bozo. Oh, yeah. I thought you had a kind of a big nose. You recognized it, huh? Yeah. You like to give it a squeeze? Oh, no. Come on, squeeze the wheeze. Many people like that. It doesn't hurt me, you know, I think we're all bozos on this bus.
Rich Mahan
That was the Fire Sign Theater from their classic surrealist 1971 LP. I think we're all Bozos on this bus. Once there were bozo masks and a bus involved, it was a pretty easy jump to declare themselves the Bozo Bus.
Jesse Jarno
So this was just something to do on the long bus ride. So many jokes, many jokes about the bozos.
Rich Mahan
But it took somebody else, probably Robert Hunter, to make the next jump. If there were bozos on this bus, who was riding on that other bus?
Jesse Jarno
Bolos were the other bus. We called them the bolos and they didn't like that shoe stuff at us and shit. So it was, you know, it was, you know, some people needed to sleep and I think our bus was not that one. No sleeping.
Rich Mahan
Alan Trist.
Jesse Jarno
I didn't have an ear to wherever that conversation was going down. I mean, the, the bozo and the bolo buses, there was some interaction between them in terms of people swapping from one to another. But I remember the Bozo bus had a lot of band members and Hunter and I was on there and the bolo bus had a lot of the crew. Billy was there, but then people would go back and forth and after all, we were there for weeks. So I don't remember it happening on the buses.
Rich Mahan
As Robert Hunter described it to Blair Jackson, the Bozo bus was for people who wanted to be tripping out and raving all the time. The bolo bus was for people who preferred to sink totally into their own neuroses or just sleep.
Jesse Jarno
The Bozo Bus was Bill Candelario and Steve Parrish, of course, who sat directly behind us and just made hilarious comments at all times. So we had a pretty good sized bus, love. The more the roadies were on the other bus. Most of the band was on our bus and Pigpen was on our bus and Pigpen was not doing well and we were pretty worried about him. His girlfriend, I don't think his girlfriend could come with him on that trip. She just. Maybe it didn't happen. But he wasn't feeling good and he didn't get over whatever it was either. Yeah, and so that quieted us down a few times. He'd us out, he'd yell, he'd say, no, guys, I'll shut up. But it was a rough ride. I mean, a lot of this, the highways were in a different state from what they're in now and the, you know, luckily our bus drivers were super capable and we didn't go off the road just, just almost once up there in Switzerland. Well, the roads are not made for big tour buses, frankly.
Rich Mahan
This is from David Gans and Marty Martinez's great 1995 interview with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir.
Jesse Jarno
The Bozo Bus considered themselves the bozos. And they didn't name the bolos until later. All right, now we had the Bozo Bus Whistling Club, as I recall. I was on the bolo bus myself. So were the bolos more civilized than the bozos? It was just quieter. You could sleep on the Bologna robots. There was definitely a self consciousness of that, of, are you a bozo or a bolo, or are you different today? Are you a bozo today and a bolo tomorrow? And there was a. It was a great running joke that we had between us. And of course, you've seen the photographs where we all dressed up in masks and to scare the locals as the buses went by. Alan Trist and Bob Matthews and I called it the business of isness. I mean, we would. We would spend hours just expounding, just stoned out of our heads, of course, and just, you know, deconstructing the universe and putting it back together. And we called it the business of isness. And we just had so much fun with that. I was on the bus that Francis and Ramrod were on because they had Redson, and he was six months old, so they. There was a baby on the bus, and I. So whatever bus they were on, I was on.
Rich Mahan
So, Sam Cutler, were you on the bozo bus or the bolo bus?
Jesse Jarno
Tour manager's allowed to be on any bus he fucking likes because he organized the bus in the first place. You know what I mean? Nobody would tell me what bus to get on or off. What we had was Parrish and Candelaria sitting directly behind us. And they just. They never stopped. They were like a. They were like a power comedy couple. I mean, they couldn't stop themselves. They were out of control. They were so funny. It was a happy time, you know, we really had a happy time when people weren't completely wiped out.
Rich Mahan
And soon the bozos got religion, thanks to Parrish and Garcia's memory of an earlier comedy duo.
Jesse Jarno
This is the second in a series of radio shows presented by Colonel Stuart Nagel and Bud, in which they're suggesting and demonstrating the changes they would make if all radio were under their supervision.
Rich Mahan
That was the 1930s comedy team known as Colonel Stoopnagel and Bud, who appeared on radio and were spun off into a cartoon series. Stoopnagel preached what he called Stoopnocracy.
Jesse Jarno
Colonel Stupnage. We all used to joke about that because it was so weird. We liked all the weird shit. So Jerry and I would sit for Hours and talk about weird shit. We would go, yeah, stoopnock. Hypocrisy is peachy. So Haunter just inventing a science fiction proto religion, you know. Like this would be. This would be the mindset of a group of people who, who had traveled together and worshiped together. We would come up with this thing called Hypnocracy. This is spelled H Y P N O C. Hypnoc R A C Y. And you could make that last C A Z if you want. Hypnocrazy. That was Hunter that came up with the Hypnocracy. Because you see, it's a little known fact, but when I first came around the band, they were still problems with Scientology because some people had got involved in that. Nelson and Hunter. And so we're still calling up at the studio all the time and trying their. But we didn't give a. And tell them off, you know, and all that. But I think it was something to do with that a little bit the hypnocracy thing and to just poke fun at all nocracies and hypocrisies and hypocrites and liars and cheaters and phonies and One Way Johnny's and double backings, you know, all that shit. So you weren't supposed to look for Hypnocracy. It would find you.
Rich Mahan
And the patron saint of hypnocracy was the vast and unknowable Saint Dilbert.
Jesse Jarno
Who was Saint Dilbert anyway? A mythical figure never to see the light of day. There actually was no St Gilbert. It's just this guy that Hunter. There's no guy. There's no guy. St Gilbert is a state of mind. Have you accepted St Dilbert? And do you hurt? As of right now, I have. He walks with me now, even right? My roadie, my friend, my light. St Gilbert. He did have a presence for sure on that tour. You didn't want to mess with St. Dilbert, but you didn't know what kind of round the back curve you'd get at the same time. You know, that was Stilbert.
Rich Mahan
By the time the bozos and bolos pulled into Newcastle, a new consciousness had been created. Though their itinerary promised them a rehearsal at the venue that would prove impossible. Tony Bennett was booked at Newcastle City hall for early and late shows. They checked into the Gosforth Park Hotel and called it a night, maybe to talk about the dead in Newcastle and what it was like to be a dead Finn in the north of England. Please welcome Richard Parkinson.
Jesse Jarno
I actually grew up in a town called Carlisle which you'll know from Terrapin Station Shadows of the sailor Farming winds both foul and fair or swarm down in Carlisle he loved lady many years.
Rich Mahan
And which Robert Hunter knew from the lady of Carlisle, which he likely learned from the New Lost City Ramblers and performed on his 1980 solo album, Jacka Roses.
Jesse Jarno
Down in Carlisle, being most viewed beautiful and gay she was determined, still a lady no man on earth could have betrayed. But I know as a sort of small market town right in the northwest of England, I mean, basically Newcastle is the nearest, largest place, and that's on the opposite coast, albeit an opposite coast that's only sort of 60, 70 miles away. And the Roman wall links them. The Carlyle was pretty isolated. Even the music radio, which was at a pretty bland sort of pop am, couldn't make it through the mountains to us. So you could only pick up the signal about sort of 10, 12 o' clock at night. Occasionally you'd pick up, like, American Forces Network Radio Luxembourg, you know, those things, but that was about it. So it really was pretty isolated. So you tended to hear about stuff either because you're just hanging in a record store and you see a cover, you think it looks cool, or we're forever borrowing stuff off one another. The first one I actually owned was the Garcia, first solo record, which I won from a radio contest. And that was probably like a couple of months before the concert. I was trying to sort of think of a way of describing it instead of US terms, but I suppose I don't think you can because you've got bigger towns than we ever had. This is like a sheep and railway town in the middle of nowhere, but with a lot of history at the same time, just completely vacant of anything going on. So, yeah, we used to see. You'd see stuff on the TV news about San Francisco and the idea of California when you're sitting up in rainy, drizzly northwest of England. You know, free shows taking place in the park with everyone hanging out where there might be, you know, one gig every three months in town is worlds apart. I mean, I was 15 when I went to the City hall show. This is my first time seeing a show anywhere apart from locally. I saw Black Sabbath, which was probably the biggest rock and roll show I'd been to before the Dead. They actually started out in our town.
Rich Mahan
That was Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, early band Mythology from the Live at Queens Hotel release, doing their version of Bonnie Dobson's Morning Dew. They'd soon morph into Black Sabbath.
Jesse Jarno
They'd signed up before Paranoid sort of went broke big, which is a breakthrough record here. They signed up to do a school dance at my school for some chicken feed amount of money. But they honored the gig when they could have just canned it and gone off and made a load ball playing a big room. But they did it.
Rich Mahan
But they did have a train.
Jesse Jarno
Carl's a railway town. Anyway, Newcastle's got a big railway hub. But there's the line that goes through the valley between the two which is not particularly busy. It's about 90 minutes train ride for a 60 mile journey. But not particularly fast. It was like two worlds meeting. It was like, you know, you travel 60 miles from the back of beyond into a city that was a big city by our standards but was still pretty much. Yeah, not particular. It's got a quarter of a million population, but not huge. You walk up. You sort of walk up the. Walk up the street to the city hall which is sort of pretty small. I look at about 1500, 2000 capacity. I mean it's not a big room by any means. And I went to university in Newcastle later. So I saw a lot of gigs there. And then suddenly there's all these sort of like weird people around. And you know, when you're 15, you already feel like a bit of a hick. And when you're from the small town coming to the big city you feel like doubly hick. But you know, we were there, we had our tickets in, we went.
Rich Mahan
Something to clarify. While the venue is called Newcastle City hall, it's different from the American usage of city hall.
Jesse Jarno
In Newcastle they have a civic center which is what you might call a city hall, which where the council sits. And so the city hall is a typically a sort of municipal performance place. So it'd be there for plays, for choirs, for small orchestral concerts. These are the things that. It was published. Part of the city sort of building a cultural center for the citizens and so forth. They tended to be relatively small because I suppose originally they'd have been designed for kind of people who would have time to go to recitals. If you know the Dylan movie Don't Look Back. Part of that's at Newcastle City Hall. So he gets to meet the mayor. I'm in the sheriff's lady. And so on behalf of all of them, I've come to say how very happy we are to have you here. And I hope you have a very successful night because everybody loves you at a thousand outside. And these are my three boys, David, Stephen and Stephen. And they think you're so marvelous that they've left all their exam papers, they've got terrible corporate exams, and they've left everything to come and listen to you.
Rich Mahan
David Lemieux, they opened up with an.
Jesse Jarno
Arena and then they go to Newcastle City Hall. It was one of these venues. And this is why I always encourage people to view the venues online before they listen to a show, to get the sense of what the venue is like. This is a beautiful, I think about a 2,000 seat venue. And this is a show where I felt in listening to it, that the Grateful Dead were faced with adversity for the first time probably in years. London felt like a home show because of big arena London. I mean, it's not New York, but if you're gonna go to Europe, it's as close to a New York energy as you're gonna get. Newcastle. I've been to Newcastle and it's a rough city. It's hard partiers, it's hard drinkers. It's not New York City in Europe kind of thing. And it's a small venue. And so the adversity. What I found is that the show in Newcastle, they play it with a bit more of an edge.
Rich Mahan
Bob Weir would later say the Newcastle show featured the coldest, stiffest audience I've ever played for. Alan Trist.
Jesse Jarno
The thing I remember about Newcastle, I have this image of the hole. It was. They had this huge pipe organ right behind the stage. I'm not sure quite why, because I don't think it was a church as such. It wasn't a church organ, but it was what a backdrop for the stage. This guilt organ, you know, it wasn't such a particularly big hall, but the organ filled it up visually and I remember the seating and it was just an old timey hall of some kind. One of the first that the band visited many of those in Europe, particularly in Germany and in Holland, places like that.
Rich Mahan
There's some great photos of the band in Newcastle, including a rare shot of Jerry Garcia and a bottle of beer. A Newcastle. Of course, enthusiasts might remember this as the avatar of our late buddy. Thoughts on the Dead.
Jesse Jarno
It feels like a working class night in Northern England. You know, if you watch the movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Albert Finney and you get that vibe of the. That's. I think Manchester, you get that vibe of kind of that working class Northern England thing. And that's. That's the feeling I get from that show. They were just fantastic. I mean, they just sort of stepped out there. It was like San Francisco was like a sort of completely different planet. Yeah. And here it was in conjunction on Northumberland Road in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was the sense of possibility that was landing as well. It was the window Bulls come riding up on a quasar Buckle was silver. My overwhelming memory, I suppose, is Pig Pen. Which is odd because you wouldn't normally think of Pig Pen as being the center, but he just looked incredibly cool with a hat Nerve motorcycle jacket and the sawn off denim jacket. And yeah, I think this first set particularly has got a lot of, you know, quite a lot of Pig Pen in it, which is probably why it sort of came through. And then I think the opener of the second set as well. The Dead would have that sort of thing where at times they're like individuals all playing and then they go off in different spaces. But sometimes it just all comes together. And at that, the point when they all stepped up to the microphone to sort of do the opening of Trucking was. That was just one of those points. It was like a physical convergence, a musical convergence simultaneously.
Rich Mahan
Though Trucken had always boogied, it was only during the shows, right before departure that it turned into a proper jam song, where it got out and weird. The Newcastle show also has something else that might sound familiar to Deadcast listeners. It's the good old Grateful Dead cast intro, you guessed it. Rosie McGee has a good story about this show. This is from the audiobook of her great memoir, Dancing with the dead, available from rosiemcgee.com thanks, Rosie.
Jesse Jarno
The concert hall there was relatively small, but it was packed during the show. I decided to go out into the audience and sit in the balcony. When I got to the hallway door, I saw a guard talking with an older lady, obviously a local. The guard stopped me and said, hey, this lady wants to come backstage. Will you talk to her? I pulled the lady aside into the vestibule and asked how I could help her. My son is Eric Burdon of the Animals. Do you know him? Much to her delight, I did, having spent a couple of days with him and his band when they were renting a place in LA's Laurel Canyon. I asked her why she wanted to go backstage. Was she looking for someone in particular? Oh, no. I just thought someone back there would know my son. And I was right. You don't. She was a very nice lady. And since I was headed out to the balcony, I invited her to come with me rather than go backstage where there was nothing going on. We found perfect seats a few rows back from the railing, and we Sat together through the rest of the set. At one point she reached over and took my hand and I looked over at her, knowing she couldn't be heard above the music. She mouthed the words, they're very good, you know, and then smiled and patted my hand. It was just fantastic experience. Everybody was sort of like up and dancing. And it's quite difficult to do there because the seat, the seating is pretty narrow. So you can either go out into the aisles, which wasn't really practical because the aisles are pretty narrow there as well, or people just stand up and dance at their seats. But then you're sort of squashed into a relatively small piece of space in between the seat back and the back of the seat in front.
Rich Mahan
Getting audiences up and dancing would be a challenge across the continent, but it worked in Newcastle.
Jesse Jarno
What I remember is sort of getting a little bit anxious as the show continued because I think they came off at about 10 after 12 and our last train went at 12:30. We tore down the street and just made it to the station and it's like dived on the train and like, if we'd missed that one, the next one with the milk train at 6 in the morning.
Rich Mahan
But they made it, though. It would be logical for the dead to sail for Denmark from Newcastle, and several people remember doing that. It seems the two buses actually headed south, stopping by King's College Chapel in Cambridge on Sunday afternoon en route to the overnight ferry from Ipswich. Or maybe the buses split up. Maybe the Europe 72 tour happened on multiple timelines simultaneously and are interviewed have convened on this one. Feel free to hold that thought in mind as we proceed throughout these episodes. Phil Lesh wrote in his memoir, the buses drove onto a monster ferryboat and I disembarked a straggle up to my stateroom. The voyage was to be overnight, and since the rooms were cramped and airless, I ended up standing at the stern rail with my roadie kid, watching the sun sink into the mist, generating richer and richer bands of color beyond the flocks of seagulls following the ship.
Jesse Jarno
Thanks very much for tuning in and huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including Alan Arkish, Graham Boone, Sam.
Rich Mahan
Cutler, Janet Furman, Bill Giles, Adam Gottley, Ben Holler, Bob Hearn, Ken Hunt, Chris.
Jesse Jarno
Jones, David Lemieux, Donna Jean, God Show McKay, Bob Matthews, Rosie McGee, John Morris, Mountain Girl, Steve Parish, Richard Parkinson, Sully, Alan Trist and Bob White. Also special thanks to David Gans for providing archival interview audio. Did you travel over to Europe to catch any of the shows in 1972. Well, don't forget to go to stories.dead.net where you can record yourself telling a tour story.
Rich Mahan
We definitely want to hear from you.
Jesse Jarno
Tell your friends. Please don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks very much. Now on to Denmark. See you next week. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
This episode delves into the opening concerts of the Grateful Dead’s iconic Europe ‘72 tour, focusing on the first two shows at London’s Empire Pool (now Wembley Arena) on April 7–8, and their subsequent performance at Newcastle City Hall on April 11, 1972. Through firsthand accounts, rare letters, fan stories, and deep musical analysis, Rich and Jesse illuminate the band's experiences abroad, the mythic misadventures of touring with a large family, and the epoch-defining performances that shaped both the tour and the legendary Europe '72 live album.
The Dead Land in London ([03:37])
"Every five minutes somebody would be smoking a joint somewhere on the plane and have to be chastised and talked to sternly behave ourselves... But we did get there." ([04:05])
“It was a comedy routine, and it was made up of the most different, unpredictable, lovable, unique convergence of people that you could imagine...There was a little bit of sink or swim with a whole lot of we take care of each other..." ([04:49])
Culture Shock – London, 1972 ([07:08])
Pigpen’s Letters Home ([10:33])
“Safe and somewhat sound in London. The time change is somewhat more drastic than SF to NYC, but we have a few days to get used to it... the steam heat doesn’t work so hot...” ([10:33])
Press Rounds ([13:45])
Jerry Garcia: “We have new material that'll be new here, he said. It's not new to us. We've been playing it for a while. But our material starts to get life after we've been playing it for a while. But if we play it too long, it loses life. There's a sort of peak optimum and right now we're at one of those peaks.” ([16:16])
"We ain't superstars over in the States. We're just another medium to well-known band. We're no Three Dog Night or Creedence. We just consider ourselves general folks. Coming to Britain is just an opportunity for us to see Europe..." ([15:05])
Importing the Dead’s Scene ([19:13])
Finding Venues ([23:02])
John Morris: “I immediately wanted to find a place to put the Dead...it turned out to be bigger than we expected. More and more people came.” ([23:02])
Taming a Sonic Monster ([28:30])
“When they put up the parachutes and we stood on the stage and looked out, it was phenomenal looking because the curtains were dark in the back and the parachutes were light…It looked like a sheik’s tent or something.” ([30:22])
“The sound quality of them start to finish. Incredibly few sonic anomalies. The first night, which you'd expect...I think Big Boss Man was only half and Casey Jones simply wasn't recorded.” ([35:11])
Setting the Scene, Fans Arrive ([36:44])
Sonic Impact and Audience Shock ([42:56])
“Nobody really in the hall knew very much about the Grateful Dead. And ...within five minutes had blown everybody’s mind. The Brits were all sitting there like, with their jaws like, what is this?...People just didn’t have the words to sum up what they thought about it.”
A Historic Music Marathon ([54:15, 73:09])
“One of the greatest pieces of collective improvisation in the late 20th century.” ([81:57])
Memorable Moments & Fan Stories
“I remember well Bobby introducing Donna Jean at the start of second set, ‘This is Donna,’ says Bobby, to which she replied, ‘Howdy, y’all’...” ([45:36])
Travel Oddities: Bozo & Bolo Buses ([103:13])
Alan Trist: “The Bozo bus had a lot of band members and Hunter and I was on there and the bolo bus had a lot of the crew. Billy was there, but then people would go back and forth...” ([106:51])
Newcastle Show Reflections ([121:12])
After the Show ([126:49])
Pigpen's Last Hurrah ([91:47])
"Boy, did we knock them dead in London. They leapt up and down...lots of good press too... Sam keeps saying nothing like us ever happened here before." ([91:47])
Preservation & Reflection ([91:19])
“He said, ‘Man, we played like demons at those shows.’” ([91:19])
British Audience Perspective ([42:56])
Acid Tests in the UK ([63:31])
Birth of New Myths:
Next Episode:
For fans and Dead-curious alike, this Europe ‘72 Deadcast episode offers a home-movie tour of Dead myth, music, and mayhem—and a vivid snapshot of when the Grateful Dead first blew British minds and began their legendary continental escapade.