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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.
- [00:03]
Jesse Jarno
Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with.
- [00:10]
Rich Mahan
Sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps.
- [00:14]
Jesse Jarno
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.
- [00:23]
Rich Mahan
Ale in your neck of the woods.
- [00:25]
Jesse Jarno
Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware.
- [00:28]
Rich Mahan
Please drink responsibly.
- [00:30]
Jesse Jarno
Foreign 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 Deadheads, welcome back to Season five of the good old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan.
- [00:57]
Rich Mahan
Thanks for coming along on this journey.
- [00:59]
Jesse Jarno
As we wrap up our show by show expedition through the Grateful Dead's historic Europe 72 tour. This season has been one of the most fulfilling for Jesse and me, and we've loved hearing from you on Twitter and other social media. Thanks so much for your support. It's incredibly gratifying to see that this podcast means as much to you as it does to us. Our website, dead.netdeadcast has extra materials for you to explore from this episode. Check the daily doses of Europe 72 ephemera that we have out for you. We're sure you'll find it fascinating. Also@dead.net deadcast there's all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through four now, including season five, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so so you can listen where you like to listen. Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed their stories@stories.de.net a fair amount of you made it into the podcast this season, so thanks very much for your input.
- [02:05]
Rich Mahan
Just because this season is wrapping up.
- [02:07]
Jesse Jarno
Doesn'T mean we don't want to hear from you though. Have a Grateful Dead story to tell? Well then by all means head over to stories.dead.net and record yours today.
- [02:18]
Rich Mahan
How about some Europe 72 music for your collection?
- [02:22]
Jesse Jarno
July 29th brings Lyceum 1972 the Complete Recordings Limited Edition. It's a 24 LP box set with four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour, available exclusively at dead.net check it out there and.
- [02:40]
Rich Mahan
A newly remastered version of the original.
- [02:42]
Jesse Jarno
Europe 72 recordings will be available on CD and LP and digitally on July 29th. Well, the tour is over.
- [02:53]
Rich Mahan
The band crew and family have flown.
- [02:55]
Jesse Jarno
Back to California and now comes the.
- [02:57]
Rich Mahan
Time to comb through all of the.
- [02:59]
Jesse Jarno
Music that was recorded on this Incredible run of 22 shows across Europe.
- [03:05]
Rich Mahan
What was the process like?
- [03:07]
Jesse Jarno
To answer that question, it's time to hand it off to Jesse Jarno.
- [03:43]
Rich Mahan
The Grateful Dead feature finished up a two month, 22 show European tour at the Lyceum in London on 26 May 1972, and prepared to return home to California with some 73 hours of tape. Their original itinerary had called for the tour to close on 30 May, followed by five days at Olympic Studios in London, where the Rolling Stones had often recorded before becoming tax exiles. Presumably the plan was to start going through the tapes, but that got scratched. Alan Trist of Ice9 Publishing.
- [04:15]
Jesse Jarno
Pretty much everyone flew home the next day. I don't even remember what I did. I may have stayed back and gone into the country and sort of cooled my heels at somebody at some country place with some old friends or something, but I was pretty soon back on the job in the office. We all were.
- [04:36]
Rich Mahan
The band's August newsletter wrote. It was an incredible trip for all 43 and a half of us. Half equals Rudso, who was a real gem on the trip. Rudso being the newborn son of crew chief Ramrod, A real experience in working, traveling, fighting and playing together. And despite the fatigue and discomfort of riding on two large coach like buses for what sometimes seemed like an eternity. Actually only about one and a half months, but that's plenty long enough. We all managed to survive, although some of us were a little worse for wear. And we were all really glad to get home. We ask you to once again rise and thank tour architect Sam Cutler. Sam had an especially rough reentry.
- [05:16]
Jesse Jarno
What can I say? It nearly killed me doing it all. I had a burst ulcer when I got home. Yeah. And the only person who came to see me in hospital was Pigpen. Well, I mean, equipment guys did, but nobody from the band. Only Pigpen. He came by briefly and he was.
- [05:30]
Rich Mahan
Very ill. Poor Pigpen man. He played one more show with the Dead at the Hollywood bowl three weeks after they got home. There's only an audience tape. His B3 plane is on point, but he doesn't sing. If you think we're having a hard time saying goodbye to Pigpen, we are. The Dead were starting to turn the page into their next chapter, at least in their mind. Pig would be part of it as soon as he could be. But if chapters in Grateful Dead history can be clearly delineated, the show at the Hollywood bowl was definitely the end of one and the beginning of the next. We spoke to promoter Sepp Donahauer in our Listen to the river episodes last season.
- [06:06]
Jesse Jarno
And he said, this one show that was spectacular, I think for them and kind of a coming of age show was when we put them in the Hollywood bowl, you know, it was a headline act. They played there once before on a multi act show, but this was really their coming out as a major arena artist, you know, and it wasn't easy getting him in there because at that time the Holly bowl was managed by the Los Angeles Symphony. I called up and said, hey, we want to bring the Grateful Dead. And the phone was a little silent for a minute, but we got it in there and it was a great show. And I think that was the last show that Pigpen performed with him.
- [06:49]
Rich Mahan
The lighting crew the dead hired for Europe 72 became a fixture. Pun. Totally accidental. Ben Haller.
- [06:55]
Jesse Jarno
After the tour, one of the first places we played was Hollywood Bowl. And at the Hollywood bowl, you can imagine I'm standing with Rex, Steve Parrish, bunch of other people, right? And David Carradine, who was playing the kung fu guy, right? He came on stage and being very obnoxious, and we just kind of surrounded him. And Pullo, David Carradine got walked off the stage. He didn't dini Karate anything, and we threw him out of the thing.
- [07:31]
Rich Mahan
By the time they'd gotten back from Europe, lighting director Candace Brightman and follow spot operator slash master tech Ben Haller were an item.
- [07:39]
Jesse Jarno
Candice and I were having a grand time in New York. We were on the seventh floor of a hotel in Brooklyn Heights, Columbia Heights, looking from the Verrazano bridge to the 59th Street Bridge, all of Manhattan. One day we look out and there's a guy water skiing around Manhattan. And then we would join the band on the road. And about the second tour, everybody, band members, crew members, you cannot work for the Grateful Dead unless you move to California. So we ended up going. We lived in San Antelmo for a couple months and then we found a house out in Bolinas.
- [08:22]
Rich Mahan
From the relationship, the band's lighting rig literally grew.
- [08:25]
Jesse Jarno
I'm hanging out with Candace. Beautiful woman, you know, brilliant, smart. We're having a good time. We built. I built the follow spots. And then back then, they. They didn't have color changes for lights, or if they were, they were huge. The color change would be the size of a VW bug. So I built these little smaller ones by hand. And pretty soon she could change light colors and it had four filters and you could combine two. So you could go red, blue or purple and you could drop them all out and it would go white, that kind of stuff. We had a good old time.
- [09:09]
Rich Mahan
Post production on the album began nearly as soon as the band got home. Dennis Wizard Leonard began the process. This is from Blair Jackson's interview with Wiz. Thanks, guys.
- [09:19]
Jesse Jarno
When we're flying across the Atlantic, sitting across the aisle from Matthews, and Matthews leans over and says, hey, Wiz, as soon as the gear gets back, I want you to please play pack all the tape. Because we had fast forward wound off a lot of tapes, the tape changes so loose pack in there. And what I ended up doing was I lived in the control room for. I don't know how long it was, but I played the whole tour. And Matthews and I talked about this the other day. He never knew that I actually sat and mixed everything. You know, I went in there and. And lived in the control room and mixed the whole tour. The only thing I didn't do because I was afraid to, as a new guy, I was afraid to ask for this two track stock. To pull a two track with the.
- [10:08]
Rich Mahan
Tape in order, the first step was to pull potential songs for the album. In the Dead's vault, there are recordings marked sub reels, number one through number 10. They contain all the contenders for the project, including some that didn't make the cut. And it seems a few additional songs arrived on the final list during the mixing stage. We've been highlighting the various finalists as they've come up over the tour, but we've posted a complete playlist of all the final choices. If you'd like to recreate the album selection process yourself, head to dead.netdeadcast to find the list and the link. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [10:43]
Jesse Jarno
They physically spliced the version for Europe 72 out of that master reel and put it on a sub reel to mix it from. So when we. When we did Europe 72, the box set, everything had to be reassembled because we did remix. Obviously we didn't use the Europe 72 mixes. You know, Jeffrey, it was very cool. He got to remix the Truckin in the Morning Dew from the Lyceum. And that was very cool to hear it without the vocal overdubs and things like that. Yes, we've basically reassembled the reels.
- [11:15]
Rich Mahan
Jerry Garcia's handwriting is all over the tape boxes. We've posted some images as part of the daily dose on Dead social media. Except for the Hollywood bowl gig on June 17, the Dead had the month off. On June 3, Jerry Garcia got back to work gigging with Merle Saunders around the Bay Area, and on the sixth, he caught the third day of the Rolling Stones US 72 Tour, taking in the afternoon show at Winterland and just after the Hollywood bowl, at the behest of journalist manager Al Laronowitz, Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzman and Keith Godshow also joined songwriter David Bromberg for a session at Wally Heiders.
- [11:53]
Jesse Jarno
I stand tall with the unseen power so why should I be scared of you? I could fill your house with flowers and I could pause in all your mirrors too.
- [12:22]
Rich Mahan
That was Demon in Disguise by David Bromberg, released later in 1972 as the title track of Bromberg's new album. A few other tunes from those June 72 sessions were turned up on 1974's Dead or Alive. There were some other dead biz in June 1972. That month Bob Weir's Ace, recorded just before departure for Europe, made it into stores. And the Dead could be caught in movie theaters around the country that June in the documentary titled Fillmore, which we discussed in our episode last year, the closing of the Fillmore west.
- [13:19]
Jesse Jarno
And you know that notion. Just cross the line.
- [13:30]
Rich Mahan
On Monday, July 3, the Grateful Dead, minus Pigpen, reconvened at Alembic to start the process of turning the multi track tapes into a new album. Janet Fuhrman of Alembic was the second engineer on the sessions.
- [13:43]
Jesse Jarno
I was the person who loaded the tapes on the recorders and I would fast forward or rewind to find the beginnings and that's kind of what the second engineer does. It was a process of first of all picking which were the best versions and then deciding whether they were as good as they could be. So just about every vocal got redone and fortunately everything was well enough separated that no one would would ever know. Just about every vocal was overdubbed in the studio. The only vocals that were completely original were pig pens because I don't know whether he he was satisfied with them, but I think he was just too sick at that point to be able to come in and, and change anything. Unfortunately.
- [14:40]
Rich Mahan
We've also posted a complete list of session dates@dead.net Deadcast the Dead worked on the album in a pair of two week clumps, taking weekends off from July 3rd through July 13th minus the 4th of July.
- [14:57]
Jesse Jarno
The reason we're not doing any Pigpen songs tonight is, as you might have noticed, Pigpen isn't with us because he's real sick at home in a hospital in California, and his doctors told him he can't be on the road or do any recording or do any work at all for about six months now. So we hope that Big Pin will see you all next year and we can take all his. All your good wishes back home to him. Makes me sniffle just to think of it.
- [15:27]
Rich Mahan
That was Phil Lesh talking to the crowd on July 22nd in Seattle between the two groups of album sessions. The only Pigpen original On the album, Mr. Charlie, was mixed after most of the work had already been done on August 14, as if they'd been waiting for Pig to be well enough to come do some work. We'll bust a myth here, though. It's sometimes reported that Merle Saunders added organ overdubs to Europe 72, but that's not quite true. Merle did add some B3 parts on skull and Roses the year before, which we explored last year. Like Workingman's Dead in Skull and Roses, the album's production was credited jointly to Bob and Betty and the Grateful Dead. I wish we could have spoken with the late Bob Matthews more extensively about, well, everything. But we did speak with him a bunch about the finishing stages of Europe 72, of which he was rightly very proud.
- [16:15]
Jesse Jarno
We did Skull N Roses and we did Overdub vocals. We did them in the studio and it sounded like they were in the studio. And when we came back to do Europe 72, and at this point it was no longer Pacific High Recording, it was my studio, it was Alembic. They complained about how it sounded like it was in the studio. I said, okay, you want to recreate the vocal mic environment, if you'll recall. I said each instrument had its own input microphone storage track. So we managed to collect enough amplifiers max and out of the headphone output of each channel powered a representation of each of the musicians cabinets as it was on the amp line.
- [17:09]
Rich Mahan
That is in the big room at Alembic, the same room where the band recorded Working Man's Dead two years earlier. They set up a wall of amplifiers and ran the 16 track recordings out through them. Garcia's guitar came out of one amp, weirs out of another, just like they were on stage.
- [17:24]
Jesse Jarno
What I did for overdubs for Europe 72 was to recreate the stage. We duplicated the inter width of the stage, which was about 28, 30ft wide. In between the inner cores of that, we duplicated the layout of how the live stage was. So that included where Jerry's Representative speaker, stood where Bobby stood, etc. Etc. Etc. Each microphone that was on stage represented a source. You know, a bass, Jerry's guitar, you know, the various components. There was one for each of them. The idea being that there was different leakage. So what we did was for the overdub, we played back the original tracks from the 16 track and did not turn up the original vocal tracks and recorded new vocal tracks with the leakage from the original 2 inch tracks being played simultaneously. So we got the correct phase sync as far as timing and sounding real rather than sounding overdubbed. And we positioned them relative to how they were attempting to put everything in phase right. And because we did have this unique discrete recording, discreet to the point of the cardioid patterns, but. And then put the vocal mics up with the monitors and made a monitor mix made turned up the volume so that it approximated a relative level to the. To the singing level that they were doing. And that's how we did the vocal overdubs for Europe 72 and why the vocals sound so much better than Skull and Roses in that aspect.
- [19:28]
Rich Mahan
But this wasn't vocal stacking like Un American Beauty. They did the harmonizing live.
- [19:33]
Jesse Jarno
They tried to do it as was done. I mean, so yes, if there was Three Heart par Three Heart harmony, there was three Part harmony or two part or whatever.
- [19:44]
Rich Mahan
Thanks so much, Bob, and fare thee well. One of the suggested names for the album was Over There, after the patriotic 1917 song about going to war. But on the track sheets, the working title is revealed as Steppin out, which would be recycled into an excellent 2002 collection of the UK shows. At some point, Europe 72 took hold. Janet Fuhrman.
- [20:06]
Jesse Jarno
As far as choosing the songs and what order they would appear, that was mainly up to Jerry. I think Bob Matthews and Betty may have had a say in that, but Jerry made the final calls.
- [20:24]
Rich Mahan
Last episode. We spoke extensively about a song that didn't make it onto the Torrend subreels, a song the band didn't start playing until nearly the end of the tour, meaning that they probably weren't planning on trying to capture it on the album.
- [20:56]
Jesse Jarno
Walk Me out in the Morning Do Today.
- [21:05]
Rich Mahan
The track sheet for Morning Dew is almost totally blank, showing only Garcia's small vocal punch in and not even noting the song's other tracks. The very Last overdub for Europe 72, done on September 1st. We heard about Wiz's Morning Dew experience at the Lyceum last time. The story continued slightly at home. This is from David Ganz's interview for this is All a Dream we dreamed back home.
- [21:31]
Jesse Jarno
I was walking toward the control room the band was in. They had been in for a week or so reviewing before they chose the sequence for the album. And Garcia bursts out of the fucking control rooms. Like bounces over to me in real Jerry fashion. Hey, Whiff, guess what I said. What? He said, morning Dew from the Lyceum is absolutely on the album. And he smiles and he said, and no one was in the truck. So it was like he embraced that because it was the technological equivalent of what the band embraced musically, that if we were doing it right, you know, it just could happen. It would just make itself. And.
- [22:51]
Rich Mahan
Doing a last sweep of the vault, our archival team also turned up both Sub Reel six as well as a track sheet for El Paso. Turns out the band picked out the Rotterdam version from May 11 as a master take, with Weir, Garcia and Lesh making a few passes at overdubbing vocals plus new piano by Keith. God showed. And that's what's being heard on the Earp 72. The complete recordings box.
- [23:26]
Jesse Jarno
Look like it could run. Always backing away at it, right? Just as fast as I could from the west Texas down of El Paso, come through the badlands of New Mexico.
- [23:41]
Rich Mahan
Just as Europe 72 would bring the Dead's music to the world, it would also carry the word of St. Gilbert.
- [23:46]
Jesse Jarno
Are you all hip to hypnocracy? It's a new light for a fast fading world. I'm sure you'll all want to investigate it as soon as you get a chance.
- [24:02]
Rich Mahan
Is hypnocracy not the aspiration to know what it is? Concluded the liner notes to Europe 72. Alan Trist.
- [24:08]
Jesse Jarno
I had a lot to do with the putting together of a copy on the album, as I did with all of the albums that the Dead produced in the 70s. You know, making sure copy editing, the list of venues, getting Willie's little comment on there.
- [24:24]
Rich Mahan
Willie was Willie Legate, the author of the album's liner notes, an old friend of Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and Alan Trist.
- [24:31]
Jesse Jarno
Willie had a way with words, whether or not he was on the tour. He certainly got a lot of feedback. I think we were in contact with him as a placeholder in California. So he was there in some way. It was always a thing of like, let's find somebody different or unusual to make a contribution to this package or something. Willie would have been a perfect candidate for that.
- [25:00]
Rich Mahan
In the liner notes, Willie wrote about the bozos and bolos, rolling homes, that the subtle difference in character and import and atmosphere between the two omnibuses was so profoundly hidden and enigmatic that you can never possibly understand it. Willie Legate was neither a bozo nor a bolo, but probably understood hypnocracy before the wisened Dilbert achieved sainthood Back in the Palo Alto days, he'd been the first of the gang to experiment with lsd, writing to Sandoz for a free sample for Garcia, Hunter and Trist, he was the just slightly older weirdo on the scene. Over the next few years after Europe 72 as St Gilbert's observations began to pepper the Dead's newsletters, Willie Legate was often one of his channelers.
- [25:43]
Jesse Jarno
I remember having several phone calls with him back in California. He was one of the people doing that. There weren't many left, though.
- [25:52]
Rich Mahan
When the Dead took their whole office staff to California, Willie Legate is who kept watch over the office. In later years, when the Dead took over a warehouse on the other side of the highway, Willie became the caretaker of Front Street.
- [26:04]
Jesse Jarno
Well, he was there all the time. I mean, he became basically the warden of Front street. And he lived in an apartment just around the corner and he was there the whole time in the later years, you know, I mean, he kept the place clean and organized and ready for action. You know, it was his domain.
- [26:25]
Rich Mahan
Alan also coordinated the album's cover art.
- [26:27]
Jesse Jarno
And I remember working with Mouse and Kelly about the artwork for that album. I worked with them a lot in those days, including going down to the photographic studios where they had all the work done. They were very particular about how that was done.
- [26:46]
Rich Mahan
Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly had been the Dead's close visual collaborators for years. They'd created the airbrushed mirrored rose for American Beauty and appropriated Edmund Joseph Sullivan's illustration first for an Avalon Ballroom poster, then for the COVID of Skull and roses for Europe 72 they created what became remembered as the Ice Cream Kid, a rainbow haired goofball in a red checkered shirt smashing an ice cream cone into his forehead. Are we not men? Steve Parrish and there was the old.
- [27:15]
Jesse Jarno
Bad joke about the ice Cream kid taking the test and couldn't get in his mouth. And so all of that bad humor got wrapped up in St. Gilbert in that thing. And you know, humor is how you get down the road. And so our the Bozo bus was full of laughs, man. And we were all just yelling out funny jokes and looking at people on the street. They're looking at us, we're looking at.
- [27:39]
Rich Mahan
Them, you know, in Skeleton Key, A dictionary for Deadheads, the Artist Alton Kelly told Steve Silberman, we were thinking about the COVID for Over There, which was what we thought Europe 72 was going to be called. We were over there, we'd taken some designer drug, maybe dmt, and we were lying on the floor and couldn't get up. Then somebody told a joke about this spastic kid who won a contest by clapping deep in the heart of Texas. When they gave him first prize, an ice cream cone. Gee, thanks. He plopped it into his forehead. That's when we thought of it. Let's hang out for a minute with the images on Europe 72. Both the ice Cream Kid and a giant booted foot stepping through a rainbow across the ocean with a bit of checkered sock visible through a hole in the boot. They're actually a bit of a change from the mood of the other Mouse and Kelly creations for the Dead. To talk about the art and iconography of Europe 72, please welcome back to the Deadcast underground scholar Eric Davis, author of a heady newsletter titled the Burning Shore, as well as the brain embiggening book High Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary experience in the 70s. If you're looking for some deep beach reading this summer, I absolutely recommend it. We've linked to both@dead.net deadcast.
- [29:19]
Jesse Jarno
I owned. I think I bought Oxo Moxo first, which I also loved, but this is the one that I really listened to over and over again. So for me, the COVID art remains incredibly significant, almost kind of classic, like the Primary Encounter, along with Steely and some of the other obvious images. To me, this is really. Has always held a high place in my mind for capturing something about the Dead touring band, but also just a certain kind of energy of the counterculture that I think we don't memorialize quite as well, which is the kind of greasy kid stuff, Mad magazine element of sort of trashy satire, the kind of bozos on the bus clown humor is sort of related to it, I think, in some ways. But this figure of the Ice Cream Kid is just. It's just so perfect when you think about Stanley Mouse, you know, in terms of Dead iconography, of course, there. There's the Mouse and Kelly, Skull and Roses, skeleton roses. You know, the whole sort of idea of lifting imagery from Victorian past and bringing it forward in that sense of the kind of classic psychedelic poster art. But of course, there's this other dimension that we see very much in underground comics and in Maus's own career of this kind of hot rod culture, monster movie, EC Comics. And again Kind of MAD magazine twist. And Mouse had this whole pre California career in Detroit of really coming up with that rat fink stuff, which was both kind of a marvelous surprise. But it also underscored something really important, which is how much of the kind of hippie iconography, the psychedelic iconography of the countercultural years bubbles up from this earlier vein of kind of low brow, weirdo, unsophisticated sort of kid show bizarreity that to my mind remains just as important as the sacred iconic mandala like fantasy scapes that we might otherwise associate with psychedelic art. And you just see that in this ice cream kit. It's like the whole story is there. The goofiness, the idiocy, the kidness, these powerful icons that are as profane as they are sacred. And I see that very much. And you know, even if you just look at the ice cream blast on his third eye, it's sort of like an exploding golden light on this dude's third eye and you're like, wow, he's having a mystical experience. But of course it's via an ice cream cone that oops, missed his mouth and slams into his hilarious rainbow colored hairstyle, which itself invokes various clowns and other iconography of the day.
- [32:51]
Rich Mahan
When the album was released, it came with the spread of Marianne Mayer's wonderful tour photos, which we've been sampling in our daily dose on Dead social media. It also came with an advertisement for the Monster Company, the new T shirt venture by Mouse and Kelly. While working on the Art for Europe 72, the artist had asked the dad for a $500 loan and started their first merchandising line. It might not sound like a lot, but for the first time you could order a Dead T shirt directly from the album. Just $3.95. The rock merchandising boom was finally getting into shape. Their new office, studio and gallery was located in San Rafael, a home base for them as well as other underground artists including Victor Moscoso and Dave Sheridan. It was a short walk or nearly instant drive from the Dead's headquarters. Like the Dead, they would innovate in surprising ways, creating a New standard for 20 color silkscreen T shirt printing over the next years. The band's summer newsletter that announced the completion of the album and the launch of the Monster Company also announced another new Dead related venture. Sam Cutler had gotten right back to work after his hospitalization. In August 1972, he announced the establishment of a new business inspired by Europe 72 out of town tours, a full service agency to book shows for the Dead, the new riders and other artists in their expanding family. But that's also the next chapter. The Dead's family ambitions were growing. Seemingly the only person from the Dead camp who was bummed about the outcome of Europe 72 was lyricist Robert Hunter. His bitterness came in two flavors. He was bummed about the tour itself, he told Steve Silberman in 2001. The bolo bozo metaphor was a way of laughing it off. But the always incipient schism between crew consciousness and artist orientation became decisive. Every meal was a food fight. Sensitivity to cultures was nearly non existent. It was not only insinuated, but bluntly proclaimed that the show could not go on without muscle and Tech Strike was threatened. The band was intimidated and no one was able to call the bluff. I split off from the group at the end of that tour feeling alienated, groundless and forlorn, eventually moving to England, though I continued providing songs and collaborating with Garcia. In essence, I retired from the Grateful Dead touring and business juggernaut after the 72 tour. But a lot of Hunter's feelings also seemed to be bound up in the fate of the songs that he co wrote for Europe 72. This is Hunter speaking with WLIR's Dennis McNamara in 1978.
- [35:34]
Jesse Jarno
There is a third album in that what I consider a series of Working Man's Dead, American Beauty and then this Grateful Dead album, the live One Year of 72.
- [35:44]
Rich Mahan
He was deeply attached to the songs and believed they constituted a new LP of their own.
- [35:49]
Jesse Jarno
This was a surprise to me when this came out into a three album set because there was an album of songs which was companion to those which had He's Gone, Jack Straw, Brown Eyed Women, ramble on Rose, Mr. Charlie, Tennessee Jed and this is a fine fat album of songs.
- [36:11]
Rich Mahan
And it's true, you could totally make a great LP of those tunes. Plus comes a time a veritable Europe 72 outtake. More than five years after the album's release, Hunter was still lobbying for it.
- [36:23]
Jesse Jarno
And I've asked Warner Bros. Acts because they're into putting out Best of the Grateful Dead albums and things and they're doing a pretty nice job on that. But this, this I would like put out as one record that which is.
- [36:34]
Rich Mahan
A companion Europe 72's greatest hits. In other words, though Europe 72 contained three separate albums in some ways. An album of new songs, an album of old favorites like Sugar Magnolia and Morning Dew, and an album of jamming Alan Trist.
- [36:49]
Jesse Jarno
Those songs were amazing. I think it was Europe 72 where a lot of those songs were played for the first time and then they came out on a live album because Hunter and Garcia had written those songs. In relation to the idea of a studio album, I think I feel that in those three albums I hit kind of the peak of my songwriting. He was very much in the momentum of American Beauty and Working Man's Dead at that point, which were these hugely successful, successful studio albums. That really highlighted his work as a songsmith with Garcia, you know, and so he wanted to continue that successful process, you know. But the realities of the band's touring and finances and relationships with Warner Brothers recording contracts and one thing or another, it turned out differently.
- [37:45]
Rich Mahan
Sorry, Bob. Great album, though.
- [37:47]
Jesse Jarno
Settle Down Easy. Ramble on Rose Ramble on Rose on.
- [38:04]
Rich Mahan
October 25, Warner Bros. President Joe Smith sent out a short letter and a promotional 7 inch with ramble on Rose on the A side and Jack Straw and Mr. Charlie on the flip. A nice even representation of the band's three songwriters, though it was never released as a proper single.
- [38:41]
Jesse Jarno
We can share the women, we can share the why.
- [38:50]
Rich Mahan
As we always must remind, album release dates in the early 70s were slippery things, with announced dates not really becoming an industry wide standard until later on. But in the case of Europe 72, there really was an announced release date. In the band's November newsletter, they announced it would be out on the 5th of that month. The album starts turning up in newspaper ads and reviews around November 16, so it probably started making it into stores during those weeks. It began creating experiences for listeners right away. Dave Spiedel left us this story.
- [39:22]
Jesse Jarno
My father worked at the Minneapolis Star newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their staff got a free demo album of Europe 72 for review. Nobody wanted it, so my father brought it home and gave it to me. That's how I became a Deadhead. Listening to that album later, I copied it onto a cassette and got an old mail truck and drove across America. Picked up hitchhikers everywhere along the way. We were driving across wyoming, blasting out Europe 72 and we had a bunch of Deadheads in the van with me. And we ended up camping at a free campsite in Sheridan, Wyoming, blasting Europe 72.
- [40:21]
Rich Mahan
A triple LP was a pretty big deal in 1972. Just slightly less than two hours of music. Previously there'd been George Harrison's All Things Must Pass in 1970 and the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. Chicago released the 4LP Live at Carnegie hall in 71 too. But in some ways Europe 72 helped kick off the triple LP arms race. Also in stores in November, 72 was the nitty gritty dirt band's equally legendary triple LP, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? There are plenty of songs in Will the Circle Be Unbroken that overlapped into Jerry Garcia's folk and bluegrass repertoires. But here's a game for your next road trip. What connections can you find with Europe 72? I'm gonna go with that. They both have Hank Williams covers.
- [41:06]
Jesse Jarno
I'm a Rolling stone all along and for a life of sin I have paid the court When I put pass by People said just another guy on The Lost Highway.
- [41:40]
Rich Mahan
3 LPs allowed the dead to stretch out and get to where they wanted to go. Just like at their real shows, they didn't want to be rushed. Europe 72 was a carefully sculpted set that opened up nearly all facets of the Dead experience. In some ways, it was the most perfect blend of studio live hybrid they'd first tried to achieve with Anthem of the Sun. It made new Deadheads everywhere, like our friend Steve Silberman.
- [42:03]
Jesse Jarno
I am forever grateful to Europe 72 and to the particular performance of China Cat. Sunflower, I know you Rider on that album. I was in my friend Mark Wilsey's room. He was my best friend in high school, one of my best friends. And we were listening to Europe 72, which had probably just come out, and we were listening to China Cat. But it was during that transition that I had the moment, really, of understanding what the Dead were doing. And it was because up to that point, most of the music that I liked was vocal music like Crosby, Soul's Nash and Young. Music that told stories like folk music and CrossFit souls, Nashley Young, some kind of narrative going on. You know, we might have been stoned or not. I do remember it being day, so maybe we weren't. And Mark was, you know, a young guitar player, and he would practice guitar while I wrote poetry across the room. He ended up becoming a professional guitar player, and I ended up becoming a professional writer as well as a, you know, lifelong Deadhead. And that moment was really the moment where that all happened.
- [44:07]
Rich Mahan
In the January 4th edition of Rolling Stone, Tom Dupre raved. I'm convinced that God made the Grateful Dead so that they could be heard in concert. Besides the tremendous amount of music which the Dead plays at a date, usually they will play until they are stopped. The band exudes a laid back, happy confidence that puts a flame in the soul and a smile on the face. Yes, it does. The group is living out a sense of security and. And contentment for Pop music watchers, and it is probably our most important band still functioning. Robot Hull wrote a pretty amazingly nasty review in Cream and you know that's Cool. Michael Bourne reviewed it for Downbeat and was way into LP3. It is as if the evolution of all the music of the Dead had been synthesized, or rather quilted, into a definitive and brilliant piece. He wrote. Truckin is rustic rock bouncing breezily down a dirt road in the center of London. Even then, Garcia and Weir move out, improvising through each other with everyone listening, abstracting the music further and further. At first rocking it all, then freer with Garcia and Weir alone and introspective. The communion is intimate and the band is gradually and organically involved. Again. The tension is heightened along an edge of rock rhythm until after the crest, it has moved into the simple beauty of morning dew. French Dead freak Philippe Sicart spoke to us about seeing the Dead twice in Paris and once in Luxembourg. He was on the bus.
- [45:32]
Jesse Jarno
I went to San Francisco to see the Dead after I saw them in Paris, of course. In Winterland, 12-11-72, I saw the Hot Tuna, Country Jellyfish. It was great. I saw Jerry Garcia Band with Mel Saunders.
- [45:50]
Rich Mahan
Philippe was in the bay area when Europe 72 hit the streets.
- [45:52]
Jesse Jarno
I was in Berkeley. I remember it was November 25th, something like that. You could hear all the songs from the record in old streets, in Telegraph Avenue and everywhere on the campus of the Berkeley University. It was a big thing.
- [46:18]
Rich Mahan
And what do you do when you're a Deadhead visiting the Bay Area? You go see Jerry Garcia.
- [46:22]
Jesse Jarno
I talked to Jerry when I was in Berkeley after a show with Mers Saunders. I just wanted to tell him I was so, so, so happy to see him. And such a great memory when he. They played in Paris and Luxembourg. The Keystone was a very small place with a bar, you know, there were very few people and it was very laid back, you know, very, very relaxed. I remember the first set, it was terrible. Joe Garcia, he played Alf tune all the time. He was so disappointing. He came out, he came to the bar, have a beer. And then there was a second set and a woman came onto the the stage and she began to sing. And it was a complete. It was another Jerry Garcia. It was just great. And at the end of the show, when he. At the end, when he came back, he went back to the bar to have another drink. I told him, remember, I felt stupid, but I told him, jerry. Thanks, Jerry. It was like an orgasm. And he smiled and he laughed, you know, that's all I could Say I love it also.
- [47:45]
Rich Mahan
That adds a nice bit to solo Jerry Garcia lore, seemingly the earliest known appearance by Sarah Fulcher. The Dead were already changing, as Philippe noticed when he saw them at Winterland.
- [47:55]
Jesse Jarno
They had a new repertoire because Pigpen was not there anymore. So they were obliged to play new songs or songs they didn't play in Europe, like Friend of the Devil or things like that, and new songs like Stella Blue.
- [48:16]
Rich Mahan
And when he saw Garcia and Saunders at Longshoreman's Hall, Garcia and Saunders played an early version of they Love each Other a few months before the Dead debuted it. New chapters beckon for the Dead, but it was time for Europe 72 to go on tour, as these listener submissions remind us. Mark Mumper had seen the Dead in August 72, but didn't quite get it at first.
- [48:36]
Jesse Jarno
When Europe 72 came out in the fall, I was drawn in by the clear, quirky, cartoony Ice Cream kid and rainbow foot hole in the shoe imagery of the album cover. And I began listening on my fifth or sixth hearing of the Cumberland Blues from Wembley. I began to get what they were doing and actually to become aware that I was getting it, that they were really playing. And the open atmosphere of the Truckin Jam, the Grateful Dead free jazz of its epilogue passage and the prelude passage leading to Morning Dew. The harmonic feeling of the opening of Morning Dew, the emotional story of Brown Eyed Women, opened me to a realm of expression in music and song that I don't know what verb to use for what it gives my heart and mind. Red Grenadine the bottle was dusty but the liquor is clean Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down and it looks like glory gettin.
- [49:50]
Rich Mahan
The album made its way around the world. Stephen Gardner got Europe 72 in New Zealand.
- [49:55]
Jesse Jarno
I'm a Brit, but my family emigrated to New Zealand when I was three years old. So the Grateful Dead had come upon the consciousness of one or two 17 year olds. That's how old we were. And we started talking to friends about it, and we started importing records from a famous record shop in North Wales, Cobb Records. They were our lifeline. We would get onto them and they would get records before they were released in New Zealand. And we would get good copies, better copies, better pressings of all the stuff that was coming out of San Francisco. So we became a little bit like a marketing department for Warner Brothers and others. Because we get these records pre release. We. And we get big orders. We get 30, 40. We'd all put our money together and put together and, you know, you'd get Oxamoxoa times six, Happy trails times five. These sort of orders, we were all playing these and talking to anybody we could about them. Within a year or so. Even Warner Brothers worked out that when Anthem or Oxamoxoa came out, or Live Dead, they had to double or treble the number that they would normally send to little old Dunedin down in the south of New Zealand. They scratched their heads and they said, I don't know what the fuck's going on, but we'll send them what they want. And they did. And so that's how quite a San Francisco based music scene started up in Dunedin. Dunedin's a funny little town. They call it a city, but it's very small. Hundred thousand people. And it really was at the bottom end of New Zealand. It has a strange link with San Francisco.
- [51:49]
Rich Mahan
A late 19th century gold rush in New Zealand brought miners and miners brought with them the opium trade. And Dunedin became a new port in an international black market.
- [51:59]
Jesse Jarno
So the same trade routes were used to flood Dunedin with Californian sunshine into this place that had already got a bit of a hip scene, going to a bunch of young people who did nothing more than watch from afar what kids were doing in London, in San Francisco and elsewhere. And this stuff poured in. It was cheap and freely available and the mix was just an amazing thing. And it was the start of a vibrant psychedelic explosion, if you like, on a small scale. Nothing like San Francisco, but you know, we people were able to enjoy themselves. The cops didn't know what was going on. There was also a steady flow from Africa and from the Far east, particularly what's known as the Golden Triangle, which is the heroin producing area. There was an amazing flow of unbelievable weed and hashish. And all this combined with people growing their hair long, goofing around and enjoying the Grateful Dead and other bands. This was all at its height in 1972 when that wonderful triple album came out.
- [53:15]
Rich Mahan
That very same Dunedin psychedelic scene would yield some amazing music. Including in the later 70s, one of my all time favorite bands, the Clean Not Quite Dead Freaks. More just Music Freaks. Heartily recommended Anything Could Happen. A great book about the underground trade routes in the southern hemisphere in the late 60s and early 70s is tie stick Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade by Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter. Europe 72 spread across the world. We spoke with Sanjay Mishra in our episode called Plain Dead last year. He was a young music fan at the far end of the hippie trail in Calcutta in the mid-70s.
- [54:12]
Jesse Jarno
So the way we got American music was through hippies who came to India and then ended up being broke or wanting to do more drugs and running out of money. So they'd sell. Gradually they'd start to sell their stuff. I mean, it would start with, you know, bigger items and, and then come down to like tapes, records, whatever, you know, and. And eventually those records would make it down to us. I remember cleaning a lot of weed on live, but I just remember Europe 72 very clearly because that was on the playlist in rotation, so to speak, all the time for a long time.
- [55:02]
Rich Mahan
Sanjay and his friends started what was almost certainly Calcutta's first Dead cover band, Mahi Maha. Check out the Playing Dead episodes for more of the story. We also got this contribution from Shiku Parba in Calcutta, who seemingly miss Mahi Maha by only a few years.
- [55:18]
Jesse Jarno
I got into the music Only around 1881 when reckoning had come out. And I remember it was birdsong I heard that grabbed me first time. I had never heard such acoustic guitar.
- [55:28]
Rich Mahan
Led collective group improvisation.
- [55:30]
Jesse Jarno
And I realized instantly that this was music of great beauty and depth and very liberating at the same time in a very haunting kind of way. And I was hungry for more. And then, as luck would have it.
- [55:44]
Rich Mahan
Copy of Europe 72 and when we.
- [55:47]
Jesse Jarno
Heard, you know, it was miraculously we. He put the Stylist first time on the side with Jack Straw and Chana Cat Sunflower, the Paris performances, and we were in heaven. We had never heard such music which was so liberating and beautifully joyful. And by the time we got to the Truck Inlet jam leading on to Morning Dew, I had become a Deadhead for life. I realized the tears were involuntarily streaming down my eyes and. And I was totally overwhelmed. And I wanted to hear everything that.
- [56:41]
Rich Mahan
This band had put out that particular evening.
- [56:43]
Jesse Jarno
When I heard my first brush with Europe 72, which made me. Was a life changing event that made me a deadhead for life.
- [56:51]
Rich Mahan
Europe 72 itself became an anchor, a strangely smiling figure in a turbulent universe. Andrew Stewart contributes this. I came to Europe 72 and the.
- [57:01]
Jesse Jarno
Grateful Dead in general at 15, in the wake of psychedelic experiences that blew open my life in ways both beautiful and devastating. Other music was the soundtrack to those psychedelic experiences. The Beatles, It's All Too much. Interstellar Overdrive by Pink Floyd.
- [57:15]
Rich Mahan
But the Dead's music helped with what.
- [57:17]
Jesse Jarno
These days they call integration. For weeks at a time I didn't indeed feel tired and broken, my tongue twisted with words half spoken and thoughts unclear and the music was a solace, a bosom for my pillow. Europe 72 seemed to suggest an ecstasy on the far side of the existential explosions and upheavals. It's the sound of psychedelic optimism. Much later, YouTube videos confirmed what I intuited then, that this music was played and sang through smiles.
- [57:45]
Rich Mahan
The buoyancy of songs like He's Gone.
- [57:47]
Jesse Jarno
And Ramble On Rose in particular showed that it was possible to roll on with a cosmic sense of irony and that there was solid footing in the American mythos.
- [57:55]
Rich Mahan
In an age when liner notes were the topic of deep ponderance, the brief fragments of hypnocracy and St Gilbert were the opposite of a clarion call, but an obfuscating anti message. Perhaps a forerunner of JR Bob Dobbs and the deeply hypnocratic church of the Subgenius Eric Davis.
- [58:11]
Jesse Jarno
A really key gesture inside of particularly west coast prankster derived psychedelia, which is kind of a gesture of disavowal. You are not the guru. You don't know what's going on. Nobody knows what's going on. If you pretend you know what's going on, you should be avoided like this. This sort of release of the kind of sacred power or sacred knowledge that can easily come up in spaces where there's psychedelics, where there's, you know, religious ritual, where there's out of body experiences, there's altered states. It's very easy, as we can tell from today's psychedelic landscape, to start to believe your own hype and to become infatuated with your own visions. And there's a sort of charisma that comes from these experiences that can be very intoxicating. And so there's this primal prankster gesture of letting it go, of making fun of it, of releasing it, of winking but saying nothing, not building a system, not saying, wait, if we had this synchronicity and then that synchronicity, that must mean that the structure of the cosmic. No, no, you don't do that. That's actually moving against the medicine. And that gesture, I think is really key. And again, I think that's part of what's happening with the whole humor that we're, you know, that Europe 72 kind of reveals in a way that a lot of the other records don't do in quite the same way where they, they maintain some of that not taking their bullshit seriously kind of attitude, which to me is all about where I'll just. Bozos on this bus, we might have enlightenment experiences, but we're still bozos on this bus. We're all on the bus together. We don't know where it's going. We don't know who's driving. And that kind of humility, I think, enabled them to not become. Yeah, just not get too far up their own story about what they were doing and maybe even to be able to maintain being a band with these outsized personalities and not become a, you know, a sort of whatever, more like a cult or something.
- [60:42]
Rich Mahan
For Deadheads, Europe 72 was legendary. Right away, the liner notes listed the full itinerary, and it was obvious the album was only the beginning. The hunt was on. Please welcome back Cory Arnold of the lost Live Dead and Hooterolin blogs.
- [60:57]
Jesse Jarno
I have an older cousin from New Jersey and his best friend, former roommate, and he moved to California. And his former roommate and best friend had 500 albums now. Now we've all got 500 albums. But in 1974, that was a big deal and they were all cool. And occasionally I'd go over there with my cousin and his friend would let me play whatever I wanted. And he had the Glastonbury Fair triple album. And because he was a Gong completist, he didn't like the Grateful Dead. He was a gong completist in 1974. And so I would play it and I had no idea the thing existed. And here was this amazing copy, amazing performance of Dark Star that was completely different than Live Dead had been left off. Europe 72, and it was like a whole other world. And I would tell people, there's another album with. With Dark Star on it. And they go, no, there's not. Yes, there was. And so I. I always wanted to buy the album, but, you know, it was impossible. But in the olden days, college towns and big cities had used record stores, but it was more like antiquing. They weren't collector's items. You just looked through everything. So I would go to. When I went to college, which was 75, I would go to Rasputin's Records every day, pretty much, and look through every single rock album. This was the old, tiny Rasputin's, later a pizza place called Blondies, and look through every album. And if you found what you wanted, they were cheap. And lo and behold, after a year of looking, I came across the Glastonbury Fair album. All the packaging with the pyramid and everything, $2.50. And I looked it up, by the way, with inflation, that's now $12, $2 and 50 cents. It was incredible. And I bought it. And then when I said to people there's another album, they go, no, there's not. And I could say, yes, there is. And the Glastonbury Fair album was the first kind of indication to me, because remember, there's no bootlegs. There was a few bootlegs, but there's no tapes or anything that something else was going on in Europe and we only got the barest surface of it, and that was Glastonbury Fair was the only kind of iceberg poking above the water. So Mike White, wherever you are, thanks a lot for letting me listen.
- [63:26]
Rich Mahan
Uli Toity sent us a Relics tape trading ad from 1979 from a German Deadhead who was trying to collect the entire tour. By then he'd found exactly half. He was still missing the first night at Empire Pool, Newcastle, Aarhus, the Beat Club session, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Lille, munich, and the second night at the Lyceum. In 2001, when the first edition of the taping compendium came out, there were still some missing tapes. The tour opener parts of the second night at Empire Pool and the third night at the Lyceum only circulated as ugly audience recordings. Aarhus was an incomplete soundboard, as was the Beat Club, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt. Bickershaw was a mix of audience tape and board fragments. Nothing from the second night at the Lyceum circulated at all. And even of the soundboards that existed, a few shows were only around in hissy multi generation copies. Nothing like the beautiful tape pulled in the Alembic truck. Both Dick Lotvalla and David Lemieux curated some excellent Europe 72 releases from the Dead's vault, specifically Hundred Year Hall Rock and the Rhine and Stepping out with the Grateful Dead. But if you've reached this point in this season of the podcast, I hope you can understand why all these virtually unheard multi track tapes might be seen as a problem to be solved and how there was really only one solution. Please welcome ace problem solver, Grateful Dead archivist, enthusiast and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [64:54]
Jesse Jarno
The grateful dead the Europe 72 box set was I think at the time, certainly the most ambitious project that I'd ever thought of or even had ever heard of. And to this day it remains that in terms of the scope of the project, around 2008 I really put a lot of thought into the complete run. 22 shows. I remember in a couple of meetings in 2007, 8, 9, maybe essentially being laughed out of the room, really like, and I remember derisively basically being snorted at, well, how many people are going to buy this one? And I remember thinking, well, I'm going to buy it. So there's one. So, yeah, maybe I know at least one is going to buy it. But I had it lined up that we would do compilations, breakouts. It would be a fancy box. I always had a steamer trunk in mind to do it in some kind of steamer trunk with the stickers on it. I had this whole thing visualized and this big resistance, but primarily from one person. He was confident that he was right and I was confident that I was right, and I held a lot less sway than he did.
- [66:03]
Rich Mahan
But management changes and Grateful Dead tapes stay the same age. In 2010, Mark Pincus took over.
- [66:09]
Jesse Jarno
We talked for three or four hours and, you know, my position was being elevated to legacy manager. His position was being elevated to head of Grateful Dead, whatever the title was at the time. And we kind of mapped out our vision of the Grateful Dead legacy and how it could be presented, whether it was the music or the merchandise. And we're about the same age. He's a year or two older than I am. And he said, and one thing I want you to know on this Europe 72 project, I think it's a great idea and I'm 100% behind it. It's been green lit, let's do it. And that feeling of being supported, that's all you want, is your vision to be supported and to be trusted.
- [66:50]
Rich Mahan
The entirety of this podcast wouldn't be possible if not for what happened next. So forgive us if we make it sound pretty action filled and heroic and awesome, because it's this next work that really makes our time travel possible. So first, let's imagine a montage of David getting the squad together. The first call was to longtime archival engineer Jeffrey Norman.
- [67:10]
Jesse Jarno
Jeffrey found a studio in the Bay Area. Prairie Sun Studio up in Occidental, Petaluma. Like, it's way out there. It's like, it's pretty cool. It's kind of on a farm. And they gave him like a long term use of their studio at a very good rate. So Jeffrey was there for six or seven months. And because he was so busy mixing, everything was mixed from the 16 track. Dave Glasser did the mastering. So Jeffrey would mix a show, ship the files off to Dave Glasser, he'd master it. It was a very, I think, an efficient system. And really, I'd say the mixing probably started before the new year.
- [67:52]
Rich Mahan
Thank you, David, for making it happen, and thank you, Jeffrey Norman and Dave Glasser for making the Alembic tapes sparkle again. Please welcome to the Deadcast Jeffrey Norman, whose job it was to thread up the oversized reels made for the alembicized Ampex MM1016 track and port them into the 21st century.
- [68:09]
Jesse Jarno
The transfer was actually done on a studer machine. Some machines don't take those 14 inch reels. They are big, they're really heavy too. But. And you have to have a great transport that can keep speed pretty constant at the beginning of a reel because you know one side's got this whole mass on the supply side and the other side on the take up side. There's nothing. So you have to have some. A really. A good transport that can keep a speed. Really. Even the studer that I had, which is an 820 would accept those wide reels because otherwise that is a big problem. So the process was aligning the tape machine as best you possibly can. Sometimes there's one set of tones for Europe 72 and the levels at the digital side were good. Not too hot, 24 bit. You got a lot of headroom. And it was pretty straight ahead. Nothing between the tape machine and Pro Tools. And then sent to plan. Those digital files were sent to plangent processes and then they were time corrected with plangent which I thought really helped it out. Solidified the bass and everything.
- [69:16]
Rich Mahan
Here's how I know you rider sounded at the tour opener on one of the audience tapes by a taper seemingly named Roy. Until then, the only way to hear it. Thank you Roy. Most sincerely. This is like the. He used to be an alligator before I cut off his tail and painted him yellow of audio comparisons. But here's how it sounded after Jeffrey was done with the 16 track mixes.
- [70:07]
Jesse Jarno
That I worked Monday to Friday and that they had the studio Saturday and Sunday and then they would reset the console at the end Sunday night so they could use the. I didn't need the studio, I just needed the control room. And it was a nice. It was an older board, older neve board, very sweet board that had as good and bad. It sounded great. Had limitations about, you know, how many reverbs and delays and things like that you could use. Which was okay because it wasn't like this was going to be an effects heavy kind of mix. And they had a automation system for memory assisted mixing. They had a great. It's called Flying faders which is really the best. So they had that and they had this old console. It sounded great. The room, the mixing room. It took me a little while to kind of get used to that sound. I ended up bringing in my own Speakers because I just had a hard time kind of gauging if what I was doing was going to sound the same when I took it out, you know, that kind of thing. But they were very. It was great. And you know, it just, it got into a routine every, every day for five months. He'll go into the studio about nine or ten and he'll work on that song all day. And then right before he leaves at. He works long days. About 7 o' clock, he'll send me really, really close, like done. And whether it's a three minute me and my uncle or a 25 minute dark star, he's pretty much done at the end of the day for that song and he sends it to me and then I listen to it many times that night on headphones and on speakers and then I will send him all those notes. And part of the deal is that I need to get him those notes before 8am because when he goes back into the studio, the first thing he sees when he turns on his computer are my notes about last night's song. And they're very minimal by that point. They're like, oh, you know, maybe when we're on the Casey Jones, we're part of the song, maybe turn weird solo up or something. It's very minimal. I like the combination of both. I like to use a fader to mix it all. But I like some of the advantages that you have in the digital world too. So I'm looking at both the using the faders, but. But I look at the source material as it's essentially being played back. Instead of a tape machine over there, it's a digital machine playing back. And one great advantage of having digital as the playback is that I can do additional, maybe little tweaks of eq. Maybe I can if there's a. Instead of having to bring a fader down when there's noise, I can just mute it in the digital domain and it stays that way. I don't have to worry about bringing fader up and down. I can't use headphones, you know, they're too forgiving, I think. You know, I have to the speakers and I have like Meyer's. I have a little place here, I mean relatively small place. I use Meyer HM1 speakers. You know, I use headphones particularly now when I'm like editing audience bridges, those kinds of things. And because I usually. I try to try to cut things down to be sort of a. A Grateful Dead length between song, if you know what I mean. It's not like Bomb, Bomb. But, you know, you know, 30, 40 seconds, 50 seconds between songs, because that feels more natural. And I try to make sure it. It sounds either. If there's a story going on, you can hear people talking that you want to hear anyway. I try to make it so it's seamless in that time. I'll use headphones.
- [73:41]
Rich Mahan
Compared to the engineers who created the original album, it's safe to say that Jeffries stood a far lower chance of being accidentally dosed with LSD on a workday. But compared to pretty much any other archival tape he might be mixing, there's still probably a bit of a contact high in the aura, but each show.
- [73:57]
Jesse Jarno
Is a little bit different. A huge change from show to show. But I would always start with the sound of the drums and the ambience of the drums for each show and tweak that for that particular show and then build from there. And once they got something built, then a lot of it would stay the same for a show. There was not real good audience tracks, but we're talking Europe 72. In a lot of cases, there were no audience tracks. You know, you just had to put in audience where you can find them from the ambience of the other tracks.
- [74:28]
Rich Mahan
And it's true. On the track sheets for Europe 72, there are almost no audience tracks allotted. It was a task Betty Cantor Jackson would take up on Reckoning and dead set in 1980. For you freak completists out there, and by you, I mean me, it seems like Paris is the only city in Europe where they set up mics to capture the audience. And of the Paris performances they pulled for Europe 72, they overdubbed over the audience tracks on everything except Tennessee Jet. Anyway, when the Dead picked the individual songs to include on Europe 72, they'd cut them from the master reels and went to work overdubbing.
- [75:26]
Jesse Jarno
The songs that were pulled were on a separate reel. For the big, big reels, you'd have to find that spot. But it was pretty easy. You know, there goes the splice whoop. You roll back, open it up, and be really careful, and you can cut it back in. And generally that all works really well. Analog seems to be very forgiving when you cut it and put it back together. And the only inconsistency was the fact of songs that they had done overdubs, because there were. For the original Europe 72, they did a lot of vocal overdubs. And. And so those things were moved around and getting to those. Getting to that. That was a special problem just because the sound changed. And even though they really tried to record it, to make it, you know, have some ambience on those tracks, it did sound a lot different than the live. The vocal tracks sounded different because they were much cleaner and they were kind of interspersed where necessary. If there was, you know, if Pig didn't play on that song. So they had a. They had a track open, the vocals would go there. They tried to keep as the original vocals as much as possible, but in some songs, they didn't. They had to go over the original vocal tracks. When I mixed, I tried to be as true to the performance as possible and use. Even if the. Even if the performances were a little bit weaker, I just. I just took it upon myself to make it as original as possible. So some of those songs that were on the original Europe 72 had vocal overdubs. Where I could. I would use the original vocal, and they were never bad. In all the work I've done with Grateful Dead, it's truly amazing how seldom Jerry is out of pitch. He's. He is. He's a great singer. As far as I worked on Some of the Reason I go, God, Jerry's a little bit out of tune there. I mean, it was noteworthy because it was so rare. But in any case, in those tracks, I thought the vocals were generally pretty good. They might have been a little weaker than the studio versions. Sometimes they're off mic. You know, those kinds of problems that happen live. It's still not the same kind of ambience of a live performance. It doesn't sound the same, but it did give a little bit more of an ensemble feel. So the recorded, newly recorded vocal didn't sound so stark.
- [77:44]
Rich Mahan
It was also good to remember that he was mixing, as Zachary once put it, the Grateful Goddamn Dead.
- [77:50]
Jesse Jarno
I did have a really good time mixing some of the big jams, some of the Dark Star, and some of those big jams that could lend themselves to a little bit more space. And I tried to make things a little spaceier when they. When they said to me, hey, I'm supposed to be. You know, I'm supposed to be bigger and spacey or. Here, sure. Take that fader and crank it up on the base.
- [78:44]
Rich Mahan
That was the May 25th dark star.
- [78:46]
Jesse Jarno
Or, you know, in the building in Morning Dew. And it comes in on the middle build where. Where it climbs up, and it's pretty strong. Sometimes the bass isn't really powerful there, and I would try to. To either add EQ at that point, just depending on what Phil played at that peak point or sometimes the recording and you know, just depending on where he was in the neck and that. But the feeling is it's got really should get to a peak, right? So that sometimes I would just. I would try to boost that in.
- [79:45]
Rich Mahan
The May 23rd morning dew.
- [79:47]
Jesse Jarno
Every once in a while I'll hear a China cat. There was a really good China Cat and I think it was from a Paris show. And I'll hear that on my Apple music playlist. That just happens. I put it on in the morning. That will be Grateful Dead and similar that Apple playlist. And of all the mixes that came from Europe 72, that's the one that they pull out. And I go, man, that sounds really good. And then I realized, oh, it's that one. Is that. Is that mix?
- [80:34]
Rich Mahan
It could be Jeffrey's mix. It could also be the original Europe 72 version drawn from the Paris shows. Whichever version and however it got there. Good years all around. Jeffrey, Bob, Betty, Jerry, and I guess even you too. Apple Music Algorithm this story came across our Dead cast stories Transom too late to include in our Paris episode. But I think it's lovely and we're going to include it here. This comes from Fernand Berger Vosque.
- [81:14]
Jesse Jarno
My grandpa Jean was the director of the sound engineer at La Lipia. Believe it or not, he was not a fan of the pop music at the time. He was more into jazz music and the classical conservative on the culture. When the Dead came to town, he was amazed. He thought, oh, what is this? He was in love with the music. The first time when he came in, he thought if Wes Montgomery was in Sterlite, this. This will be his sound of the 70s. It sounded like just according what my grandpa told me. He remembered the smell of marijuana around the on the theater. It was really one of his favorite dates, along with taboule and among other African ambience music. At that time when the Grateful Dead came, he was amazed.
- [82:24]
Rich Mahan
The Dead returned to Europe a few times after 1972. First with a miniature tour of the giant sound system in 1974. After that, just like before Europe 72, there were a number of false starts. In 1976, they were supposed to play Wembley Stadium with Santana. In 1978 there were supposed to be European shows to go along with the trip to Egypt. They made it back not once but twice. In 1981, finally playing the Rainbow Theater where they were supposed to open Europe 72 and then again for another tour in 1990 where they returned to the venue formerly known as Empire Pool, then Wembley arena, all of those are epics in their own ways, though, Europe 72 laid the groundwork for them all. A two month parade across Europe, equally unforgettable to band audience members and future listeners. And though most cities in Europe aren't likely to have Dead themed venues or bars with Dead nights like in the States, there's also now a real network of European heads. Thanks to so many of them for speaking with us over these episodes, helping us connect with many others, assisting with translation and acting as heady tour guides. And not only are there European heads, there are now European Dead bands in nearly every country the dead visited in 1972. Bill Giles, who saw shows at Empire Pool, Bickershaw and Lyceum, has a fascinating perspective on the spread of the scene. He's been playing keyboard in various Dead bands for decades.
- [83:47]
Jesse Jarno
I was living in France, in Paris in the 90s, and when Jerry died, there was this sort of great awakening that's happened in a great many places. And I met up with a number of guys, Deadheads, musicians, and indeed they had their own band called Trinfant Homme Mystery Train, and started playing with them. And they organized a wonderful, wonderful event took place in January 96 to celebrate the life and the music of Jerry Garcia and a whole bundle of musicians, all different styles, people that, you know, Garcia, his music had touched in different ways. And so there was this whole Sunday, from 3 in the afternoon till 11 at night, really wonderful day, you know, I started playing with these guys and then we started doing a whole load of gigs. And there were a number of young French guys who'd been in the States, gone into the Dead Sea, and were really keen to organize events. And so, you know, we played someplace out in the country and that was called, you know, looking for a chateau. Lots of chateaus in France. And we did one wonderful place called the Divan du Monde, like the bed of the world in Paris. We called that to Lay Me Down. And then there were some others on a barge. We played. Actually, we played up in Potsdam, in Berlin as well, near Berlin. That was sort of Ship of Fools. Anyway, so there's a whole sort of set of, you know, these gigs going on. The band was called Dedicas, which is sort of dedication in French, but spelled, you know, D E A D in our case. And then I left. Well, I left France and we continued. Still did a few, still did a few gigs. I go to Paris and the band came over and we played a couple of festivals in England and we played in Germany. And we played in Amsterdam and then that seemed ended, if you like. And then I came back to England and I now play with this band, the Grateful Dudes. The Grateful Dudes have been. We've been in existence for about five years. We do regular gigs in London. But this year there's going to be an outdoor festival to celebrate the music of the Grateful Dead and in particular the 50th anniversary of the Europe 72 tour. That's going to take place on an organic farm in the Cotswolds near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. And it'll be happening on the first weekend of July. So that's the 2nd of July, Saturday, the 2nd of July. Profits in the event, if there are any, will go to charity. And we hope to assemble as many people as possible in the UK who saw the Grateful Dead or who liked their music, and many of whom were sort of probably gone into a bit of hibernation. So what we really like to do is encourage people to come out from their hibernation families and work and all the other things that prevent people going to music concerts and sort of staying with the scene. So, you know, we hope on this gig, 2nd of July, that lots of people will come out and have a great time, I might add. We're also doing three nights in Germany in the first weekend of August in Saxony in Germany at another Deadhead festival. So there'll be. We'll be doing three successive nights of playing that.
- [87:08]
Rich Mahan
Dead freaks unite. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast A more recent convert to Europe 72 is Ottilie Burbridge, bassist for Dead and Co who went deep into the Dead's catalog when he took up the bass chair. Oteal is the co host of the wonderful podcast Comes a Time who were also kind enough to have Rich and me on as guests. Recently we talked with Ottilie more extensively during our playing Dead episodes.
- [87:33]
Jesse Jarno
I love the way it sounds. I love Phil's sound back then. It's just like unbelievable. He's getting that sound in 1972. Just unbelievable. But also the band and you know where they were at just as a band, you know, you could feel that they're of one accord of one mind. Everybody's on the same page, everybody's on the same drugs, everybody's on the. You know what I mean? It's. That's such a special time for that type of creativity to happen. It just kind of has a halo around it.
- [88:12]
Rich Mahan
There's only one way to properly sign off from this season of The Dead cast, which is with one of the core tenets of hypnocracy, thus far unmentioned. This comes from David Ganz's conversation with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh in 1983, transcribed in Conversations with the Dead. David worries that knowing too much about the music might rob it of some of its magic.
- [88:32]
Jesse Jarno
I've often felt like Toto the dog.
- [88:35]
Rich Mahan
Pulling back the curtain and exposing the guy working the machine.
- [88:39]
Jesse Jarno
I would have been much happier believing in the wizard. Knowing how it works takes the romance right out of the situation. That great hypnocratic saying, in the sea.
- [88:49]
Rich Mahan
Of hypnocracy, the shore is just another wave.
- [88:56]
Jesse Jarno
The sayings of St Gilbert. Isn't that fabulous? Yep. That says it all right there, Jack.
- [89:11]
Rich Mahan
That's the whole truth.
- [89:13]
Jesse Jarno
Well, you know, the whole. The truth and the.
- [89:16]
Rich Mahan
The treeth.
- [89:17]
Jesse Jarno
The treeth.
- [89:18]
Rich Mahan
Yeah. There's the truth and the treeth. The treeth.
- [89:21]
Jesse Jarno
Of the matter. That's the truth of the matter. Yeah, the truth.
- [89:26]
Rich Mahan
That's us here at the Deadcast bringing you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. See you next time.
- [90:03]
Jesse Jarno
Thanks very much for tuning in. And huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including Bob Matthews, Sam Cutler, Alan Trist, Steve Parish, Janet Furman, Ben Holler, Oteel Burbridge, David Lemieux, Jeffrey Norman, Steve Silberman, Eric Davis, Philippe Sicard, Bill.
- [90:23]
Rich Mahan
Giles, Dave Spiedel, Mark Mumper, Corey Arnold.
- [90:28]
Jesse Jarno
Stephen Gardner, Chiku Parbat, Andrew Stewart and Fernand Berger Vosk. Also, thanks to David Ganz and Blair Jackson for providing archival interview audio. You guys were so helpful through this season. Keep in touch with us by signing up for the official Grateful Dead email list@dead.net and keep those stories coming by recording yours@stories.dead.net we'll see you at the next show. Have a great summer tripping down that golden road. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.