Europe '72: Lyceum Ballroom

Summary

GOOD OL’ GRATEFUL DEADCAST

Episode: Europe '72: Lyceum Ballroom (May 26, 2022)

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Overview

This episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is an in-depth, story-filled exploration of the Grateful Dead’s historic four-night run at London’s Lyceum Ballroom in May 1972—the emotional and musical culmination of their Europe ‘72 tour. Hosts Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow guide listeners through the unique atmosphere of these shows, the social and musical context in London, the setlist highlights (including the genesis of iconic performances immortalized on Europe ’72), and the lasting impact of these concerts on fans, the band, and the counterculture at large.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Returning to London

• Time Travel to 1972: The hosts frame these shows as the Dead’s return to London after seven weeks touring Europe, culminating in a legendary four-night stand at the Lyceum.
• The Importance of Settling In: The band loved playing multiple nights at the same venue. Lyceum’s grandeur and energy lent itself to inspired performances.
  • “It was a beautiful venue…they liked to settle into a venue for several days and get comfortable, you know, and that really did happen at the Lyceum.” — Alan Trist (04:19)

2. Lyceum Ballroom: The Room, the Neighborhood, and the Scene

• Historic Venue: Opened in 1834, the Lyceum had been everything from a ballroom to an opera house. Notably, the venue featured a retractable roof, sometimes opened during shows.
  • “The roof slid open when they... When it was good weather....The Dead live inside a venue, but with the sky out there.” — Ben Haller (28:37)
• Neighborhood Vibes: The Lyceum’s location in Covent Garden put it at the heart of London’s arts and theater district.
• Social Mixing: These shows became a true family affair, with fans, European “Dead freaks”, Warner Bros. and Columbia reps, and friends made throughout Europe joining in.

3. Fan and Crew Memories: Atmosphere and Culture

• Fan Experience: The ballroom’s layout encouraged both dancing and chilling; the vibe was warm and communal.
  • “There were two essential attractions. One was the music and one was the culture... In a sense, it was the last flowering of the counterculture...” — Chris Jones (25:57)
• Band Accessibility: Encounters with band members before shows and the lack of a clear barrier between stage and audience emphasized the Dead’s unique rapport with their audience.
• Countercultural Moment: The UK’s underground scene coalesced around these concerts. For many, this was the “last gathering of the tribes” (25:57), before the counterculture faded into mainstream.

4. Europe '72 Material and Live Album Sessions

• Recording History: Over half of Europe ’72 winds up being sourced from the Lyceum concerts, cementing their legendary status.
• Song Debuts and Endings: The run features notable live debuts (e.g. “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu”) and emotional final performances—especially for Pigpen, absent from future albums due to declining health.
  • “Mr. Charlie would be his final original contribution to a Grateful Dead album.” (40:51)
• Improvisational Peaks: The extended jams (e.g. “Dark Star” → “Morning Dew”) showcase the band at their exploratory best, blending structured improvisation with freeform magic.
  • “We start up again. Jerry on high A. And we've returned to the chord A, the home chord, Jerry, with this classic triplet solo style...” — Graham Boone (53:49)

5. Band, Crew, and Fan Interactions

• Adventures of the New Riders: Colourful stories abound—hash-fueled trips to the Van Gogh museum, getting “saved” by evangelists in the parking lot, and late-night jam sessions.
  • “We ate that hash and being up all night, we go to the [Van Gogh] museum…and then we slept on the ferry.” — Alan Arkish (14:54)
• Baseball in England: The Dead and their crew (the “Dead Ringers”) organized impromptu softball games, bringing American pastimes to the English countryside.
  • “It was a big beautiful place... looked like where Robin Hood would have hung out...” — David Nelson (65:43)

6. The Music: Setlists, Performances, and Iconic Moments

• Setlist Diversity: Each night’s setlist was distinct, showing off new material, blues covers, and dynamic improvisation. Fans were amazed at the lack of repetition and unpredictability.
• Legendary Jams: The “Dark Star” sandwiches, especially with “Morning Dew,” represented high points of group telepathy and emotional depth. Extended analysis (e.g., “Sputnik” theme in Dark Star) provided for the music theory-minded.
  • “It's wide open, deep space. Bill's dropped out. Keith has dropped out. Fill in those two note chords...and I always thought he [Phil] was particularly important....” — Andy Childs (92:54)
• Audience Participation: On the final night, the audience initiated the Bo Diddley beat, prompting the band to break into “Not Fade Away”—a legendary example of band-audience feedback.
  • “The audience starts clapping the Bo Diddley beat…they picked up on the rhythm. And you get a shot from [Bill] Kreuzmann. And they go into Not Fade Away…” — Bill Giles (108:32)

7. Pigpen’s Last Stand

• Pigpen takes center stage at these shows, giving his final performances of “Mr. Charlie,” “Chinatown Shuffle,” and “The Stranger,” among others. The bittersweet edge is ever-present, with his health failing.

8. Recording the Magic

• The Alembic Recorders: Technical insights from Dennis “Wizard” Leonard and Janet Furman provide a glimpse into recording logistics and last-night high jinks.
  • “We were all really, really, really high for the last show of the tour…The tape box for the set reads ‘We're all really stone now.’” — Jesse Jarnow (123:03, 123:58)
• Unique Overdubs and Mishaps: Fun facts like an unfixable beep in “Ramble On Rose,” (154:17), and Jerry overdubbing vocals on “Morning Dew,” highlight the human and technological quirks behind the classic album.

9. End of an Era: Emotional and Musical Closure

• Closing Night Vibes: The last show is described by fans and crew as life-changing, with multiple emotional peaks (“Morning Dew” brings tears to both Jerry Garcia and the audience; see Jesse Jarnow and Jeremy Poynton, 135:58, 138:13).
• Final Songbook Entries: The final performances of “Ramble On Rose,” “One More Saturday Night,” and others—later carefully selected and overdubbed in California—cap the run with a celebratory yet reflective mood.
• Legacy Reflections: The Lyceum run is framed as both the high-water mark of live Dead in the early ‘70s and a pivotal moment for the counterculture’s last hurrah.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

On Venue and Atmosphere:

• “It was a beautiful venue... and of course, it had... two stacks of balconies. It was a beautiful venue.” — Alan Trist (04:19)
• “The Lyceum was a theater that was run by... Henry Irving... his business manager was Bram Stoker.” — Ken Hunt (151:28)

On Band-Fan Interactions:

• “There were two essential attractions. One was the music and one was the culture... It became everything that I'd hoped it... was.” — Chris Jones (25:57)
• “The specific memory from that was that end of the first set... the audience starts clapping the Bo Diddley beat... and they know what they have to do, which is play Not Fade Away…” — Bill Giles (108:32)

On Pigpen:

• “Mr. Charlie would be his final original contribution to a Grateful Dead album.” — Rich Mahan (40:51)

On Improvisation:

• “Once Kreutzman started starting the song on drums, the jam structure began to shuffle with motifs showing up everywhere.” — Jesse Jarnow (56:52)

On the Emotional Impact:

• “During Jerry's solo... there were tears streaming at his face. Oh, man. And honestly, every time I think about it, I go back there. It's a moment in time that I'll never forget.” — Jesse Jarnow (135:58)
• “The last night was an absolute and utter gem... I can tell you I was weeping my heart out. I still weep my heart out.” — Jeremy Poynton (138:13)

On Recording Frenzy:

• “She had a little two track set up at the end of the truck... I said, betty, not only are we in record, but we're in playback! And that time sucked with her head.” — Dennis “Wizard” Leonard (124:14)

On Lyric Whimsy:

• “Ramble on Rose is the closest to complete whimsy I've come up with.” — Robert Hunter (141:04)
• “The 72 songs... they refer to ragtime and they refer to a lot of things that seem to come out of the twenties... It doesn't make... It's like weird time travel music... That ability to summon another time in relatively simple chords.” — Elvis Costello (156:21)

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Key Timestamps

• Venue & Tour Introduction: 03:53–05:47
• Lyceum Fan Memories: 18:57–20:57, 23:20–25:57
• The Music: Setlist & Performance Highlights: 25:57–27:52, 38:13–40:51, 49:43–56:01, 91:40–99:16
• Audience & Band Energy: 108:32–110:08 (Clapping Not Fade Away)
• Dark Star into Morning Dew Analysis: 53:49–60:38, 91:40–97:29
• Pigpen’s Final Performances: 40:51–45:35, 107:12–108:20
• Behind-the-Scenes Recording: 122:32–125:30, 154:17
• Heartfelt Last Night: 135:58–138:13, 146:28 (Ramble On Rose context), 159:02–159:18 (“One More Saturday Night”)

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Conclusion

The Lyceum run, as chronicled in this episode, stands as a milestone in Grateful Dead history—rich with exceptional improvisation, legendary setlists, and a deeply communal, countercultural spirit. Through colorful recollections, musical analysis, and archival insights, Europe ’72: Lyceum Ballroom captures both the magic of the moment and the bittersweet sense of an era’s end, offering fans a transportive journey to those all-night London jams under the open sky.

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Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

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[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

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[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

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[Rich Mahan]

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[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 lords and ladies. Welcome back to season five of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks for coming along on this journey.

[Jesse Jarno]

As we time travel across the pond to 50 years ago and and tag.

[Rich Mahan]

Along with the Grateful Dead on their.

[Jesse Jarno]

Historic Europe 72 tour. We are bringing new episodes of the Dead Cast to you weekly this season. Each episode covers the shows that took place on the Europe 72 tour 50.

[Rich Mahan]

Years to the week after they happened.

[Jesse Jarno]

Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour for this episode. In fact, we have been releasing a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during season five and there's new content for.

[Rich Mahan]

You on the regular [e-mail] deadcast there's.

[Jesse Jarno]

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. Thanks very much to everyone who's contributed stories [e-mail] we still want to hear from you. Was Europe 72 your favorite album ever at one point?

[Rich Mahan]

What was it like when you first heard it?

[Jesse Jarno]

How did it change the way you.

[Rich Mahan]

Felt about the Grateful Dead?

[Jesse Jarno]

We need your input. Give us your stories [e-mail] hey, how about some new Europe 72 music for your collection? June 29 brings Lyceum 1972 the Complete Recordings Limited Edition. It's a 24 LP box set with the four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour which are the topic of today's podcast, available [e-mail] and of course there's going to be a newly remastered version of the original Europe 72 release available on CD, LP and digitally also on July 29th. Well, this week we're back in jolly.

[Rich Mahan]

Old England for a four night run.

[Jesse Jarno]

At the historic Lyceum Theater, May 23 through May 26, 1972. And yes, while these are the last four shows of the Grateful Dead's Europe 72 tour, by no means is your trip over. There's still one more episode to come next week before we wrap up season five. So let's finish up these pints and. And take the tube to the Strand in Covent Garden to meet up with Jesse Jarno.

[Rich Mahan]

The Grateful Dead and their family returned to London near the end of May 1972, seven weeks after their arrival. The Dead would record more than half of what became Europe 72 over the final four nights of the tour at the Lyceum Ballroom, including the entirety of the album's third lp. The shows at the Lyceum would become instant legends for band and fans alike. Everybody loved the Lyceum. Alan Trist of Einstein Publishing that tour.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ending run at the Lyceum, right in the heart of the theatre district of London in the Strand, was pretty special because the band always liked to settle into a venue for several days and get comfortable, you know, and that really did happen at the Lyceum. You've seen the set lists, the way they structured four days of music. It had such a good vibe. And of course, it had the. I think it had two stacks of balconies and things like that. It was a beautiful venue.

[Rich Mahan]

Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David.

[Jesse Jarno]

Lemieux to end at a beautiful theater where you, you know, you really get to settle in Paris is nice. A couple nights in Paris, Wembley's nice couple nights there. But to really settle in for four nights with the new riders, you get to hang out with the new riders, stay in a hotel and not have to leave for a while, I think was very special. And you hear it in the music.

[Rich Mahan]

As part of our daily dose on Dead social media, we've posted a wonderful photo of the Lyceum taken from the stage by Marianne Mayer before one of the shows. It gives a good feel for the venue. The promoters who'd worked with the band throughout continental Europe flew to London to celebrate, as did representatives from Warner Bros. Who set up promotional tables at the venue, making it a proper Grateful Dead evening. The New Riders of the Purple Sage even opened all four shows. Their record company, Columbia, came and did promotions as well.

[Jesse Jarno]

A lot of our friends that we'd made throughout Europe and in London, of course, were there too. So there was a sense of an extended Grateful Dead family affair going on there too. You know, I remember Jean Jacques and Daniel from Paris were there. I'M sure there was, and I think there was somebody from Holland, I can't remember Danny Brooks, of course, and then other people that were part of our London associates, record company people. But it was a grand finale in that way.

[Rich Mahan]

Dana Brooks was the editor of the Book of the Dead, a free concert program distributed at the door each night. More recently, it was reproduced as part of the Europe 72 the complete recordings box set. Significantly, it was the first extended publication about the Dead. Though it was only 30 pages, it contained interviews with all the band members and a detailed biography that still holds up as a solid representation, plus lots of cool photos.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was Dana who wanted to make this happen and we said, sure, how can we help? You know, because I don't think we had the ability in those days to actually put a program together. Needed a professional publishing person, which we later became.

[Rich Mahan]

Nicholas Meriwether is a founder of the Grateful Dead Studies association and wrote liner notes for the excellent new Boxtead of the Lyceum shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think the book does a great.

[Rich Mahan]

Job of one of the bigger points.

[Jesse Jarno]

About the entire tour, which is you.

[Rich Mahan]

Listen to a band that's really trying.

[Jesse Jarno]

To communicate with folks that they don't.

[Rich Mahan]

Have any presumptions about.

[Jesse Jarno]

By 1972 they know who their fans are.

[Rich Mahan]

But when they go to Europe, there's.

[Jesse Jarno]

This whole other sort of ethos that envelops them and really makes them think about how do we want to convey.

[Rich Mahan]

Who we are, what our project is?

[Jesse Jarno]

Because in 1972 they're also at an apex of their. The term that comes to mind is empire building, but in many ways that's the opposite of what they mean. What we're getting at though, is this sense of a self contained project that based on music, but it's much more than music. It's music as a way of establishing community.

[Rich Mahan]

That week, Bill Kreutzman told an interviewer for Beat Instrumental the Dead is just some kind of contact that we try to make with an audience of people. When you're inside it, it's a hard thing to say. The Dead arrived in London with a day or two to spare. There were some additional work to be done as well. Well, benefit work. I'm not sure when in the run it happened, but we'll place it here before we get too carried away.

[Jesse Jarno]

The most interesting thing that happened for me at that was a return back to the Glastonbury Festival because that had happened in 1971, despite the fact that the Dead haven't been able to kind of be the Headliners of it. Pete Townsend was there. And there was a wonderful English band of our ilk then called Hawk Wind. You know, the play and these were all recorded. But the festival lost a lot of money because as original festivals often do, you know, I think it was. John Coleman was involved with financial affairs along with Andrew Kerr. And he asked me if the band would give some music to an album that they were putting out to try to raise funds to cover their debts and the debt said, yeah, we'd love to. And they looked the files because in those days they would listen to two tracks a lot on the road in America, too. I mean, they would. They would do instant, you know, replay of the concerts as part of their sense of their due diligence about their work.

[Rich Mahan]

Bill Kreuzman told Steve Turner of Beat Instrumental. We listen to the tapes and scrutinize what we've been playing. Sometimes we surprise ourselves at what we've played. We listen to see how we can correct ourselves. Maybe we listen and the whole feeling of our performance has been wrong. It never hurts us to play it back. Not only do we learn about playing, but also about recording techniques.

[Jesse Jarno]

They'd been checking in to the tapes as we went along. You know, I don't know how that happened technically. We knew we had the good stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

It's worth noting that while the Dead were making the music of the Europe 72 tour, they kept updated on their own work. When playing any given Dark Star on the tour. They may have just listened to any of the previous Dark Stars. Quickly, though, the appropriate good stuff was located.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dark Star from Wembley at the beginning of the tour was a. Well, we can give them 26 minutes of this, you know, a whole side of music. During that Lyceum stretch, Garcia and Matthews and myself, we walked down to Soho to a studio to mix the Dark Star. It was a very interesting studio, completely in an anonymous part of London, Soho. It was not a difficult job for Jerry and Bob to mix down the tapes, you know, the full on studio. And we were told at the time that one of the Beatles earlier albums had been mixed there by their arranger, whose name I still forget that. That was so interesting to have that little step back into history and tie together different things like the Glastonbury Fair and a Beatles recording studio. And we were at the Lyceum. It was just like we're in San Francisco going down to a studio and do something. London was our town, you know, at that point.

[Rich Mahan]

And so it was that the Dead released the first live music from the Europe 72 Tour, finding its way onto the triple LP Glastonbury Fair, the Electric Score, released by revelation enterprises in July 1972. We talked extensively about this version of Dark star on episode two of this season and you can check out Dr. Graham Boone's complete annotation on YouTube titled the Wonders of Dark Star. Besides the original Darkstar 7 inch and the live Dead version, it would be the only Dark star released until two from the vault in 1992. For Deadheads in both Europe and the States, it was as welcome as it was deep. For American Deadheads, though, it was definitely a record collecting obscurity. As a piece of music released into the record collecting wilds, it also had an impact outside the Dead world. Archivist David Lemieux 2005, maybe, I don't know.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bernardo Bertolucci, 2004 was making a movie called the Dreamers. And Bertolucci had had that Glastonbury fair album from 72 and he remembered that Dark Star. So he wanted for this movie the Dreamers, which was about the Paris 1968 cultural riots, Truffaut and Godard. It was incredible movie and I'll never forget he wanted to use a piece of the music from the Dark so that he'd remembered from 30 years ago. So we licensed to Bertolucci this piece of Dark Star from Wembley from Fore, one of my favorite Dark stars. And I got to choose the piece of music it was. Bertolucci trusted us to give him something good, so we gave him this great piece of music. And then the way he used it in the movie, it's lay. I saw the movie in the theater, Jean Luc Godard. He's looking down on me from my office. I've got a photo that my professor took of Godard in 1979-80. And in the movie, the Dark Star is playing while there's a piece of Godard talking. And from one of his movies over it, he layered Dark Star with Godara.

[Rich Mahan]

Rolling into town the morning of the first show were Joe's Lights, the former Fillmore east lighting crew, semi adrift in Europe since the closure of the Rainbow Theater earlier in the year. Please welcome back to the Dead Cast your friend and ours, the great filmmaker and dead freak, Alan Arkish.

[Jesse Jarno]

We hooked up with the New Riders in Amsterdam at a festival in Amsterdam that was on whatever their equivalent is a Memorial Day weekend, because they if that's a big deal to go from London to Amsterdam with all that equipment. And so we went to that festival and Ike and Tina Turner at that festival, the New Riders and the Pink Floyd, we were put up in the same hotel as the Riders and as Ike and Tina, but they didn't give us whatever the per diem was we couldn't get. We didn't have free room service or anything, which was insane because we were been up all night. So we go into the hotel after being up all night doing the shows, we went back to the hotel and it was five in the morning and they were setting up this gigantic breakfast buffet. So we told them that we were guests of the festival and we gave them all the names we were not to be denied. And we decimated the buffet. And just as we were finishing out of the elevator comes Marmaduke and the New Riders. Hey guys, will we see you? Are you doing the shows in London? And I remember us saying that we would be taking a later ferry than theirs. So Marmaduke gave us all their leftover hashtag, this is the kind of thing you remember and said, well, because we're going straight to the ferry, so do whatever you want with it and then toss it. So for dessert, we all ate the hash and went to the Van Gogh Museum. We ate that hash and being up all night, we go to the museum with the Van Goghs and they are like spinning off the walls. And then we slept on the ferry.

[Rich Mahan]

Be sure to check out alan on the YouTube series trailers from Hell. The New Riders of the Purple Sage had been having their own adventures since making their European debut playing before the Dead at the Bickershaw Festival. They played a handful of other shows in the UK before heading over to the continent. Our friend Cory Arnold has pieced together all the details on his Hooterolin blog. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast. David Nelson has a few memories of the tour.

[Jesse Jarno]

We were eating at this place, it was before a gig or after the gig, and there was this location, this restaurant that was like. And it was Europe. So I wasn't familiar with how they do things here. But we go down and you go in through like a concierge or a doorman, you know. And somebody came up and asked me something that. That rang a bell to me and I thought, oh yeah. And he said, can I talk to you up here? And we just stepped up over this little mound onto the past the parking lot. And he proceeds to save me, Christian wise, you know, he had me say a prayer out loud and stuff like that. And I just went along with it, went okay, yeah. And he said, okay, you're saved. Now you shall have eternal life. I thought, well, I went in and everybody was sitting down at the tables and I went there. I just got saved, everybody.

[Rich Mahan]

You know, some people go to Europe and get snow globes or cool sweaters or knives. David Nelson got saved. Righteous. We'll pop back to David in a bit. But the new writers rejoined the extended cast for the four nights. Promoter John Morris.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think we added the Lyceum towards the end. The whole thing was they were coming, they'd agreed to come do the Rainbow and then we lost the rainbow. So this whole, whole tour got expanded from makeup dates, you know, to cover it. Wembley and then on one end and then Lyceum on the other.

[Rich Mahan]

The British Dead freaks have to a head, nothing but love for the Lyceum, both the venue and the four nights of music that unfolded. Welcome back, Chris Jones.

[Jesse Jarno]

We all went up to the Lyceum, about half a dozen of us went there, and absolutely amazing venue. It's an old theater type ballroom and a big stage. There's a plush velvet fittings and things, and very, very nice place. Lots of room for dancing at the front or for just sitting down and rolling a joint. And at the back, tables and chairs.

[Rich Mahan]

Graham Walker.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's in the centre of London. It's just off the Strand, which every American's heard of. So it's. Yeah, it was right there, close to.

[Rich Mahan]

The West End and the esteemed music journalist Ken Hunt.

[Jesse Jarno]

Directly across at a diagonal angle is the place where the first occurrence in English of the word folk song occurred. And in 1847, a woman called. I'm working on this book by a singer called Martin Carthy. And this appears in the book. In 1847, Mary Howitt translated the German folk song in English, it's the Three Little Roses, and the original was Volkslied in German, which she translated as folk's, you know, apostrophe s song. So just across the road from where the dead played in 1847, someone had invented the word folk song in English.

[Rich Mahan]

Alex Allen.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's a strange place because, I mean, it was built in the 19th century sometime as a theater, but then they sort of get into difficulty as a theater and they converted it into what was called the Lyceum Ballroom. It's all down as the Lyceum Theatre, everything. But I think technically then it was actually called the Lyceum Ballroom.

[Rich Mahan]

Originally opened in 1834, replacing an earlier iteration of the Strand Lyceum, located nearby the Lyceum. The Dead Plate had many lives in the nearly century And a half between its first curtain raising and when the dead came in 1972, it had been an opera house, legitimate theater, a cinema, and in the 1940s became a ballroom. In the early 60s, before the Beatles hit big even, it was a pioneering dance music venue. One of the first places in the world where people groove to records spun by a dj. And it, of course, had another life in the hippie era.

[Jesse Jarno]

They stripped out all the seats downstairs and then they had quite a big stage. And then at the back there was a bar and tables. And before things like the Miss World contest held there. I mean, it was quite a, you know, a sort of eclectic mix if you look at it. The two venues in London that were closely corresponded, I suppose, to the Fillmore and the Avalon were the ufo, the UFO and the Middle Earth in Covent Garden. When they closed down. What then emerged was something called the Midnight Court, which was at the Lyceum. Everybody who were, if you like, counterculturally, a list pretty much played there in 1771. And basically the Midnight Court, it kicked off at midnight and we turned out into the street again around six, seven o' clock in the morning. And there were four bands at a time that played, you know, each show. The bands I saw there were mainly the British bands. The Nice Coliseum, John Mile, A Prejudice Leap for three, Ripped Down All Hate I Screamed the Lilac Life's All Black and White screamed from my skull I had dreamed romantic facts of Musketeers foundation deep somehow.

[Rich Mahan]

But I was so much older than.

[Jesse Jarno]

You know, I'm younger than that now.

[Rich Mahan]

That was the Nice, featuring Keith Emerson doing Bob Dylan's My Back Pages from their live album Elegy. Graham Walker was a Deadhead for sure, but the Dead didn't really come through.

[Jesse Jarno]

Live Dead was the album. If I was ever dubious about my interest in the Grateful Dead, Live Dead confirmed my lifelong connection to it. My favorite bands through the late 60s and early 70s were traffic, who never disappointed. They always played great sets. The Nice before Emerson became a bit of a cliche. Bless him though, because they were excellent. They really were Pink Floyd. I can remember I was at a classical concert a few years back and it was, I think, the London Symphony Orchestra. It was up in Leeds, which is not that far away from where I am. I was talking to a guy next to me and he was. He was writing a PhD on emotion in music. And I said, oh, that's interesting. So we talked for a while and I said, you know, one or two classical things that mean a lot to me. In terms of, you know, the emotional pull. And I said during that time I would go to a Pink Floyd gig, and every time they did Saucer Full of Secrets, I would cry.

[Rich Mahan]

In early 1972, just before the Dead arrived in Europe, Pink Floyd debuted their Dark side of the Moon live show. Releasing the LP a year later, I was surprised at how many British heads no longer flew their freak flags for the Floyd.

[Jesse Jarno]

A couple of friends of mine stopped going to see Pink Floyd because they never forgave them for what they did to Sid. I forgave them. And I mean, as it turns out. I mean, I do exactly the same in my situation. This was the counterculture. This was the late 60s, early 70s. It was us against the world and we were the minority. They were our band. I mean, you know, they were the house band until they got too big. And it wasn't. It wasn't the same because the counterculture became corporate and became mainstream and became nothing like it used to be. The optimism had gone to some extent. Chris Jones, I saw them through the Dark side of the Moon show, when that just come out, the Floyd at Earl's Court. And as I said to a lot of people at the time, it pretty much left me cold. I mean, a lot of people loved it. I mean, they loved the light show, they loved the carbon monoxide, the dry ice effects and all that sort of thing. No, I liked the music, but what I didn't like about it was I could have played the record and I could have listened to the show and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

[Rich Mahan]

But then the Dead came to town.

[Jesse Jarno]

With the Grateful Dead. You go along there and everything is different, you know, same song, it's different. I mean, how many times have I listened to, you know, He's Gone or Tennessee Jet or Loser or Ramble On Rose, and they still draw me in because every time you listen, that guitar playing in particular or the bass playing, it's not the same. You know, the drumming isn't the same. There's something new every time. There were two essential attractions. One was the music and one was the culture. Certainly for us over in the uk, the Dead personified, to a large extent, the counterculture that was coming. And a lot of our changes and our influences were coming from San Francisco. And the Dead were very significant in that. Talking about the 72 Tour, for me, looking back at it now is in a sense, the last flowering of the counterculture, because at that point, the underground magazines were still going very well. So there's A lot of information being shared and people were prepared for the Dead to come over. Everybody knew what it was all about. And I've been to a lot of shows at the Lyceum before then in 1771, with a lot of really good bands, but it was never quite the same as it was from those 72 shows. I've never seen so many people crammed into one place in my time. They were swinging off the stairwells. It was amazing. And in a sense, it was the last gathering of the tribes in the UK before it got, I don't know, corporate cynical. And it was magical. It was absolutely amazing. It became everything that I'd hoped it. It was.

[Rich Mahan]

Promoter John Morris.

[Jesse Jarno]

They were probably some of the most amazing shows we ever did anywhere, because the theater was great. It was a very, very straight venue for the Dead and. But it was a beautiful place and they loved it, probably. It was a phenomenal venue and it was perfectly suited for the Dead because we could open the roof.

[Rich Mahan]

Yes, John Morris did just say that the Lyceum roof opened up.

[Jesse Jarno]

It only opened from memory when you could guarantee that it was going to be a beautiful summer's evening. And in London you can't often guarantee that. So it was a very rare event when they actually managed to do it.

[Rich Mahan]

Ben Haller of the lighting crew.

[Jesse Jarno]

We played in a hall that was built prior to 1776. That last one in London, that was a great place. It had been rebuilt. London gets burned down every couple of years, but it was a theater, two or three thousand seats. And the roof slid open when they. When it was good weather. Which is, what, two days a year or something? Yeah, it was like these stadiums nowadays, but it was a roof that was on some kind of a contraption that opened it up. The Dead live inside a venue, but with the sky out there.

[Rich Mahan]

According to historical weather data, it was unseasonably warm all four days. The Lyceum shows, with daytime highs between 79 and 81 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime lows in the mid-50s with no recorded precipitation. Keep in mind that at any point during the Lyceum shows, and therefore during most of Europe 72, the album heads could look up and see the sky. The venue is still in operation, but its current operators probably don't find much use for the giant skylight.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think it had live music through till maybe the early 80s, but, I mean, it was mainly mainstream stuff. And now I'm not sure if they made it into a cinema or a theater, but the Lion King either is the movie or the play has been there for the last 20,000 years, it seems. I mean, that's what's there right now. And I haven't been in probably. I haven't been in since 72. To be honest. That's probably the last time I was there.

[Rich Mahan]

Joe's Lights weren't contracted to work the Lyceum gigs, but you can bet Alan Arkish made it inside.

[Jesse Jarno]

I went to all the shows at the Lyceum and was working there in some unofficial but for cash thing because.

[Rich Mahan]

That was a tough union house. And I think maybe I was in.

[Jesse Jarno]

A lightning booth trying to explain to the lighting guy who everyone was in the band. Ben Haller, who had been in the light show with us, was now assisting Candace on the tour. So we were hearing a lot about the tour. And we were hearing all the stuff about the Bolo's bus and the Bozos bus. And the music is so good because their whole vibe was so good. And so in a way, their trip to Europe is an extension of the bus, the further bus. I think that cannot be discounted. Jean Claude Kaufman, who is my partner and who did the Lyceum shows with me, he's also the guy who did the Mean Joe Green commercial for Coca Cola. Because he was a producer. He'd left, gotten out of the business and gone back to his straight work, which was in the advertising business. He went into the dressing room and he said, is there anything more we can get you? Everybody enjoyed it. Everybody was really happy with it. The sound checks had gone great, and somebody said, well, we have everything but Coke. Jean Claude disappeared, came back an hour later with two cases of Coca Cola, and the band cracked up after the Leal show.

[Rich Mahan]

The tour's blow stash had very likely been tossed in an airport trash can at the behest of an irate Bill Kreutzman. An episode we discussed last episode. Or maybe the touring party had just grown wise to the fact that the blow stash had been dosed with Orange Sunshine. Jim Smollin.

[Jesse Jarno]

On May 23, 1972, I flew from JFK Airport in New York to London Heathrow, hopping on a bus to head into downtown London. I looked on the bus and somebody had put a placard on there that said Grateful Dead tonight, Lyceum Theater. So I got where I was going, dropped all my things off. I'd never been to London, didn't know where I was. But I was determined to get to the Lyceum. I got there late in the day. I bought a ticket And I believe the ticket was very cheap, under $10.

[Rich Mahan]

For locals, it was a little easier. Ken Hunt.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the case of the Lyceum, it was just one underground line, which was really handy. And then a walk across Waterloo Bridge of Waterloo Sunset fame Every day I look at the world from my window Chilly, chilly is the evening sun. What is sunset?

[Rich Mahan]

Archivist David Lemieux.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think these four nights kind of take you on a journey where the first night is that triumphant. We're back in London, but now we're playing a beautiful theater. We're not in the big arena. Graham Walker for the Dead and New Riders. The ticket probably said something like seven o' clock or something like that for the evening show. So I turned up at a ridiculously early time of 7 o', clock, and I think I must have been the first one in. For the first show, you go in through the front door, and then you climb a large stairwell. And there was me about five stairs behind Jerry and Mountain Girl walking up the stage. And so it was. I thought, whoa, okay, great stuff. You know, none of this green room shit. They're just kind of hanging out. I go upstairs. I mean, this is a. It was a gaudy ballroom, basically. Huge. Really, really large. And it used to be, you know, ballroom dancing. I mean, that was what it was designed for in the first instance. And I went into this theater not knowing where I was going, and realized it's such a small theater. I was way up front by myself. I met a group of people from Amsterdam who. We ended up hanging out all night. And it was the show of all shows. I think if I remember right, it was the New riders first, and then the Dead came on after the Dead.

[Rich Mahan]

Had played instantly legendary shows at Empire Pool and the Bickershaw Festival earlier in the tour. Check out episodes two and six of this season respectively. It was no surprise that there were British heads ready to go see them multiple nights in a row. Alex Allen Bickashaw was a tremendous experience.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was my first time seeing the Dead. Lots of new songs, a really fantastic experience. The Lyceum was actually a much, much better venue in many ways. It was the end of the tour. You felt they were probably, you know, a bit more relaxed and especially being able to play four nights at the same venue. It was definitely Bickershaw that made me decide I must go to the Lyceum shows. And indeed, so knocked out that I must go to all four shows. The contrast between that and then the Lyceum shows may come onto was huge, really, in terms of the venue and the ambiance. Chris Jones, the Lyceum. They gave so many freebies away, they were giving it the Book of the Dead. They're also giving these spinners, you know, where you pull a string and a thing in that card, a cardboard thing spins around. And they had some Grateful Dead ones and they had some New Riders. I've still got my New Riders one. It's just good PR now, looking back at it, you know. But at the time it was really, it was unheard of that so much free stuff was given away at concerts.

[Rich Mahan]

Warner Bros. Was there in force all four nights with a promotional booth as well as their own private balcony booth. Columbia Records, home to New Riders of the Purple Sage, did the same.

[Jesse Jarno]

Take a look around you now and what do you see? If you could go somewhere else now, where would that be? And you find a place to hide from Token where. I do remember being quite impressed by the New Riders because for one reason or another, I wasn't expecting them. I didn't know there was a support, certainly on the first night and out they came. And I can remember a great version of down in the Boondocks that they played. I mean, that was my distinctive memory of New Riders. But they were excellent. I mean, they really were very, very good. And they did a pretty memory, a pretty long set. I mean, it wasn't just, you know, like a 45 minute support group set. It was a really, really lovely venue. I felt really at home there, really comfortable again. I sat and I, you know, was fairly well spaced. I don't know how many people were there. I mean, I'd be interested to know what the numbers of attendance numbers were there. But it didn't seem to be crushed. But it seemed to be a lot of people, a lot of people there. But it wasn't, wasn't at all crushed. Good evening, welcome to here. Left my home in York, Virginia, California on my mind Straddle that granite road it passed promise all across Carolina welcome.

[Rich Mahan]

To here indeed it was the first time the Dead opened a show with Chuck Berry's the Promised Land, its standard home for much of the next decade. Alex Allen and it was very relaxed.

[Jesse Jarno]

Because you could wander around. I don't think I did, but you could go upstairs and there were still seats on the balcony, whatever the top tier's called on the ground. It was just open, you're just standing and you could get very close. I don't remember there being a huge crush. I remember sort of alternating between perhaps having a beer and sitting at the back, and then going right up front, staring at Jerry Garcia, you know, with his fingers and being knocked out by Phil Lesh's bass. It may be that my audio equipment wasn't. Well, it was pretty good. But for listening to the records, I hadn't quite realized what a contribution Phil Lesh made to the overall sound and the overall performance. And actually seeing Bob Weir and recognizing what his contribution was. And Pig Pen was stage right, pretty much behind Jerry. And they play whenever they played. And then when it was Pigpen's turn, he would just kind of wander out and probably brush against Jerry on the way out. And they go into whatever, you know, Jerry would play the blues chord and ba boom, off they go. And I remember Pig Pen very, very clearly. And that may be because I never saw him again. Maybe that was distinct, but I can clearly remember Mr. Charlie. I take a little powder, take a little. Put it in my shotgun and I go walking out. Mr. Charlie told me so.

[Rich Mahan]

In fact, the version of Mr. Charlie from the first night at the Lyceum was the keeper used on Europe 72, take number 19. That is, they played it at every show of the tour up until then and would play it at the next three as well. There are no overdubs at all on it. On one hand, sweet take. On the other hand. By the time the band was doing overdubs in the summer, Pigman was too sick to participate. Mr. Charlie would be his final original contribution to a Grateful Dead album. They debuted it the previous summer just after finishing work on Skull N Roses. This is from an early version recorded August 6, 1971, at the Hollywood Palladium. Now, Road Trips, Volume 1, Number 3. Rich digs it severely.

[Jesse Jarno]

Cause Mr. Charlie told me so.

[Rich Mahan]

Besides missing a verse, the song was almost the same as in its final form on the album. Mr. Charlie is credited to McKernan and lyricist Robert Hunter. In 1980, our friend Ken Hunt, who we'll hear more from later, asked Hunter about the nature of his collaboration with pigpen on Mr. Charlie. And Hunter's answer was surprising. Well, that wasn't a collaboration, he said. Pigpen is an old time blues man about that. We're gonna do this song and he wants a piece of the action. I can say that safely. Now that he's dead, Pig would let me write for him, which is very, very nice. Just as an artist and as a very close personal friend, I liked writing blues and stuff like Easy Wind, the kind of stuff that Pig could do and nobody else could do very well. There's a Robert Hunter solo demo of Mr. Charlie out and about in the world as well. Said to be from 1970 with an extra verse. Ask a Taper. It's the same Mr. Charlie we know, but based on the demo, I'd argue that Pig totally deserves his songwriting credit, especially compared to the fleshed out and arranged version that appeared on Europe 72. But who is Mr. Charlie? As always, probably Robert Hunter would welcome any interpretation, but the term stretches back to the 19th century and was still in use in the 20th. Let's start with this definition from the Underground Dictionary published in 1971 by Dr. Eugene Landy, later the quack psychiatrist Brian Wilson. Mr. Charlie one white man boss two white establishment man. He is one who lives in suburbia, usually has a white collar job, two to three children, a station wagon and a compact car and a white picket fence. He has short hair and puts the American flag outside his house on patriotic holidays. In short, he is part of the mainstream American life and society. Aka Herbie, aka Mr. Jones C establishment. But that's the 20th century version. In the 19th century, the term Mr. Charlie was synonymous with plantation owner. Ms. Ann was the female equivalent. The names have changed a few times, but the modern equivalents of Mr. Charlie and Ms. Anne aren't too hard to find in contemporary culture. Like the candyman, Mr. Charlie turns up as a character in numerous folk and pop songs. A close read of Robert Hunter's usage finds something that's not quite as easy as the Chuba Chuba sing along chorus suggests that the narrator evidently works more or less as Mr. Charlie's enforcer. Not really a very sympathetic position.

[Jesse Jarno]

Will you take a silver dollar Take a silver dime Mix it up together in some alligator wine and I could hear the drums voodoo on alone Mr. Charlie telling me I can't do nothing wrong.

[Rich Mahan]

Pigpana debuted a few songs during the Europe 72 period that he was singing nearly every night of the tour. Chinatown Shuffle and the Stranger. Just like Bob Weir tucked aside some of his new originals for his own album, Ace, I imagine Pigpen was perhaps doing the same for his own oft discussed solo album, perhaps alongside Empty Pages, played a few times the summer before Mr. Charlie disappeared when Pigpen died. And a sad side story of the Lyceum shows is that they were the final performances for Pigpen's repertoire. Though Bob Weir revived some of his covers later on, Mr. Charlie returned after the Grateful Dead dissolved. Performed at various points by Phil Lesh and friends, the Dead and dead and.

[Jesse Jarno]

Company Mr. Charlie told me Mr. Charlie told me so thank you at the end of a song, he would sincerely thank the audience for listening before retiring back behind his keyboard.

[Rich Mahan]

Alex Allen I remember, you know, Tennessee.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jed, hearing the words, you know, as I say, it was new to me, but hearing the Blackmire kick my dog or whatever and, you know, being stuck in my mind my dog. And he said, let it back to Tennessee. It was the Robert Hunter lyrics that, you know, really grabbed me. And hence my website was primarily, I mean, it was, you know, its focus is obviously Grateful Dead, but actually what most of it now is Robert Hunter stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

Alex's site, WhiteGum.com is my first stop when researching the finer footnotes of Grateful Dead lyrics. We've talked to him a bunch about Robert Hunter's lyrics, especially an episode last year called Keys to the rain, celebrating Hunter's 80th.

[Jesse Jarno]

I remember things like China Cat, Sunflower seeing actually, I don't think I'd realized that Bob Weir played his part in there. The familiar riff at the beginning. And so it was great to be able to get. Get right up front. I knew straight away it was not formulaic. It was not, you know, here are. We're going to play our best tunes, our hits or whatever, and we're going to be here for an hour and 15 minutes and then we're going to go. It was much more relaxed. It was. And that X factor between the audience and the band, which is hard to put your finger on to a large extent because it's not visible, but was very, very definitely there. I mean, we were all in the band for those shows and it was very. There wasn't, you know, the barrier between the stage and the crowd wasn't there like it was for most other things anybody ever went to see. It was, it was, it was qualitatively different.

[Rich Mahan]

The China Cat, Sunflower, I Know youw Rider combo made the final set of mixes when the band was picking the album, as did versions of Chinatown Shuffle, Jack Straw and Comes A Time. We'll post a full list of the tour mixes with our episode next week. In the first set, they even debuted a song that received a three star marking on the tape box itself, though, didn't make the tour mixes.

[Jesse Jarno]

Got a hold on Me Too I Got Rocky Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu Want to stuff a bit?

[Rich Mahan]

Rock and Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu by Huey Piano Smith and producer Johnny Vincent had a very brief life in the Dead repertoire. A few versions in Europe and one more in the States before slipping into Jerry Garcia's side songbook. Occasionally, people in the crowd really wanted to hear Darkstar.

[Jesse Jarno]

You wouldn't recognize any women. How much you want to bet? Man, I bet you wouldn't. I bet we could slip it in on you and you never know. I'll bet you a pack. How do you know we haven't already done it? I'll bet you a pack of Dunhills.

[Rich Mahan]

And I point this out because if you listen very closely, I'm pretty sure you can hear an interjection by Ben Holler of the lighting crew. In our episode about the shows in West Germany, he told us about how he would sometimes prank the band by yelling for the Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit or getting somebody in the crowd to do it for him. Compare how he says White Rabbit here with how it sounds when somebody shouts for it at the Lyceum.

[Jesse Jarno]

White Rabbit.

[Rich Mahan]

If it's not Ben, shout out to the second White Rabbit. Shooter or shouter. The Dead didn't play White Rabbit, though. The next night. I'm pretty sure that was Ben shouting in triumph at the end of the quote in this next story from tour architect Sam Cutler. Remember that in rock speak, gig means any number of shows at a single venue.

[Jesse Jarno]

The last gig of the tour we did, which was in London, was in a place that was run by the security guys, were all in, like, nice red jackets, all very neat white shirts with black bow ties, you know, and it was like all very organized and everything. And the manager came up to me. He was all kind of his hair all, you know, slicked back. Now we have to end this concert at 11 o'. Clock. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we've got to end at 11 o' clock because otherwise we go into overtime and it costs far too much money. We have to pay the staff and everything. I said, well, there's no way the Grateful Dead are going to agree to that, man. And it's not in the contract. You know what I mean? Forget it. No way, I said. The Grateful Dead play until they decide that they're fed up with playing and they don't want to play anymore. It's as simple as that. That's what's going to happen anyway. It was kind of left us up in the air. We're going to take a break and we'll be back in a few minutes and going to play for a while. And I know your ticket reads from 7 till 12, but I know you'll forgive us if we go a little later tonight. So, of course what happened was miraculously, all the security got high since some goodness knows how but they did. And so the black tires would come off, the red jackets were taken off. There were various bare chested security guys.

[Rich Mahan]

Right Head would report all four Lyceum shows running to the wee hours. In the second set on the first night, the band drifted into the song people had been requesting earlier. Please welcome back Graham Boone. I love the way this first jam goes from stillness to rippling movement.

[Jesse Jarno]

A quietness drawing out the moment. And we start up again. Cherry on high A. And we've returned to the chord A, the home chord, Jerry, with this classic triplet solo style. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, 2, 3. You can hear Keith and Bob staying home on that one chord of A and then moving around. Energy is growing. Move back to E minor. Cherry starting to build back up to high A and then back down again. And then holding that beautiful D note, riffing on that, that D. Listen to Bob. Bob's hearing Jerry.

[Rich Mahan]

Since its debut in late 1967, Darkstar had expanded and expanded and mostly expanded more. It would do the same after the Europe 72 tour as well. In its first few years, the song's improvisation followed a more structured path, with Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart on hand percussion, with Kreuzmann often shifting to full drum kit by the end. When hart departed in 1971, Kreuzmann shifted his strategy, jumping on the kit from the start, giving him a space for the One is where you think it is style drumming that we discussed in the Netherlands episode. One of Kreutzmann's nicknames inside the band was the Gang of One. And I totally hear that in pretty much every Europe 72 dark star.

[Jesse Jarno]

Really nice feel through here, Jerry, with repeating riffs that really get people on a burst of energy. An A chord. Really beautiful chording from Bob and then some great backup from Keith and. And now you can hear Pigpen on organ. What a wonderful sound. Everybody together.

[Rich Mahan]

Once Kreutzman started starting the song on drums, the jam structure began to shuffle with motifs showing up everywhere.

[Jesse Jarno]

And then here comes Bob with this interesting vamp on E minor, kind of a two chord vamp. And it's supported by Phil, who does a little bit of walking bass and then some funky bass. Jared getting into a little bit of his arpeggio riff on A minor, though not on the usual E minor note.

[Rich Mahan]

Though not quite exactly the same. That riff is genetically related to what old school tapers call the Sputnik theme, one of the key components in those earlier, more structured dark stars. A few episodes back, we posed the question of where the name came from. It turns out that the term Sputnik theme is coming from inside the house. Or at least from inside the deadcast family. Over to one of our excellent German correspondents, Volkmar. Ah, the Sputnik theme.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ha.

[Rich Mahan]

That term first came up as kind.

[Jesse Jarno]

Of a joke in the late 80s early 90s.

[Rich Mahan]

Uri and me started to discuss in.

[Jesse Jarno]

Time all the dark stars we had.

[Rich Mahan]

At that time, which weren't that much. Very soon we discovered some reoccurring themes. Hey, this one sounds like a Sputnik.

[Jesse Jarno]

What? Yeah, it sounds like a theme from outer space traveling around as some kind of weird satellite. Ah.

[Rich Mahan]

And in some way it connects the dark star to the Earth.

[Jesse Jarno]

And so we coined the term Sputnik.

[Rich Mahan]

Later on we agreed with Jim Powell on it and since then it has settled into common vocabulary. Our first description, Sputnik slow starting, tingling often by cherry alone moving into high pitched guitar picking.

[Jesse Jarno]

Appears as early as 68 in 70 used as transition out of space. Later incarnations have a hint character only.

[Rich Mahan]

Many solar orbits ago, Uli and Volkmar compiled a miniature book with their dark star maps. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast and all.

[Jesse Jarno]

Of a sudden, Phil hitting a major harmony. Are we going to go back to Dark Star? Looks like Bob wants to maybe is really slowing down. And Jerry suddenly hits an open D chord, which is the chord of Morning Dew. Bob's still thinking a dark star there for a second, but. And then we're into Morning Dew. It's interesting because it's also Mixolydian, but it's in a different key, so the feeling is different and the feeling of your fingers on the instruments is different. Beautiful performance of Morning Dew following Dark Star.

[Rich Mahan]

It kept going and going. There was even another song debut late in the evening. Kinda. It might sound like they're going back and to not fade away from going down the road feeling bad, but Jerry knows better.

[Jesse Jarno]

My favorite world. Gotta go, yeah.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead had played hey Bo Diddley when they backed the rock legend at the Academy two months earlier, and Sound checked it a few times since. It had come out a few more times in 72 and once, as David Leopold reminds us with the Neville Brothers in 1986, featuring Bob Weir on tambourine. For a brief period, it was an alternate destination in the late show Boogie Down. The Times of London gushed about the show, wrote Miles Palmer. It was rock music devoid of theatrical effects but glittering with expertise. Unlike some critics on the tour, Palmer made it to the end of the very Long night calling out the magic ballad Uncle John's Band that closed the set.

[Jesse Jarno]

Oho.

[Rich Mahan]

What I want to know is where does the time go? Palmer wrote. Where indeed? I thought looking at my watch, it was 1:50am.

[Jesse Jarno]

Like the morning sun you come and like the wind you blow Ain't no time to think Barely time to wait.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, almost. The show definitely went long.

[Jesse Jarno]

Graham Walker at that point I was living in Watford, so that was about 15 miles away. I think the first night I actually drove in. Subsequently I did, I realized that that probably wasn't a good idea. So I honestly can't remember what happened. I probably got back to the railway station and wait for the first train in the morning, which would have been about six, I guess, so it wouldn't have been too long a wait. Certainly the. The last buses and trains had, well, gone probably even before the Dead came on stage. So certainly for the second set.

[Rich Mahan]

Jim Smolin I think the show started.

[Jesse Jarno]

Around 8 and I think we left there. It was well after 3am I go outside, I tell these guys from Amsterdam, I'm going to take the. Take the underground, the Tube, back to where I was going. They said, the Tube's closed, mate. So people I never knew before gave me a ride back to where I was going. All I can say is I've seen the Dead a lot of times. That show was the show of all shows.

[Rich Mahan]

With the gear set up at the Lyceum, the Dead had a party the next afternoon.

[Jesse Jarno]

Steve Parrish we met a lot of people in England. The promoters took us out to St. John's Jerusalem. We had a wild party out there and a lot of people associated with Apple Records and the Rolling Stones came out and stuff like that, you know, so we had a good party there.

[Rich Mahan]

The New Riders of the Purple Sage were along for the ride. There's a photo of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, David Nelson and John Dawson with acoustic guitars in St. John's Jerusalem Chapel. But a lot of what people remember about the day was the softball. David Nelson played softball with the Dead sometimes back home.

[Jesse Jarno]

We arranged to go to this place, I think near Fairfax where they had a baseball diamond in, and go there and hit balls. And I got movies of that. I mean, just little clips of it. My home movies. St. John's Jerusalem. We had a big game that day, and that's mostly that day now. You know, if you go back into the 40s, when our American servicemen were in England, they didn't like to play cricket. You know, cricket's a very annoying game if you're American, raised on baseball. And so we were always playing baseball in America at the time. We played the Starship, we played the Dope Dealers of Marin, we played Bill Graham's team, we played the one legged Sisters from Hell and all these teams, you know, and we had a lot of fun at it. So we were still wizard on that right at the time. And you'll see us all swinging those bats and we had a lot of fun. It was a big beautiful place, you know, it looked like where Robin Hood would have hung out or something like that.

[Rich Mahan]

We offered an in depth history of the Dead softball team, the Dead Ringers, on our ripple episode during our American Beauty season.

[Jesse Jarno]

For both fans, roadies were from Pendleton, Oregon. And so one of them roadies was Gary Harover, who was a big guy who was good at baseball and he was actually a draft pick for the Chicago White Sox at one point. Anyway, so we go to this guy's house. There was a guy and his family who offered us that they wanted us to come over and visit and offered a place to stay and stuff like that. And. And he had, in England, he had out in his back area a little baseball diamond that was drawn up. You know, they don't know a whole lot about baseball, but he had a bat and a couple of softballs and a couple of bats and a softball. So anyway, we took our positions, we split into a couple of teams. I mean it wasn't full team or anything, but it was just a play, you know, and I'm out in like center field or right field, so to speak. And Harover hits the softball so hard that the seams came off. The little, the binding, you know, that has the raised area on a softball, you know, that just ripped off and came off and as I caught, was going flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, you know, it almost obliterated the ball itself. That was the last time we played baseball, I think is that day at St. John's Jerusalem. That was the last baseball game that was on and there were some films of it. Marianne Mayer took a lot of great pictures there of us because we were really camera shy. Didn't let a lot of people take pictures, unfortunately.

[Rich Mahan]

We've posted some sweet action shots of the Dead Ringers last intra squad game as part of the daily dose on social media, including a shot I love of Jerry Garcia flagrantly distracting outfielder David Nelson. Then it was on to the bozo and bolo buses one more time, an hour or so west back to London for night two at the Lyceum archivist David Lemieux.

[Jesse Jarno]

5:24. The second show, I think the most under the radar show on the tour. But every single song at this show is played incredibly well. This was the band settling into the second show of a four night run at a venue. They don't have to leave, they don't have to leave the hotel for a week. They were so locked in on 5 24. Again, I will really encourage people to check that show out because it's a concise show, the playing in the band, the other one, everything about this show is concise. They mean business, they're focused, they're together. It's positive energy.

[Rich Mahan]

In the audience was music journalist Andy Childs, who'd been blown away at Empire Pool.

[Jesse Jarno]

I bought tickets for the middle two shows. It was intimate. It had the feeling of a very kind of living room concert vibe. Because the Lyceum isn't that big. I mean, that's why I wanted to go after the Wembley show, because the Wembley shows, there's quite a big arena and if you're in the wrong seats, they can look a long way away. But with the Lyceum, there's a sense of intimacy, which I thought was always important with what they were doing. But it definitely was my impression that there were a lot of Americans at all those shows. So automatically there was a different feel to the, to the audience and a different way of, I don't know, just different vibe of the whole thing. She's been in trouble all my life Brought me out in the cold rain.

[Rich Mahan]

In the snow Please welcome back Bill Giles now of the Grateful Dudes.

[Jesse Jarno]

The thing about the Lyceum is just the nicest venue. It's a ballroom, so there's a floor and four for dancing. @ the back there's a balcony and the balcony has tables and chairs. You can sit at your tables and enjoy whatever's going on on stage. And that's what I did both nights for the new riders set up on the balcony. Had a good time watching the band from the balcony and then went down onto the floor and, you know, right, right at the front for the Dead. And then, you know, sort of standing, you know, a few, few yards from Mr. Garcia's feet. It was an outstanding experience. This next one's dedicated to all you sots back there at the. I want you to think it over Lay back in a full balloon With a pizzle in my hand the Lyceum, because I was much closer to the stage, it was a more intimate thing. But they just look like they lived on the stage. There's just a level of relaxation and amusement and, you know, having a great time. And yeah, it was again, a different sort of feel than I ever got from any other band.

[Rich Mahan]

Andy Chiles had spent a lot of time thinking about the Dead before he got to see them.

[Jesse Jarno]

All the band members came from very different musical backgrounds and that was something that was new because, you know, you look at UK bands at rock bands, they all met at art college or they all came from similar backgrounds. And for a rock band like that consist of members that came from classical music background, folk, country, bluegrass, I mean, that was quite unique and it kind of. It reflected in the music. It was something I read about called. It was called Dissonant Counterpoint. And when I look, when I heard Live Dead, that did it for me because Dark Star is the epitome of that. And it's that record I had to play six times, seven times, and every time I heard it it sounded different because I was listening to something different in the mix. And it was a great example of loads of different styles coming together that shouldn't have worked. They were all different. It shouldn't have actually coalesced the way they did. But they did. And I was really looking forward to hearing that at the Lyceum and they didn't disappoint. I mean, it was just amazing. The whole experience of the Lyceum kind of confirmed what I thought was great about the band. And it was just totally different from, from any UK rock gig that you would go to at the time. Very, very different, very different. I mean, it was eclectic, it was relaxed, very friendly and just the whole range of material that they, that they covered was very exciting. I put those shows down as in my top half dozen shows I've ever seen. Their sound was so different and their competence on stage was so advanced compared to. And their relaxed nature on stage. It was like, you know, it was like a party going on on stage in a way. But the sound, the sound, there was a clarity to the sound that you didn't hear with your typical English bands, you know, the Claptons or indeed the Hendrixes or what have you, who were playing through martial amplification, which tends to distort rather than the beautiful Mackintosh PA that they'd had and their sort of Fender based guitar amplification. The sound and the way that they approached the gig was like, again, it was different from anything that anybody had ever really seen before. And I think people forget, perhaps just amongst the enormous musical talent in the band, just how good they sounded and how great they looked. You know, like I said earlier, like they live on stage.

[Rich Mahan]

The Grateful Dudes will be celebrating Europe 72 this summer at the event, Playing on the farm. We've posted a [e-mail] Deadcast the Dead also caught two tracks for Yurt 72 on the second night at the Lyceum. The first had been in their repertoire pretty much continuously since 1966, the definition of an old standby. Here's How It Hurts Me Too sounded on November 10, 1967 at the shrine in LA. Now on the 30 trips around the sun box set.

[Jesse Jarno]

You said you was hurting Almost lost your mind.

[Rich Mahan]

Not too different from Europe 72 in some ways, besides the moodiness of the two drummers. But I also think Pigpen had pretty clearly become a better singer by 1972, and the band had gotten better as well. I love the little handoff from Garcia's feedback to Keith Godshow's piano while Pig is singing here.

[Jesse Jarno]

Why? Because.

[Rich Mahan]

Pigpan almost certainly learned it from Elmore James, who credited himself as the author of the song and who released his version in 1957 with the broom Dusters.

[Jesse Jarno]

Almost lost your mind the man you love he hurts you all the time when things go wrong go wrong with you it hurting me too.

[Rich Mahan]

With that it were so simple. The story of It Hurts Me Too iterates fascinatingly when traced in reverse and reveals an interesting Europe 72 connection 17 years before Elmore James version of It Hurts Me too In 1940, Tampa Red recorded a song with the same name, same melody, and some of the same.

[Jesse Jarno]

Words, I can't be happy mama for being so blue when you keep on worrying the way you do when things go wrong so wrong with you it hurts me too.

[Rich Mahan]

But Tampa Redd's song It Hurts Me Too was an update on a song he'd first recorded 11 years before that, in 1929, the slide guitar instrumental you got to reap what you sow. If that sounds familiar, it should. Besides, it hurts me too. You got to Reap what yout Sow was the apparent origin point for several other songs in the Blues Family Tree. Perhaps a melody going around previously on One Branch, the melody evolved into Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen. On another, it became Sitting on Top of the World, a masterpiece by the great string band the Mississippi Chic.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just trying to find my little all in all but now she's on I don't worry I'm sitting on top of the world.

[Rich Mahan]

Which you may know as side A, track 5 of the first Grateful Dead LP.

[Jesse Jarno]

I worked all summer calls me all now she.

[Rich Mahan]

To summarize, two songs in the Dead's early repertoire, It Hurts Me Too and Sitting On Top of the World, seemingly derived from the same common tune. Coincidentally, the Dead had just brought Sitting On Top of the World back into the repertoire for the final time a few nights earlier in Munich. And they'd play it on the first and third nights at the Lyceum, the last two versions of the song ever played by the band Bummer. And for that matter, the version of It Hurts Me too on the second night of the Lyceum included on Europe 72 was the last version they ever played.

[Jesse Jarno]

Thank you.

[Rich Mahan]

A few songs later in the first set, the Dead caught another song for Europe 72.

[Jesse Jarno]

Oh, the tale that you've been seeing.

[Rich Mahan]

Originally by Hank Williams. That was the fifth and final take of youf Win Again, recorded for Europe 72, requiring no overdubs, it was perhaps the most no fuss, no must tune of the project. No versions were pulled for the tour end mixes, and there doesn't seem to be a surviving track sheet. Apparently a semi spontaneous inclusion on the album introduced into the Dead's repertoire in the fall of 1971. It was gone by less than a year later, with a few performances in 75 by the early iteration of the Jerry Garcia Band. You Win Again is of course, one of the most legendary of all country songs.

[Jesse Jarno]

The news is out all over town that you've been seen running round I know that I should leave but then I just can't go. You win again.

[Rich Mahan]

According to Hank Williams, the biography by Colin Escott, George Marron and William McEwen, the song was originally titled I Lose Again, with a new title suggested by producer Fred Rose. When Williams recorded it in the summer of 1952, the day after his divorce was finalized, it was an instant standard.

[Jesse Jarno]

Now I see whatever just trusted was my great sin. What can I do for you Win?

[Rich Mahan]

Derek Gilman dropped us a lovely story about the lyceum [e-mail], which we'll use to end our look at night two.

[Jesse Jarno]

In late May 72, approaching the end of my first year at Oxford, I went with three fellow students to see the Dead play at the Lyceum on the Strand in central London. I've no idea which night of the week it was, and so I can listen to tracks from all four concerts and feel myself there as we started the drive home. Surely in a state of euphoria, we turned the wrong way down Pall Mall, then a one way street it nearly crashed into a large bus. Both vehicles came to a rapid stop happily with no actual collision. As we got out of our Mini we saw, amazingly, that it was the tour bus, with members of the band amongst those leaning out, the windows openable in those days. We shouted to them how much we'd enjoyed the concert and all was going swimmingly until a police car appeared, much to our consternation. Pigpen climbed down to see what was going on, and perhaps somebody else too, but I just remember Pigpen. Fortunately the officers were friendly enough. Did we benefit from being Oxford undergraduates at a time when there were fewer university students in the uk? Undoubtedly. Did we apologize profusely and claim we were unfamiliar with London's roads? Probably. Did Pigpen speak up for us? Possibly. The police let us off and departed and we headed back. Almost 50 years on, it seems unlikely that anyone on the bus would recall that moment, but it's certainly a memory for me.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead didn't catch any of Europe 72 on the third night at the Lyceum, Thursday 25th May, but it was hardly uneventful, especially for those who attended. John Kieffer had seen the band in April at Empire Pool.

[Jesse Jarno]

As soon as I could, I bought a ticket for my girlfriend and I to go to the Lyceum a few weeks later, and May 25th at the Lyceum was my second Grateful Dead show. So after being blown away by the Empire Pool show a few weeks before, I had in the meantime used all my birthday money and a chunk of my wages on American Beauty and a pricey import copy of Skull and Roses from Richard Branson's first Virgin Store. The Lyceum was a great venue, much more intimate at 2000 than the Empire Pool if I wasn't nearly there already. This concept may be a Dead fan for life.

[Rich Mahan]

It would be the last time they played a number of songs, mainly one sung by Pigpen.

[Jesse Jarno]

Big balls made can't you help me when I call Will you ain't so big you just told us about all.

[Rich Mahan]

Goodbye to Big Boss man revived by garcia in the 80s, and goodbye to good lovin'revived by Weir in 76.

[Jesse Jarno]

When I was feeling so bad if my family died.

[Rich Mahan]

The last version with Pigpen doesn't have a freestyle, but it does have Jerry Garcia on B3 for the last time.

[Jesse Jarno]

All I need, all I need you.

[Rich Mahan]

It also has a jam that gets pretty deep. The first set of the 25 May show is also the Last time, One of My Favorite Things Happened Broke down Palace with a combination of Keith Gadchaux's Piano and Pigpen's B3 organization. Bill Giles.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Thursday night that was the 25th of the penultimate gig. They ended as they were doing, generally doing then the first set with Casey Jones and again, just talking about sound clarity, when they get to the final choruses that repeat, you know, driving that train, et cetera, et cetera. And the guy on the soundboard, whatever it was, just cranking up the amp every time they get through a new verse and it just gets louder. And I'm sure they did that. They. Sure they did that everywhere. But, I mean, it's just something I remember that this thing was getting so goddamn loud that, you know, and it was totally clear and it was, you know, the fact that I remember, I remember that happening. Deeply impressioned experience. Watch your spear. Watch your.

[Rich Mahan]

The second set had an unusual jam sequence with Uncle John's band melting into a gentle space, reformulating dramatically into Warfrat. Chris Jones and I went to the.

[Jesse Jarno]

First three shows, and then I ran out of money and I couldn't afford to go to the last one, which was real, real bummer, and I've regretted it ever since. But I think I did. Did okay.

[Rich Mahan]

And he did tape the shows, which was pretty excellent, too, because then Warfrat drifted into that special place to spin us through this 11th and final Dark Star of Europe 72. Please welcome back Graham Boone.

[Jesse Jarno]

Warfrat transitioning into Dark Star is such a powerful move and feeling. They don't even play the tag. Jerry just started in on his riff, and they're into it with that feeling of Warfrap in the background. This is a slow and pensive beginning.

[Rich Mahan]

Chris Jones.

[Jesse Jarno]

I got to see my second Dark Star on the Thursday. And one of the things about the Lyceum Ballroom, I don't know if anybody said this, is that the had a roof which rolled back and while they were playing Dark Star Looking up, was it Darkstar? Was it the other one? It might have been the other one, but it was. It was a spacey, magical trip, looking out and see the stars, just a little black square in the ceiling and the stars above. And it was just absolutely magical. And I think they had to do it to let all the fumes out, you know, let the smoke and the incense and whatever else that. That happened. That really happened. A lot of things I've forgotten that is true.

[Rich Mahan]

Andy Childs.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Lyceum had a retractable roof and the atmosphere Got a bit smoky in there for a while. And so they opened the roof, let the scent out. The roof was kind of domed. I think maybe there was a small part of it in the middle. And that just kind of opened up as a, you know, as a dome. So it wasn't the whole roof, you know, I'll never forget that. It was quite nice because then, you know, you saw the stars coming in. And it was kind of a magic moment, really, in a way. You know, it's kind of perfect. It was certainly open that night. I think it was on the Thursday night, the last night that I was there and it opened. And it was absolutely amazing that it happened. It just felt just right. May is not always warm in this country, but we were hot. We were warm. And to open the thing then was absolutely superb. And I don't know whether someone pointed out to me or whether I was just laying out flat on the floor, zonked out of me box. And anyway, I noticed it and it was great. Beautiful sense of hovering. And you can hear everybody just adding little bits and pieces to this moment. Fill back on a. And creating a sense of center. But always in movement. They would go in a huddle, you know, they would look at each other and they'd be looking at what each other was doing. And it was that kind of playing off each other in a very intimate way, you know, which again, you know, never seen a rock band do that. Never seen anything like that before. So the band is in a very spacey mode here for a minute. And then Jerry hits this note. Listen to Jerry's note. And then Bob hits a note. And through feedback, they just hold on to these notes. Phil Lesh playing his growling bass. Wide open, deep space. Bill's dropped out. Keith has dropped out. Fill in those two note chords, those dyadic monster chords in the bass. Phil always seemed to me to be the one that kind of took the lead when it came to where these jams would go and where. And it was almost like jazz because they're all melodies he plays. He doesn't play ordinary bass lines. He plays melodies. So they just go off and. And the rest of the band follows. And I always thought he was really probably. I mean, you can't discount the contribution of any of the band members. But I always thought that he was particularly important. And not many people really had written about that.

[Rich Mahan]

Andy would. In zigzag, he would write of the shows. I was given irrevocable proof to support my theory that Phil Lash is a genius beyond all shadow of a doubt, he was pushing out endless boulder like notes that formed the bass and cornerstone of the whole sound. Beautiful imaginative riffs during tightly arranged numbers. And when they stretched out, veering off the road to God knows where, it was pure counterpoint at its very best. I'll never forget one particular instance where the band had worked themselves into a piece that trained students of the game would probably describe as electric chamber music. And Lesh was completely and utterly in control of the whole thing, crouched next to his amp and playing his bass high up on the neck, gradually stabilizing all the many different melodies and rhythms flying around him and then leading them off somewhere else completely. Phil lashed at the height of his creativity. That's not an experience you treat lightly. Andy's profile of the Dead, a three Part history, was published in Zigzag over the course of 1973.

[Jesse Jarno]

Shortly after that, I became the editor of Zigzag, so I think it might have been instrumental.

[Rich Mahan]

It also helped him score an interview with Phil Lesh. The next time the Dead came through London, a topic we'll have to save for another day.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bill Giles down the front and there was a guy behind me with his girlfriend. And I just remember this conversation, or I just remember him saying, it's all right, they'll get back to playing music in a while, or words to that effect. And this was during what is actually really quite a difficult Dark star. I mean, they sort of rather. I had some sympathy because they sort of. They'd rather lose their way. They found it really nice bits from everybody. And there Phil pops into his feeling groovy. And listen to that tremolo effect on Bob's guitar. You know, Jerry's not standing on top, he's just grooving with his bandmates. And then he starts coming out, as always, Bill underpinning the whole jam. And as usual, you have this pause of four bars and then coming back.

[Rich Mahan]

And we'll fade out. The last Europe 72 dark star with a tiny bit that anticipates the feel of Eyes of the World, debuted eight months later. Thanks, Graham Boone, for all the celestial navigation. This dark star re enters local gravity in the same way that a half dozen previous dark stars on Europe $72. The dead had gone from Dark Star into Sugar Magnolia a few times before the Europe 72 tour and would do so a few times after. But I think of it as the quintessential Europe 72 dark star transition.

[Jesse Jarno]

Chris Jones seeing the dead six times in the space of less than two months that's, that's, that's quite a lot. I am really so impressed me with the musicianship, the dedication of playing for those sort of long hours. As I said, all the freebies they gave, the atmosphere that they engendered. It was just an absolutely marvelous experience for a very young man.

[Rich Mahan]

John Kiefer, actually.

[Jesse Jarno]

The vibe was so friendly and relaxed. It was not like being at a concert at all, more like an outdoor festival, but inside a faded rococo ballroom. I've been listening to a lot of jazz, Coltrane, Miles, etc, and electronic music. As a teenager. I remember being amazed one minute at the Dead's improvisations, while next minute being drawn into great songs like Wolf Rat and then dancing like an idiot with my girlfriend to Sugar Magnolia. There certainly is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert at the end of the second one. I think they seem to go on for hours and hours. And you'd come out into Covent Garden in the early hours of the morning and because there was a fruit and vegetable market at Common Garden at the time, and all the workers would be coming in, going to work, you know, coming into work. And while we were coming out of the Lyceum, it was quite funny.

[Rich Mahan]

The final night of the tour, the last of the Lyceum shows has long been voted an all time favorite by Deadheads, and it was an instant all timer for Alan Arkish, who'd seen virtually every classic Dead set at the Fillmore east while working there.

[Jesse Jarno]

The last one is one of my top five favorite Grateful Dead shows of all time. And I think you can tell on the recording there's an energy to it.

[Rich Mahan]

And it's true, it was another deeply electrified night. Stories abound about the touring party making a valiant, and sometimes not so valiant attempt to finish off their collective LSD supply. Courtney Pollock and his lady friend met up with the tour for the Lyceum shows. This actually could have happened on any of the earlier nights, but we'll use it to set the mood.

[Jesse Jarno]

We went and met up as a band again in London for the last gigs over there. Victoria and I were in the same hotel with the band and we go to the gig and actually it was Candelario. Kid Candelario we ran into first. We were on stage, you know, I was checking equipment and, you know, tight eyes. I got Victoria with me and he's like, hey you. You guys want to drop or whatever he said, and sure. So he gives us a squeeze out of the murine bottle because it was dissolved in murine under the guise of eyedroppers. Of course.

[Rich Mahan]

Previously on the Dead Cast. We heard about how Courtney had avoided the Paris megadosing because he came with his own supply of windowpane. He did not avoid such a fate in London.

[Jesse Jarno]

And she and I both got absolutely blitzed. All visual and sound just became a morass of fragmentia, you know, Light became shards of broken glass. There was no. You couldn't see anything. And all sound was disjointed. And it was absolutely hellacious, you know. And I just knew it was going to be a number, several hours. We just had to write it out until we came down enough. Yeah. And that it also had speed in it, you know. It was just not a cool thing in small doses. It was probably really good for, you know, getting setting up equipment breaking down at the end of the night, you know, keeping that thread of energy going, you know. But if you take too much, you couldn't do anything. You couldn't see, you couldn't hear properly, you know. It was just hours before we could actually start to make head or tail events. I quickly found a little spot backstage where we could just hunker down and ride it out.

[Rich Mahan]

The Deads family weren't the only ones going all out. Jeremy Poynton.

[Jesse Jarno]

When we hit the road from Oxford, me and some friends from college hired a man to go down to the Lyceum. I think we managed the first show and the last show. Being impoverished students had got to Wembley and been blown away. Got to Bickershaw and been blown away and covered in mud. Absolutely perfect. The shows were spectacular. The acid we had was absolutely spectacular.

[Rich Mahan]

Glorious days back on the planetary surface the show got going. Opening up were the new rioters of the Purple Sage. A tape has long circulated of their set, but turns out it was from one of the other nights. New Riders archivist Rob Leitstein recently discovered the real 26th of May set. It will be released this fall by Omnivore Recordings. Here's a sneak preview of Dirty Business. Please dig Buddy Cage's sweet petal steel.

[Jesse Jarno]

Sam.

[Rich Mahan]

And then once more it was time for the Grateful Dead.

[Jesse Jarno]

Left my home in Norfolk, Virginia California on my mind Straddled at the grand and road and passed Riley on across Caroline Stopped in Charlotte and bypass rocking we never was a minute late we was not 30 miles out of Atlanta Miles sundown Rolling past Georgia State and for the trouble it turned into a struggle Halfway across Alabama when the hell broke down and left us all spend.

[Rich Mahan]

It in downtown Birmingham Writer Ken Hunt.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Lyceum was a much more intimate venue. It was a very European audience. People had traveled from across Europe. There was none of the stuff which I despise, which was people calling out Jerry and Grateful Dead. And I just thought, no, I don't need that in my ears. I just want to hear the music. So there was none of that at either of the concerts I went to.

[Rich Mahan]

The night would not only yield four songs and two extended jams for the officially released version of Europe 72, but another five performances made it to the end of tour mixes for album consideration. Along with China Cat, Sunflower in the first set, it also included three of Pigpen's performances in the first set. The first was Mr. Charlie.

[Jesse Jarno]

Mr. Charlie told me so.

[Rich Mahan]

Another was the Stranger, the only version from the tour pulled as a potential keeper.

[Jesse Jarno]

I wake up early in the morning. You know. You know I'm in a.

[Rich Mahan]

The last was Chinatown Shuffle.

[Jesse Jarno]

Don't Expect for.

[Rich Mahan]

Was the last song Pigpen would sing with the Grateful Dead. They would be the final performances of all three songs. Which still sucks. There's one moment that many remember about the first set. Bill Giles.

[Jesse Jarno]

The specific memory from that was that end of the first set, towards the end of the first set, I think they'd done China Rider and they would probably have done, as they had done most of the shows, Casey Jones as the set one closer. And anyway, so pause after China Rider, a bit of dead air. They're working out what to do. And then the audience starts clapping the Bo Diddley beat. So you've got the audience going. The lovely thing about the Lyceum is when you get the audience feeding the band and the audience. And I was one of them, we started clapping a rhythm.

[Rich Mahan]

Remember Phil Lesh's encounter with the Danish crowd back at the beginning of the tour?

[Jesse Jarno]

See, you know what? We're gonna keep on playing. You don't have to to clap like that, but you can if you want to. If you want to clap, go ahead, go ahead, get it on. But we won't do one in that tempo, you know, necessarily.

[Rich Mahan]

You can if you want to, but.

[Jesse Jarno]

You don't have to if you don't want to. You can do whatever you want, but don't get sucked into it now.

[Rich Mahan]

Tonight they would on the band.

[Jesse Jarno]

You see the band on the stage and there. Everything sort of looking at one another in amazement and laughing and chuckling and all the rest of it. And they know what they have to do, which is play not Fade away. And that's what they do. And they picked up on the rhythm. And you get a shot from Sounds like Kreuzmann. And they go in to Not Fade Away. Now, I don't know how often the Dead did that sort of stuff, but it was a, you know, a special moment. I won't say it was magical, but it was a special moment. I want to love you night and day, you know I love. Set one concludes, you know, with the help of the audience inspiration. With Not Fade Away going into going down the road, that was a great little. That was just a great moment of, you know, band and crowd interaction without a word being spoken.

[Rich Mahan]

In later years, it would become a semi regular ritual for the audience to start up the rhythm and pass it to the band. But the Lyceum show is a magical, totally spontaneous early instance. It happened at least one other time, on November 8, 1970, at the Capitol Theater in Portchester, of course, but there's still plenty of missing tapes. Alan Arkish Not Fade Away is awesome.

[Jesse Jarno]

The give and take on Not Fade Away between Cherry's playing and Bob singing is very Chuck Berry like and very on it. It's like really strong rock and roll fills.

[Rich Mahan]

It was a warm and fuzzy way to end the first set because for the Dead's extended family, set break was utter chaos.

[Jesse Jarno]

Sam Cutler, and it was a Far Ben another one. It was a stonking high gig, and my mother wanted to come and see what this band was like. You know who this band was? The Grateful Dead. So I sent. I organized a car to bring her and her husband to the gig. And she sat in the balcony next to Haley, who was mixing the music. Everyone's completely stoned. And I suddenly wrote, oh, yeah, my fucking. It was like the break, you know, we were having a break and, oh, my mother's up there, I better go and get her. So I went and got her, right? I said, come down to the dressing room, say hello to Jerry, right? Which was a great mistake. So this little old English lady took her down to the dressing room, and everybody's in the dressing room all smoking joints and completely out of it. My mother looked like she just stepped into the middle of like, Sodom and Gomorrah. And I took her up to Garcia, and Garcia kind of, you know, peered over his glasses and her like that. And I said, oh, Jerry, this is my mother. So he looked at her like that and he goes, I didn't know you had a mother, is what Jerry said. My mother didn't take kindly to that. And then she goes, she says to him something like, you know what? This music is far too loud. It's positively dangerous. Do you know, don't you realize that it can, you know, injure people? You can destroy their hearing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I managed to get her out of there and she went home. She. She couldn't stand it any longer. That was that. So that was. Yeah, that was that gig, man. That ended at like 3:30 in the morning instead of the 11 o' clock that the manager demanded.

[Rich Mahan]

Wiz had an entertaining set break.

[Jesse Jarno]

When we were in Germany, we went to a toy store and bought these really, really high quality full face masks. And I had a punch, a Punch and Judy one. And I had a lot of hair and, you know, I could pull my hair back, put the mask on and then kind of pull my hair around the mask and, you know, it was cool. Anyway, you know, I was talking about the other mask that we had. The band wore them. At one point during the last Lyceum.

[Rich Mahan]

Gig, Wiz went to get a drink in the Warner Brothers promotional box where thanks to one of the other quippies, the company's representatives had gotten dosed.

[Jesse Jarno]

So, set break. I put the punch mask on and I go up there and people see me walk in and all of a sudden everybody's on the other side side of the box cowering. And I didn't think, you know, I like just thought, oh shit, I don't want to fuck these guys over. So I pulled the mask off and it must have looked like I ripped my face off.

[Rich Mahan]

Many years later, Wiz and Candace Brightman reunited on the touring crew for Phil Lesh and Friends. And as happens, the topic of Europe 72 came up and eventually the Masked Night at the Lyceum.

[Jesse Jarno]

And we started talking about that and Candace, her jaw drops and she looks at me and says, they were masks. What are you talking about? I thought I was hallucinating. I said, no, they put masks on for us. And we laughed.

[Rich Mahan]

Then it was time to get down to the evening's business. Drop the needle on LP3 of Europe 72 and you'll hear the beginning of set two from night four at the Lyceum. The crowd knows what's coming. The Dead sixth show in London in two months.

[Jesse Jarno]

Of course, by now I need to tell you that this next number rose straight to the top of the charts in Turlock, California. Numero Uno had stayed there for a week or two. They loved us in Turlock and we love them for that.

[Rich Mahan]

Far be it from the Dead cast to leave Weir's Turlock claim like that alone. It's sometimes suggested that it's a ban in joke related to a gig a few years earlier in Turlock, but the thing is, it actually sounds like a plausible claim to me. In the 70s, it wasn't uncommon for small towns to have their own local music charts, often just ads in the paper sponsored by a local record store or radio station. And Truckin does appear on at least one such chart just after the time Weir started using that piece of patter in late 71. The Archives of the Turlock Daily Journal aren't yet digitized, unfortunately. I contacted the paper via current reporter Chris Correa, who queried some of the old schoolers at the publication. None of them remember a local music chart, but I know firsthand how difficult it can be to research between multiverses and I'd still love to get some Dead freak eyeballs on late 1970 and 1971 editions of the Turlock Daily Journal. But anywho, of course the Dead recorded Truckin less than two years earlier when it became the closing song on American Beauty. We went way into Truckin during our season closing episode from that season, so we ask you to please point your podcast player to that for a deeper history. But to recount briefly the original conception of Truckin was a bit different. That was the demo for Truckin from the expanded Angel Share edition of American Beauty, available on a streaming service near you. The song beefed up considerably over its first year and change of live performances, but it was only just before the Europe 72 tour that the song developed a proper jam. That was a version from March 26 at the Academy in New York, just before the band's departure for London and the first Truckin to really cruise the cosmic highway. Cracking open to 18 minutes. The tour ending version in London was take 18, played most nights of the tour and got to a pretty out place as well. At the Lyceum, Truckin unfolded into a 1 hour 10 minute sequence, segueing into the other one, into Morning Dew, back into the other one, and on into Sing Me Back Home. For the album it was edited judiciously down to less than half that, a disc long piece of music that begins with Truckin and ends with Morning Dew. At Alembic, Weir, Garcia and Lesh overed up new vocals on July 31st.

[Jesse Jarno]

More or less in life, Just keep Trucking.

[Rich Mahan]

On the official album, the Truckin outro was retitled Epilogue and made into its own track. There are no edits, but it did earn Keith Gotcho his first publishing credit on the Grateful Dead album Fading, just as it starts to melt into the other one. One person who had a fascinating perspective on the dead's jamming on the Europe 72 tour is Dennis Wizard Leonard, who watched the entire tour through a tiny black and white monitor in the recording truck.

[Jesse Jarno]

One of my favorite things musically, and I could see this through the black and white monitor, is a lot of time Jerry would be playing kind of with his head down, and other band members would just be on their instruments. And they would telegraph things to each other for transitions without even visual contact. There was something extraordinary going on, and it wasn't just the music. These guys were so in touch with each other that I think that something as subtle as the speed of a bend could telegraph something.

[Rich Mahan]

There was still plenty of excitement in the recording truck on the last night.

[Jesse Jarno]

Of the tour in Amsterdam. I had found and had it for quite a while in an antique shop. A real human skull by them there. And it was. It lived on top of the 13 inch monitor for a while. And that was like right under a Laughing Jack flag. That was the backdrop between the two JBL monitors. Early in the second set, Joe Smith comes out to the truck.

[Rich Mahan]

Legendary Warner Brothers president Joe Smith in the house.

[Jesse Jarno]

And he kind of like, you know, like, you know, there was a funky staircase that we carried to get in there. And he says, do you guys mind if I hang out here? I think I'm high, Betty. And I looked at him and said, no problem, just relax, man. And Joe sits down and, you know, he's like, listening, and he starts to look at the 12 inch, 15 inch monitor. And he glances up and says that that's a real human skull, huh? And I said, yeah, Joe, it is. I'm gonna go back inside now.

[Rich Mahan]

Did the Dead's crew finally dose Joe Smith? Not likely. Smith never met a story he couldn't tell, and it was a story he never told. Did they dose themselves enthusiastically?

[Jesse Jarno]

We were all really, really, really high for the last show of the tour.

[Rich Mahan]

The tape box for the set reads.

[Jesse Jarno]

We'Re all really stone now.

[Rich Mahan]

A little bit later into the second set, due to circumstances, wizard found himself alone in the alembic truck. Dennis McNally featured a version of this story in his official band biography, Long, strange Trip. But I love hearing wizard tell it.

[Jesse Jarno]

Betty comes over to me at my end of the truck and she's like, high as shit and says, is this. Is it okay? I said, yeah, it's okay. We're rolling. We're in record. It sounds good. She said, could you listen. And I go over to. She had a little two track set up at the end of the truck. I had a multi track at the other end. And I listened to the mix and it sounds good. And I solo each track and everything's there. And I said, it's all great. She said, are you sure? And then she looks at me and says, are we in record? Oh, I said, betty, not only are we in record, but we're in playback. So what we're hearing has already happened. And that time sucked with her head. And she said, oh, God. And I said, betty, why don't you go inside? We had just changed tape. We had an hour and a half pack of tape per big reel.

[Rich Mahan]

And so Wiz was alone in the recording truck. You may have heard a version of this part in Amir Barlev's Long Strange Trip documentary, but here's a slightly more jammed out version.

[Jesse Jarno]

I'm sitting there, you know, like high as shit. But, you know, I spent time on the prankster buses. I could talk to cops and change the tires on the bus while I was completely high. It was required. And I'm feeling both great and at the same time, a little sad because it was the 22nd show, the last of the tour, and I had not been inside for one song even. And as a kid, you know, as a young hippie Deadhead, I had always wanted to see what was before the green curtain. And now I was there and I realized, you know, there's no going back to Kansas on this. This is where I am, this is where I'll be, and it's okay. And I felt great, you know, like, holy shit. I was like a hippie seven months ago. And now these guys trust me enough to just be alone in the truck and deal with recording the band. That felt great. Parrish calls me on the intercom and says, hey, Buckhead. What? Steve said one of the re twenties on the piano cabinets drooping or something like that. You know, it's just a mic clip. Can you please stick a coin in it and tighten it up? Fuck you, that's not my, you know, Steve. And I realized, holy shit, nobody's here. I can't get in touch with anybody. And they were jamming and, you know, the dynamics were pretty subdued. I'm running inside to fix this mic clip. I lock the truck. As I close the door, the truck is like vibrating at me. It's going to be okay. And I go inside, stick a coin in the mic clip, tighten it up, look at Parrish and sneer and I start to walk off stage and they drop into Morning Dew, also a tune, you know, I knew, which wasn't going to have outrageous dynamics. Had an hour, hour, 15 minutes, tape left on the machine. And I figured, what the fuck? I am staying right here for this tune. Walk me out in the morning do my honey Walk me out in the morning and upstage Centerish, there was a backstage monster monitor I walked past that was right behind Garcia's rig. Garcia looked at me and like, smiled a funny Jerry smile because, you know, like, what the fuck are you doing in here? And I hung out for the tune.

[Rich Mahan]

We'll let wizard watch morning dew, take four, used on Europe 72, while we steer briefly into the history of Morning Dew. Of course, Morning Dew began side B of the dead. Self titled 1967 debut sounds a little different. The song, originally about the world after nuclear fallout, was written and recorded by Canadian songwriter Bonnie Dobson in 1962 at the height of the Cold War. Released on her Live at Folk City lp.

[Jesse Jarno]

This is a song about Morning Dew and I hope that it never falls on us. Take me for a walk in the morning to my honey Take me for a walk in the morning sun My love.

[Rich Mahan]

On the Dead's album Morning Dew is credited to songwriters Bonnie Dobson and Tim Rose. We'll let music scholar Ken Hunt address this. Not only was he present for the Europe 72 version at the Lyceum, but he's now friends with Bonnie Dobson herself.

[Jesse Jarno]

There were all sorts of rights grabs, rights grabs going on. One of the rights grabs was Morning Jew. When Bonn wrote Morning Jew, the first person who really got to tackle it was Fred Neal. And Fred was honorable. He changed a word and didn't claim a third. Now when Tony Rose comes along, the bastard claims jumps it. And it took Bonnie years to extricate herself from that. He was very underhand, so I use that derogatory term for him advisedly.

[Rich Mahan]

The song was an instant hit among the folk revivalists, popularized largely by the 1964 Fred Neil and Vince Martin version, which is where Jerry Garcia picked it up.

[Jesse Jarno]

Walk me out in the morning do my honey Walk me out in the morning Do Today can't walk you out in the morning do my baby.

[Rich Mahan]

In the five years between the song's original release and the Dead's debut, it was performed by the west coast pop art experimental band Lulu, the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart Mythology, featuring Tony Iommi and Bill Ward and more.

[Jesse Jarno]

Thought I heard a favor.

[Rich Mahan]

That was the original vocal for Morning Dew at the Lyceum with just a touch of sourness in Garcia's voice fixed in the mix. Here's how it sounded on the final version of the song. If you listen closely, you can hear the ghost of the original vocal.

[Jesse Jarno]

Thought I heard a Believe it.

[Rich Mahan]

That was actually the very last piece of music recorded for Europe 72. Overdubbed on September 1st. But only the vocals on the first part of the song were redone after the first solo. They're live.

[Jesse Jarno]

Listen to his vocals wonderfully. Like, some of his vocals are throwaway. He was so off mic. But they did not overdub those away. And, you know, he was really there. He was totally committed to pure emotion playing down his arms. It just blew my mind.

[Rich Mahan]

Most of the earlier versions of Morning Dew by other artists end like this, with the refrain, now there's no more morning dew. Here's how Lulu does it. I love this version. There's one thing all of the earlier versions are missing, though.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the morning. Do my honey. I guess it doesn't matter.

[Rich Mahan]

As near as I can tell, the lyric, I guess it doesn't matter anyway. Doesn't appear in any recorded version of Morning Dew before the Grateful Dead debuted theirs in early 1967. If that's true, I think it's very likely it constitutes an original lyric by Jerry Garcia.

[Jesse Jarno]

I guess it does. No matter. I guess it doesn't matter anyway. And during Jerry's solo, you know, both for getting sustain and maybe for other reasons, he played his solo very close to his cabinet, facing the cabinet, for the most part, just to get feedback. Sustained looked up at him, and in mid solo, there were tears streaming at his face. Oh, man. And honestly, every time I think about it, I go back there. It's moment in time that I'll never forget.

[Rich Mahan]

Jeremy Poynton.

[Jesse Jarno]

The last night was an absolute and utter gem. And I can only think of Wiz talking about not being in the recording van and watching Jerry, tears pouring out down his eyes as he played Morning Dew. Jerry was not alone in the audience. I can tell you I was weeping my heart out. I still weep my heart out.

[Rich Mahan]

For Jerry, it was truly a rich sequence of music. Sing Me Back Home made it to the tour ending reels.

[Jesse Jarno]

Me back home before I die. There were some things that they gave three stars to, but that song was not. The song title was not actually included in Europe 72. So in the Sing Me Back Home. Sing Me Back Home was given three stars. But I think they wanted to put one big Jerry sung ballad on the album.

[Rich Mahan]

We've got them now. Watch out next week when we post the complete list of post tour mixes, but they certainly weren't done recording for Europe 72.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just like Mujahan, the band.

[Rich Mahan]

Debuted Ramble On Rose at the beginning of their Long Fall 71 tour. Here's a bit of the third ever version October 22, 1971 in Chicago from Dave's Picks 3 a few clicks faster, but there were virtually no differences either musically or lyrically between Ramble on Rose as it was introduced and Ramble On Rose as it was recorded in its early years. Garcia reserved the song for the second set, generally the heavier part of the show for when the band was properly warmed up. It certainly wasn't a ballad or anything remotely heavy, but perhaps something colorful to catch people at their most levitated. Here's what Robert Hunter told David Ganz about Ramble on Rose in 1977, published in David's great book Conversations with the Dead.

[Jesse Jarno]

Like Ramble on Rose is the closest to complete whimsy I've come up with. That was another one that I sat down and wrote numerous verses to. Came up with them, just that all tied around. Did you say your name was Ramblin Rose? Ramble on baby, settle down Easy G. It fit.

[Rich Mahan]

But your version of complete whimsy might differ slightly from Robert Hunter's notion of the same thing. A spew of images from the American subconscious linked by a flower, the rambling rose, perfect for winding through other plants or through the bars of a trellis or a pergola, a conceptual continuation, in some ways, of the American beauty that titled their 1970 album. But one of the Dead's most American songs, began with the invocation of a British character just like Jack the Ripper. The true identity of Jack the Ripper, a British serial killer who brutally preyed on sex workers in London's East End, remains unknown.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just like Mojo Hand, a term out.

[Rich Mahan]

Of blues culture and more specifically black culture with origins in West Africa, a mojo hand was a flannel bag carrying various spiritual tools. It turns up lots and blues and R and B and the Dead's own song Caution in the context of Ramble on Rose, the concept of the mojo hand almost sounds a bit anthropomorphized, as if it were a member of the song's dream.

[Jesse Jarno]

Blunt Rotation Just like Billy Sunday in a shotgun Red Tampa.

[Rich Mahan]

Billy Sunday played eight seasons in Major League Baseball, debuting with the Chicago Cubs in 1888 before becoming arguably the most prominent early 20th century Christian evangelist.

[Jesse Jarno]

I didn't want our boys to die drunkers that I fought and fight. I'm going to live long enough to see America so dry you'd have to prime a man before he can spit. And I'll fight the saloon from Hawaii up to Hoboken and I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot and I'll fight it as punch it as long as I have a fist I'll bun it as long as I have a head I'll bite it as long as I have a tooth and when I am old and fistless and footless and toothless I'll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to pernation and by dream.

[Rich Mahan]

Blunt rotation I mean a real dream where you end up hanging out with bizarre characters and can't quite escape.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just Like New York City One of.

[Rich Mahan]

My favorite little details about Ramble On Rose is that starting in the later 70s, nearly whenever and wherever the Dead played it, the line just like New York City, would likely get a big cheer. Further testament to the centrality of Manhattan to the Deadhead universe. Here it is on November 30, 1980, at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Now Dave's picks eight what's up Fox Denners Just Like New York City Nicholas Merriweather There's a cyclical feel to it. It almost feels like it borrows from.

[Jesse Jarno]

The same kind of cyclicality that you hear in Truckin first. But Truckin is serious and Truckin is autobiographical, whereas Ramble On Rose you get more of a sense of it's the same sense of sort of folky cyclicality. But now it's not really tethered to anything deeper and more ambitious. It really is just Hunter's classic sense of wordplay. It's got an element of whimsy to it, but it's also got an element of look at the catalog of images that he presents in there.

[Rich Mahan]

There's really deep, basic stuff.

[Jesse Jarno]

This is the way that Hunter sees American history. This is the way that Hunter sees the American song bag. It's got serious literary teeth in it.

[Rich Mahan]

If China Clap, Sunflower is nothing but pure whimsy.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ramble On Rose is kind of whimsy with a purpose.

[Rich Mahan]

The song is dance with illusions and will point you to dead.net deadcast, where we've linked to David Dodd's annotated ramble on Rose from his annotated Rachel Dead lyrics site, which further teases out connections between all of these. Along with Items from early 20th century popular culture, the song features proverbs, biblical references, and nursery rhymes Just like Jack.

[Jesse Jarno]

And Jill Papa told the jailer One go up and one go down do yourself a favor Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water Jack fell down and broke his crown.

[Rich Mahan]

And Jill came tumbling after.

[Jesse Jarno]

Never gonna end I'm gonna march you up and down the look on Candyland Take you to the leader of our band.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, that does kind of sound like a pretty weird dream. As musicologists might note, though, Ramble On Rose doesn't contain anything like actual ragtime. Besides the vague flirtations of Keith Godchau's piano. It does, however, have a few lyrical references to Irving Berlin's 1911 global hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band, which, like Ramble On Rose, doesn't contain much by way of actual ragtime either. Here hear heard sung in 1912 by Billy Murray.

[Jesse Jarno]

Who'S the leader of the band. And if you care to hear the Swanee river played in RA Ragtime, Come on in here, Come on in here Alexander's Ragtime Band There was a little.

[Rich Mahan]

More ragtime buried further down.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just like Crazy Otto.

[Rich Mahan]

Depending who you ask, it seems likely that Crazy Otto is a reference to the piano player and ragtime revivalist Johnny Maddox, who had a 1955 instrumental hit with the Crazy Otto Medley, a cover of a German artist named Schragerado. Which means that buried inside this very American piece of music is a triple nested invocation, an American taking their musical identity from a German pianist playing American ragtime. The next lyric probably doesn't need much explanation for many American listeners, just like Wolfman Jack. Wolfman Jack was one of North America's preeminent pirate DJs, beaming forth with his distinct gravelly voice from the so called Clear Channel XERB.

[Jesse Jarno]

XCRB moves up 9:30 in Los Angeles. This is 50,000watt Clear Channel XERB Radio, North America Central Studios, Los Angeles. 1090 on your dial. Hey baby. Welcome on in here to the Wolfman Jack Show. For a Tuesday night.

[Rich Mahan]

In 1973, Wolfman Jack would begin to cross over into the mainstream with a role in George Lucas's American Graffiti. But to British audiences in 1972, he was a mystery.

[Jesse Jarno]

There are lots of new songs that, you know, never heard and you know. So by the end of the four nights at Lyceum, we'd heard most of them a couple times and we're getting a bit more familiar. They were, I thought, intriguing and had, you know, fascinating lyrics. So as I said, it was the sort of Tennessee Jed Brown Eyed Women ramble on Rose that I started thinking. And they're sort of fascinating references because that then brings out. Get sort of Wolfman Jack. Who on earth is Wolfman Jack?

[Rich Mahan]

The illusions of these songs inspired Alex to start WhiteGum.com, the brilliant grateful Dead lyrics site. The verse ended with a reference that was likewise pretty.

[Jesse Jarno]

Sittin flush with a royal aces back to back.

[Rich Mahan]

Like many card games, poker had ancient origins. But the modern 52 card deck and rules can be traced to New Orleans, where it spread by way of the Mississippi River. It's since gone global thanks to satellite television and the Internet. But like the Robes, it was a key piece of Robert Hunter's imagery. The last bits of Ramble on Rose are more British.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just like Mary Shelley, just like Frankenstein. Make your chains and count your chains and try to walk the land.

[Rich Mahan]

Of course, Frankenstein was the Doctor and Mary Shelley, the author, co creators of the monster that lived rent free in Jerry Garcia's imagination and surely appeal to him here. The only Grateful Dead song to invoke Frankenstein itself. You may be familiar with Garcia's 1995 interview. The movie that changed my life about Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. It's worth seeking out in full the iconography.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Frankenstein's monster, Dracula and the Wolfman became figures of tremendous fascination for me.

[Rich Mahan]

I mean, overwhelming.

[Jesse Jarno]

I mean, it led me, for example, things like the discovery of German expressionist theater and film, you know what I mean? The James Whale original Frankenstein. So beautiful, beautiful lighting, beautiful sets, you know, the great angular stuff.

[Rich Mahan]

The Lyceum held a deep connection to the spooky as well.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ken Hunt in that song. It was just like Mary Shelley. That's the one that got me. The Lyceum was a theater that was run by the actor manager, which is a term in dramas. Henry Irving, who's very famous, and Henry Irving took over. I think it was 1878. Now he was the actor manager, so he. He would perform on stage. He was directing the management of theater and he had a business manager and his business manager was Bram Stoker. And I didn't know that, obviously, back in those days.

[Rich Mahan]

Listener Stephen Gardner chimed in with more detail.

[Jesse Jarno]

75 years before the Elyceum run, almost to the week, was the publication date of Bram Stoker's great horror novel, Dracula. Bram Stoker, the Irish writer, was better known in his lifetime as the manager of London's Lyceum Theatre. I think there was some strange draw that brought them there, involving monsters and darkness and Gothic horror to perform what was four days of phenomenal fine art.

[Rich Mahan]

But there it was take 11 of ramble on Rose recorded on the last night of the tour. There was some work to be done on the song back home. On July 7, Keith Gottschau overed up piano, which can be heard weaving through the mix here, along with an extra layer of backing vocals added July 12, wiping Garcia's original singing.

[Jesse Jarno]

Line. Take you to the leader of the My Bad.

[Rich Mahan]

Janet Fuhrman was tape operator for the Overdub sessions.

[Jesse Jarno]

I remember one funny little quirky thing. I think it's on Ramble on rose on Europe 72 album. There's one place where there's a beep and it was caused by, I think, a mic cable getting kicked out. And you know, it was just like a transient that happened from suddenly being disconnected. And we tried to get rid of that and just couldn't do it. And it's still there. You can hear it very plainly in the middle of the song beep. If you listen carefully for it, it's loud and clear. It was rambling Ro Ro.

[Rich Mahan]

I guess Wiz was back in the truck by then. Like pretty much all the other new material in Europe 72, Ramelan Rose was an instant standard in the Dead's repertoire over the late 70s. It gradually migrated into the first set, another unassuming Garcia Hunter original. But both songwriters clearly remained in love with it, never disappearing from the Dead's repertoire for too long and changing very little except for the sound of the musicians, their instruments, and how they chose to address the song's changes. Here's a version from March 29, 1990, recorded at NASA Coliseum and released on Wake up to find out. Hunter called it a favorite. There's something funny about that song, he would say. Now seems as good a time as any to repeat an Elvis Costello quote we heard at the beginning of the first episode this season.

[Jesse Jarno]

The 72 songs have a strange thing they they went. They refer to ragtime and they refer to a lot of things that seem to come out of the twenties. And even though the music is still played by electric rock and roll band, I feel that Those songs from 72 have something in common with the songs of the band from around the the first two albums. Particularly in that it sounds like music that was recorded in the 1888s, except it's all electric. It doesn't make. It's like weird time travel music. To me, that's more extraordinary, that ability to summon another time in relatively simple chords. They're not actually that complex without really sounding like a pastiche, but it's a mixture of the phrasing, the humility of the singing, the lyrical idiom, the lyrical references, and the just the just how unusual those songs are as a rhythm, this shuffle, this strange, the pulsing rhythm that a lot of them have, like Tennessee Jet and Rabble on Rose, both have this strange kind of rhythm that really isn't heard in very much other music.

[Rich Mahan]

Lots of Grateful Bed songs are easy standards for bands. The excellent website deaddisc.com maintains pages for each Dead original with deep sub discographies of recorded covers. It's a delight to explore, but not too many people have covered Ramble On Rose, perhaps because of that shuffle beat that Elvis articulated. So we'll close out the Ramble On Rose portion of the Dead cast with a bit of a relatively recent version by the great singer Winona Judd on her Winona EP from 2020, joined by aspiring Nashvillian Bob Weir, who's been tweaking one of the lyrics in recent years.

[Jesse Jarno]

Just like Marshall, she wrote Frankenstein. Clank her chains and counter change and try to walk the line I'm There.

[Rich Mahan]

Is still one More song to catch for Europe 72. In fact, the last song on side A of Europe 72 was the last song performed on the Europe 72 tour.

[Jesse Jarno]

I went down to the mountain I was drinking some wine Looked up in the heaven Lord I saw my design Written by Cross the heaven played in black and white Saturday night.

[Rich Mahan]

Take 19 of one more Saturday night was the keeper. Dead Heads got a big dose of the song that year. Released in the States on Bob Weir's Ace album later that spring in Europe, the studio version had been released in advance of the tour as the Ace out of a single and credited to the Grateful Dead featuring Bobby Ace. They played the bejesus out of it in Europe, often in an encore slot the day after the Europe 72 version at the tour Closer the Beat clubbed on Radio Bremen aired the results of the Dead session. You can hear all about that in our West Germany episode from a few weeks back. Hopefully we can go deeper another day, but One More Saturday Night has an unusual origin story that made it a pretty good tour closer in Europe especially. The song actually began as a collaboration between Weir and Robert Hunter and was one of the ones that led to their creative falling out over the course of 1971. Hunter gave Weir a dynamite in depot Bricks are pouring down Cost your reputation if they catch you hanging round Every choice you look at serves but to confuse Reckon you could call it the United States Blues oh baby One More Saturday Night uh huh One More Saturday Night from there, Weir made it his own. He asked Hunter if the resulting song could be titled US Blues. Hunter told him no and removed his name from the songwriting credits. A few years later, a new Dead song would appear with the winking lyric. You can call this song the United States Blues. Put a bookmark there. On Europe 72, one more Saturday night was one of the last tweaked up in the studio. Weir replaced his own vocals with two new tracks on August 1st, Jerry Garcia's 30th birthday. Garcia was perhaps hanging elsewhere. Garcia, Donna and Phil added a round of catchy response vocals on August 3, becoming part of the song's arrangement in modified form with Keith replacing his piano on August 8th. And that was pretty much it for the Europe 72 tour. One more Friday night in this case, and one more loadout for the quippies. Then across the ocean and another continent back to the toontown of Marin county with 73 hours of tape. What to do with it all.

[Jesse Jarno]

Thanks very much for tuning in, and huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including Sam Cutler, Steve Parish, Alan Trist, David Nelson, Ben Holler, Janet Furman.

[Rich Mahan]

John Morris, Courtney Pollock, Alan Arkush, Alex Allen, Andy Childs, Ken Hunt, Chris Jones, Graham Walker, Bill Giles, Derek Gilman, John.

[Jesse Jarno]

Keefer, Jim Smolin, Jeremy Pointon, Volkmar Rupp, David Lemieux, Graham Boone, Nicholas Merriweather and Stephen Gardner. Also special thanks to David Ganz and.

[Rich Mahan]

Blair Jackson for providing archival interview audio.

[Jesse Jarno]

Please don't forget to like and subscribe and leave us a review if you're so inclined.

[Rich Mahan]

Thank you very much.

[Jesse Jarno]

Next week we wrap up season five.

[Rich Mahan]

With one more episode, so don't unpack your bags just yet.

[Jesse Jarno]

See you then. 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.