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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with.
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Sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps.
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Of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale.
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Ale in your neck of the woods.
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Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware.
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Please drink responsibly.
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The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious Ladies and gents, Jet setters welcome back to season five of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thanks for coming along on this journey as we time travel across the pond to 50 years ago and tag along.
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With the Grateful Dead on their historic Europe 72 tour.
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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 years to the week after they happened. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour for this episode. In fact, as you know by now, we have been releasing a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during season five. So there's new content for you all the time. It's on social Media, it's on dead.net also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes. Everything we've done up to today. You can link from there to anywhere you like to listen. Did you attend any of the remaining shows on the Europe 72 tour? Because we'd love to hear your stories and you want to share what Europe 72 means to you. When did you get the record? Head over to stories.dead.net and record those stories about Europe 72 because we need your input. How about some Europe 72 music for your collection? July 29th brings Lyceum 1972 the Complete Recordings Limited Edition. It's a 24 LP box set with four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour. Available exclusively@dead.net and there's a newly remastered version of the original Europe 72 album. It's going to be available on CD, LP and digitally also on July 29th. Well, riding high on the success of the Bickershaw Festival in Wickham, England, we find ourselves riding high on a jet plane back to the continent this week.
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To play two shows in the Netherlands.
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May 10th will be at the Concert Gabo in Amsterdam and.
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And May 11th we play the Grot.
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Sal de Dolen in Rotterdam.
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Both venues are lovely. The area is famous for tulips and another beautiful crop. Get ready for a bit of legal.
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Fun with Jesse Jarno.
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On 8 May 1972, the day after the Grateful Dead performed at the Bickershaw Festival, the band and family flew from Manchester to Amsterdam. Donna Jean Godscho McKay.
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You know, most of the memories I have of the concerts kind of blend in together, but more insignificant things like being at the Holiday Inn in Amsterdam, which was close to the airport there, and seeing acres and acres of tulips is something that is really stuck in my mind forever. I just stared out the out of a hotel window at. All you could see was acres and acres of these beautiful tulips. And of course I had never seen anything like that before and it was just astounding to me. Oh, that's where the tulips come from. Everything was a revelation to me, literally everything.
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Alan Trist of Ice9 Publishing was serving as a liaison to the underground press.
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I would jump ahead to the next city or two on the tour to make press arrangements and so on. You know, being in Amsterdam was beautiful. I mean, those canals and walking around, everyone was tripping out on the streets, having a good time. The Dutch underground newspaper world and the underground 60s world, there was quite lively. And so there were people I remember, who joined the tour from different parts of Europe in different cities. It was a lot of in and out like that. Press people, I mean.
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But really, how much do you remember about your first visit to Amsterdam from the quippies, Steve Parish.
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And then Amsterdam was a lot of fun too, of course, being able to smoke pot and it be decriminalized to the point that it was there. The pot in Amsterdam at that time was so strong because it was African weed. Really strong. Africa is the mother of all weed, man. And so the purple weeds that we got there at that time were incredible. And after that, when we came back to Amsterdam, we noticed that they had dumbed the weed way down. I found out from a friend of mine that was because so many tourists were getting so stoned and driving their cars into the canals and falling plate glass windows and peeing on the street in front of people and all crazy shit. So they really did dumb it down.
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Dennis Wis Leonard from Blair Jackson's interview we've linked to Blair's books@dead.net deadcast we stayed in.
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Where the fuck did we stay? What was the name of the place? It was between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Just about in between Amsterdam and Rotterdam. And we trained in and out of.
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There, traveling either in or out of Leiden by train. One roving squad of bolos got into a spot of trouble, as Phil Lesh recalled to David Ganz and Marty Martinez in 1995. Thanks, David and Marty.
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Dan Healy was our sound man up until a couple years ago, and he got in an altercation of some kind with a Dutch citizen on a train and the police came looking for him. And we, and we, we stood, we formed ranks in front of Dan so that they couldn't get to Dan. We were going to make them go through us to get Dan. They weren't going to take our sound man away. And these three Dutch policemen, I mean, they looked like something out of the third man or some kind of World War II black and white movie. I came to Casablanca for the baths. There are no baths in Casablanca. Oh, I was misinformed. But eventually somebody came along who spoke Dutch and English and was able to convince us that all they wanted to do was talk to Dan right there at the hotel, and they weren't going to take him away.
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But mostly, vibes were pretty excellent. Ben Haller was part of the lighting crew.
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Amsterdam's wonderful, you know, just their whole, you know, I mean, they were leading the way on legalizing marijuana and stuff. So, you know, there was a lot of devotion to that there and an.
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Equivalent devotion to the munchies.
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We got to eat in some great places. Ristoffel is a dish in Amsterdam, and it's. The Dutch had held Indonesia. The Indonesians had the most wonderful meal in the world, which is a hundred little small dishes with all this different stuff in it, and then rice and you, you just, you know, pork and peanut sauce and just the most wonderful stuff.
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Of course, the dead weren't the only travelers discovering the wonders of Amsterdam. Even beyond its status as the cannabis capital of Europe, Amsterdam was a far northwestern terminus on what is now called the Hippy Trail, an overland route from Western Europe that passed through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and ending as far east as Nepal or even Bangkok. It was a circuit that kept a current of heady energy flowing between the continents, not to mention supplies of hash, LSD and rock LPs. In our episode last year titled Playing Dead Part 1, we discussed some of what happened at the other end of the hippie trail. The dead surely crossed paths with travelers throughout their Europe. 72 tour. But at least by our pretty random sampling of dead freaks, we've been able to find the shows in the Netherlands were a bold intersection point. One traveler that spring was Dixon Hall.
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I went off to first year university out here, you know, in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia. And a lot of us, you know, did. After first year, we said, let's take some time off, go and travel, right? So put together some money, work for six months. And then there was quite an established route. Get to London and to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a center for buying and selling buses. And it was all like somebody that we knew had been there a year before and had handed on a contact. Go and buy a Volkswagen van and off you go, right? So three of us did that. We were. We headed south. We met some guys from a man and a woman. Of course, they were only 18 or 19 in those days, 20 from Detroit who had their van. And we met them on the beach in Morocco. And they'd driven all the way to Afghanistan and back. And then we're down in Morocco. We went down to Morocco and kind of hung out on the beach in Agadir for six or seven weeks and, you know, smoking our brains out and surfing or whatever it was. Anyway, it was great. So we then traveled on for a while and at some point, as I said on that little thing, we picked up a rolling stone. My remembrance is it was in the Barcelona train station. You'd go looking for the newspaper, the Herald Tribune, right, Or whatever. The International Herald Tribune. There's a rolling stone. The Dead are playing in, you know, this tour of Europe. We had already decided that we were heading back to Amsterdam because we were going to sell the van and go in different directions. There were three of us. Somebody wanted to go north up to Scandinavia. I wanted to go to Greece and Italy. So we then we looked at each other and said, let's make sure we get there in time. We'll go and see a show. You know, we hadn't had any music for three months. Those are the, you know, pre cassette days, I guess, whatever. And we. I remember we took some circuitous route up through Switzerland, over to get to Heidelberg because we had a friend to go and see. And we did that. And we had like two days and we drove. Maybe we only had one day. I think we drove from Heidelberg to Rotterdam overnight to get the tickets for the Rotterdam show on the 11th, then went up to Amsterdam. You'd been four months, really without music other than, I guess it was a radio in the van, but who knows? What we were able to hear. And we'd been through a whole bunch of interesting experiences on various different places and run ins with police and locals in Morocco and Spain. We'd had a great time. But you missed something about your kind of normal North American teenage life, which was music. I mean, we used to go to concerts all the time, right? Because they were cheap and they were. It was. That was entertainment, right? There was always something going on. And so I think we just sort of looked at each other and went, wow, wouldn't that be fantastic? We were committed to going to both shows. Imagine that, two nights in a row. It's only separated by an hour or two of driving. You got your, you know, your turtle shell on your back with the van.
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Anyways, another head traveling around Europe was Peter Swift.
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I just turned 21 and I was bumming around on my own. Then I went to Europe and lived over in Switzerland for that spring with a lady who was going to college there. I must have found out when I was there that the Dead were playing, headed right towards Amsterdam, because I knew they were going to be there. And so I think I arrived maybe a day or two before the show. And I just. Going around as a very liberal city. I remember that there's a Central park that you just would see people hanging out very loose. The red. Of course, the red light district where you could walk down the streets and see the ladies in there. Showrooms. And that was. That was new. I got there a day or two before the show, ran into Steve Parish in some record store. And he was promoting the idea that maybe there was going to be a concert in the park that weekend. Which did not turn out to be. But he gave me one of these decals. Those old skull and rose decals. No, I was sitting in the record store where you could sit and listen to records. So I was listening to something and he. This big guy came in and I can just picture him there. And he just started talking to people. I had no idea who he was, but he had a stack of these decals. He was saying, you know, something about the Grateful Dead maybe doing a show, free concert in the park, perhaps.
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Obviously, the Dead didn't play a surprise show in Amsterdam in 72. That would have to wait another nine years. Please welcome to the Dead cast the band's Dutch promoter, Barry Visser.
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Of course, Woodstock didn't go unnoticed in Europe. So I went to see the movie and I thought, well, would it be a great idea to do something similar in Europe? Something here in the Netherlands? Then I started looking for a venue for a location, and I got nowhere. In the meantime, I got in contact with Frederick Bannister in England. He was staging a festival near Bath. And so I asked him, can we bring the American acts together to Europe? And he agreed. So Jefferson Airplane, Country Show, Santana, it's a beautiful day. And the birds, of course, the birds in Holland were magical. They were all contracted. But the problem I had, I had no venue, so I was playing blood poker. But in the end, a guy from Rotterdam knocked on my door. George Knapp. He was working on a similar idea in Rotterdam. We drove to Rotterdam. He showed me a venue on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Incredible woods, a lake, really fantastic. From that moment on, in six weeks we pulled the festival together. And it's. In the end, it became a real. It made history in Holland. Night is talking backwards and the Red Queen's off with her head. Remember what the dumb, I'll say. All right, feed ahead, be your head.
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According to some accounts, the Crawling in Pop Festival was the beginning of the cannabis revolution in the Netherlands.
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Obviously we lost money and we went bankrupt. But I continued working on Mojo. But that's the way it went. Also the same destiny. Yeah. Woodstock got a similar fate.
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I believe it was through the Crawling Ink Pop Festival that Barry Visser became acquainted with John Morris, who managed the Fillmore east for Bill Graham and went on to work at Woodstock.
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John, in one way or the other, he was involved in the Groningen festival in Rotterdam. He was there in the background as a sort of at a jump.
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By 1972, John Morris helped Sam Cutler lay the groundwork for the Dead's Europe 72 tour.
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John, at that time he was working from out London, I believe he had. He was programming the Rainbow Theater. I remember meetings on the Kings Road where his residence was with other promoters from Europe. And I believe one of the bands which was signed up for a European tour was the brace for that, I think Fritz Rau from Germany and I believe from the Scandinavian countries. It was Knut Torbjornsen and Norbert Ganson from France. I believe.
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We discussed this independent promoters alliance in the first episode of this season. The mission of Sam Cutler and John Morris was to book the band into the most righteous concert halls of Europe.
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Setgebau normally is for the classical and for Herbert von Carjan directing and Horowitz playing the piano. But somehow the directors didn't mind having popcorn there. So it was a perfect, great venue to put on concerts. We had lots of groups, Frank Zappa and the Models of Invention, Deep Purple, the Incredible String Band and a lot. It was a very nice period at Zeppelin as well.
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Peter Swift was ready for the show on the train.
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I was backpacking around. I must have had enough money to buy a train ticket. And this guy, he was probably based in Germany. We just started talking on the train and he's a young soldier and he was doing the same thing going to Amsterdam. Like I said, I can't remember seeing the Dead or not. He must have, but he had some lst. So we hung out for a day or two before and then both dropped before the concert. Went out to dinner and had to run out of the restaurant because we were laughing so much. I remember got to the show and I just was mesmerized. I was taken by the music in Amsterdam. It was very old. It's an old opera house, so it's very ornate.
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Dixon hall.
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This was a typical classical music hall with a great big pipe organ stuff up the back. Well renowned acoustics and what was it? I don't know, 2,500 people or something. It was pretty intimate gathering. Ornate organ type pipes behind the stage, I think. And the typical seats on the floor, aisle down the center. So we were able to go right up the center and stay right front and center. I had a hard run running from your window. And I was right in the front, in the center. Right. Right in front of. And it was a nice beautiful concert hall or Nate and was packed but group of Americans right in the center stage. And I was there and I was getting. We had. Like I wrote to you. I. We were asked to ask the audience not to smoke. And what happened everybody during that. I think the set was around 3 hours. Started smoking and it were no normal cigarettes, were no Marlboros. They were smoking pot and cannabis. And so the whole auditorium was one big blue curtain. I think in hindsight it's hilarious.
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So other crowds in Amsterdam, the absolute cannabis center of Europe in 1972, were more polite than Dead fans.
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They were more polite. Yes, yes. The graceful death, maybe. I don't know. That was one big eruption of smoke. But Amsterdam in that period was maybe sort of marriage in heaven between the audience and the band.
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One review in the evening paper, NRC Handelsblad was more impressed with the group's gear, especially their lighting. Mentioning bright hues and twilight mists. A multitude of vapors and smells emanating from a massive smoking crowd seemed entirely in style with the colorful spectacle. Big ups to Candace Brightman. Thanks to Dave Davis and to Dead sources for the translation, the timing was perfect.
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I was right up front and the whole trip was great. And they just blew me away in a way that had never been blown away before with music. I'd seen a lot of concerts in the late 60s in Philadelphia, in that area. Never the Dead. No one knew what the Dead were then. So this show just blew me away. In fact, in the book, one of the photos in that book, that in the whole suitcase package, there's a picture of a guy in this on the stage, laying on his head on the stage. I swear it's me. It's looking right up at Weir, you know, I'm pretty sure it's me. I'll say it's me. I will. Because I looked at a picture of me about two months later and I looked just. It looks the same. It's not that clear of a shot, but, you know, I can imagine. I mean, I was there and just buzzed out. I know you are Gonna miss me when I'm gone I know you right Gonna miss me when I'm gone Gonna miss your baby from rolling in your.
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Arms out in the equipment truck, the tape crew missed a few of the song titles on the tape reels. Jerry Garcia's handwriting is on the master. Adding them back in. This is dynamite. Someone else notes on one of the reels. But the single song from the two shows in Holland to make it to Europe 72, performed in the first set at Amsterdam, doesn't get any special recognition on the tape box. In fact, on the tape boxes for the tour, it had a slightly different name. That, of course, is Europe 72, side A, track two, he's gone, recorded midway through the first set in Amsterdam on 10 May 1972, and noted on this and other tape boxes as he's long gone. That was take 8 of the song, and actually only the 8th version ever played. Written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, it was the only original Dead song to debut during the Europe 72 Tour. Played for the first time during the second performance in Copenhagen and at every full tour stop since then. In 1991, Jerry Garcia recalled to Blair Jackson. My recollection is we wrote it just before we went to Europe in 1972. I remember working on it in a little apartment I had in San Francisco in March of 1972 as the dead were packing their gear. He's Gone almost qualified as a topical song. Like many Grateful Dead songs, He's Gone would go on to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. And they're not wrong but unlike many Grateful Dead songs, the lyrics to He's Gone were written about one person in specific. And they weren't written out of any sense of longing for that person's absence.
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Like a steam locomotive. He's gone. He's gone. Nothing's gonna bring him back. He's gone.
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In 1969, the band hired a new manager, a one time champion drummer and former music store owner named Lenny Hart. More lately, the Reverend Lenny Hart. Despite the fact that he was drummer Mickey Hart's father, he was a divisive figure. Europe 72 tour architect Sam Cutler told us this during our season on Working Man's.
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Jonathan Reester told me actually who left the Great for Dead because of Lenny, that Lenny actually showed up at a meeting with a Bible in his hand and introduced himself as the Reverend Lenny Hart and swore on the Bible that he wouldn't rip them off. They're artists, you know, it's easy to take advantage of artists.
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And on March 2, 1970, exactly as the Dead were in the middle of the sessions for the album that became Working Man's Dead, the Reverend Lenny Hart did just that. When he disappeared with the account ledgers. And after having ripped off the band for nearly $80,000, over a half million dollars calculated with inflation, the band hardly took it lying down, suing him. And when he disappeared, hiring a private investigator to track him down, he took.
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$350,000 off the band, counting the mezzanine, and ran away, right, with this girl from the bank. This was, you know, his big fantasy, right? And where did he run to? He was discovered by the police in a seedy motel on the beach in San Diego. Lucky didn't even make it to Mexico.
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Lenny Hart was ordered to pay back what was owed. And on March 2, 1972, two years to the day after he left, was sentenced to six months in jail. Though Robert Hunter held some lyrics close to his vest, the lyricist was more than happy to discuss the intent behind one of the Dead's deep singalongs.
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And.
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And that intent was I told you so. One of the song's key lyrics emphatically notes, I told you he was gonna rob you blind. Phrased only slightly differently. It goes like this.
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Like I told you what I said, steal your face right off your head.
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I warned them about him from the beginning, Robert Hunter told relics in 1981. That song just contained more warning. Heard that way, nearly every line of He's Gone points to the darker corners of the human psyche and what happens when bad turns to worse.
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Lost one round, but the prize wasn't anything back in the bag and more of the same. Same old man in a drainage God on a limb, you know better, but I know you.
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There are several lyric drafts in circulation. We've posted one as part of our daily dose on the Dead social media. One alternate lyric is hanging on a meat hook, Cool in my heels, Sign no papers and make no deals. The great Alex Allen has transcribed a bunch of the draft lyrics, and we've linked to them@dead.net deadcast a few shows after it debuted, Garcia and Hunter added the Bridge, first performed in Hamburg.
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Mountain train lost two rounds, but the prize was identity five.
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In 1991, Blair Jackson did a really great joint interview with Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, available in the book Going down the Road, A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, which you can find via a used book purveyor near you. Hunter told Blair, it's changed through the years. These songs are amorphous that way. What I intend is not what a thing is. In the end, Garcia added, we don't create the meanings of the tunes. Ultimately, they recreate themselves, each performance in the minds of everybody there. We'll revisit some of that momentarily, but first we're going to focus for a moment on He's Gone as the Dead recorded it in 1972, here's how it sounded when the Dead recorded it in Amsterdam from the Europe 72 the complete recordings box set. Here's how that same bit of music sounds in the final album, Foreign There are several tiny overdubs, not one, but two Keith God shows labeled on the reel as low piano and high Piano overdubbed on July 7th back at Alembic. To my ears, the high piano recalls Howard Wales piano parts on Broke Down Palace. It's fun to listen to the album and pick out the two Keiths the day before. Bob Weir's original rhythm guitar was erased and replaced, as were all of the vocals, though Jerry's lead remained on the master tape. Likewise, the chorus got a new voice that wasn't singing the song just yet on the European tour. Listen closely, that's Donna Jean Godsho in the vocal blend along with Garcia, Lesh and Weir, her first time heard on a proper Dead album. They did a lot of work on the vocals with Donna, Jerry and weir recording on July 7, with Donna and Jerry redoing their parts again on July 10, the same day that Lesh added his own vocals to the stack. We'll also be posting the track sheet for the He's Gone sessions on Dead Social media, if you'd like to check that out. They also did a tiny bit of songwriting in the studio. Here's how he's gone ended when they played it live on the Europe 72 tour. This is from the version after Amsterdam in Lille, France. Notice something missing? The big Sing along coda was added to the song when they got home. The vocals heard on the Complete Recordings box are overdubs. When they returned to the road in July, the Sing along outro became a fixture. Like the music itself, the meanings of Dead songs evolved, too. In March 1973, five months after He's Gone was released on Europe 72, Ron Pigpen McKernan died at the age of 27. A few weeks later, the Dead returned to the road to perform at the Nassau Coliseum, the first show since Pigpen's death. In Rolling Stone, Lenny Kaye reported they moved deliberately into He's Gone, Jerry leaning into the microphone in the evening's only apparent reference to the recent death of Ron Pigpen, McKernan reeling out the final chorus, and from then on, the meaning stuck with the song. Our friend Mr. Completely suggests that mournfulness can already be heard in the fall 72 versions before Pig's earthly departure. In its original intent, He's Gone was intended to provide closure after being burned, but its context at the heart of Dead shows with a big swaying and expanding outro somehow transformed it into something nostalgic. That was September 21, 1972, at the Philadelphia Spectrum. Now Dix picks 36. As you can tell, maybe that was leading into a sad, bluesy guitar solo. It was also the first version of He's Gone to lead into a transition that the band would continue to play on and off for the next decade and change. And so it was that He's Gone was sewn onto the front of the band's Ever Morphin Jam suite. Though there were some intense versions of the song, it wasn't until the later 70s that he's gone itself morphed from a song with a big guitar solo to a song with a big jam. Another thing that happened to He's Gone in this era is that one of its lyrics became the name of a 1976 live album, Steal youl Face, produced by Phil Lesh and owsley Stanley, from 1974 live recordings. The COVID art was the skull and lightning bolt logo designed by Owsley's buddy Bob Thomas in the early 70s, which many started calling the Steal youl Face logo. Just another weird folkloric turn. Naturally, Bear hated it. One version of He's Gone worth checking out comes from the end of this period. May 6, 1981, at NASA Coliseum on Long Island. Now Dix picks 13, which found both another meaning for the lyrics and one of its most widescreen jams.
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This one's for Bobby Sands.
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That was Bob Weir dedicating He's Gone to Bobby Sands, the Irish freedom fighter who just died on a hunger strike. The sing along was intense and the improv got to a place somewhere between the themes Deadheads call the Spanish jam and the Caution jam.
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Sam.
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Wild stuff, though there are great He's Gone jams in the 80s. It found space again nearly a decade later. This is from July 6, 1990, at Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky. Released on view from the Vault, where it heads towards the other one, or maybe truckin, but never exactly arrives. Thanks to Mr. Completely for the tip. But that was like several galaxies away from Amsterdam. 72 Unless you were on, say, some powerful psychedelic.
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Seeing the Dead on that, the power that they have when you're at that height, didn't intimidate me. I mean, I, I because they're, they're a powerful beast. When you're cranking on a psychedelic, you know, you could see there were mutual interests, you know, on my part and our part and theirs. And that's what really made it fun. And that was why you didn't have the sense that you were just going to see the Grateful Dead. You know, you were going to be part of an experience that was going to be unique.
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Tennessee Jed was called for the best of mixes at the end of the tour. We'll be posting the full lists later in the season and from nearly at the end of the show, Ramble on. Rose.
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Sa.
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In his book Living with the Dead, Rock Scully remembered, perhaps accurately, a rough loadout. Go to fold up cables after show and roll up yards of gold leaf with them. Sheets of gold pull right off the wall. Oops. Better than the 49 California Gold Rush. They freak. Their $250,000 gold flake job on the balcony is going to hell in a handbasket. It wasn't like we were trying to steal it or anything. We were just going to throw it out. None of us was paying attention. Ramrod gamely trying to stick it back up again. We have to pay to have it put on again. It was a real innocent mistake, dudes. Or as official dead Historian Dennis McNally described the night, the concert Gabao was a jewel of a theater where the cocaine was far too good. Dennis Whiz Leonard Via Our good buddy Blair Jackson.
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I had friends living in Amsterdam, and I, you know, it's wonderful. Like, Kathy went into town with Bonnie, and I went and caught up with a friend of mine from the Bronx. He's living on a canal in a barge. And Eddie immediately gave me a bicycle and said, come on, I'll show you Amsterdam. And also handed me a bottle full of orange Sunshine tablets. So I had those and, you know, Heard said, hmm. And we were on this anti blow campaign. So we ground. We kept a few and we ground them up and put it in the Blow staff. So it's like, okay, they can have blow, but they're gonna get high too.
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Keep a third eye on that blow stash. In the next few episodes, Dixon hall and his buddies found a place to crash.
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Like, we had a Volkswagen van, and we're parked, you know, out on the canal, sleeping there. And every once in a while, the police would knock on your door or your window, and you think, oh, this is it. And they'd say, hey, you know, we want you to move, because somebody's complained about the van being there. The place had, you know, hash smoke billowing out of it. Nobody cared.
- [43:43]
B
And I was off to Rotterdam by train for a show the next night, 11 May, with a band staying in between in Leiden. I've never been to Venlo, Holland, about two hours to the southeast of Rotterdam. But I'm pretty certain that we at the Deadcast can endure sounds as the headiest record shop in the area. We were happy to welcome to the Deadcast its proprietor, Hirk Driessen, who grew up in Venlo and when he was a teenager was part of a weekend expedition to Rotterdam that included the Dead show.
- [44:09]
A
We were only 16, 70 years old, but we had a youth club. People there were older than me, but we were three. Three or four times a week we were there. And the main thing they played there, the DJs, was music from the west coast of the United States. And we enjoyed that so much. And our hair was growing, going longer, and we wanted to be like them. And, well, that's how it started. They were playing the Dead and Moby Grape and It's a Beautiful Day and all this stuff. We were already Dead heads with our 16 or 17 in our hometown. There was a band called Static, and they did all this west coast stuff playing. They did very good. They played west coast pop art experimental band, Transparent Day and Moby grape stuff and St Stephen and other Grateful Dead songs. They did it so well. But as we had the opportunity to go to visit the real thing. Yeah, you can understand, it was for us, huge.
- [45:15]
B
Didn't your hometown have a group that covered the West Coast Pop experimental band? What do you mean? No, they recruited one of the slightly older heads.
- [45:24]
A
There was one guy in this youth club who wanted to go with us. He could drive a license and he had this bus. So we organized it and we went. Yeah, that was very exciting for us.
- [45:38]
B
For us youngsters, they had a big weekend planned. On Friday, they'd see the Dead. On Saturday, across town, they'd catch another show.
- [45:48]
A
We choose Rotterdam, I think because of the combination. Beach Boys, Grateful Dead. Because Dusseldorf is very close to where we live. One hour. But I think that the combination made it to go to Torotterdam. And we were really music lovers. We were 10 people in a small bus, Small Volkswagen bus, the iconic one, you know.
- [46:17]
B
Another Canadian who wound up seeing the Dead in Rotterdam was David Johns, who'd met up with some of his friends in Europe. They too had been bopping around the hippie trail, though Dave only caught the end of it.
- [46:28]
A
So we went to Berlin and then we went to Copenhagen. Saw the Doors in Copenhagen, but Jimmy Morrison had just died. It was their first tour since. Without him. And then you go to Amsterdam and if, you know, in those days you bought and sold vehicles in Amsterdam, on the street, in front of the American Express office, toured Europe and then sold it again. So they sold their van and went home. And I'm all by myself in Amsterdam. It's like the hippie capital of the world in those days. Nuttier than San Francisco, because people from all over the world. So I'm in some kind of hostel and I go, I better get out of here or I'll just hang here for months and miss Europe. So I think just took a train a little way away. And then I go, no, I gotta teach myself how to hitchhike. So I hitchhiked to Rotterdam, not very far away. And some I don't know where, but I saw a poster for the Grateful Dead.
- [47:32]
B
Too bad he didn't catch a ride with Dixon and his friends. The show was at the Grotesaal, the big room in De Doylen, a venue complex in Rotterdam. Promoter Barry Visser.
- [47:42]
A
It's a bit similar. You can compare it with the Royal Festival in London. The concept bar was a little bit more old fashioned. The whole building. Also from the outside, Rotterdam was a little more modern, but also 2000 capacity. In my diary says I bought a ticket, so maybe I went right to the concert hall. And since I only Needed one. I think it was a pretty full house. They said, well, there's one ticket left over, right in the middle of the second row. You want that? Do you? Yeah. So I got that ticket. Yeah. So then I get to the hall, this big, gorgeous European concert hall. And everybody's inside, but they're not letting people go into the actual hall itself. So I'm saying, I got a ticket, I got a ticket. But she couldn't speak English or something, so she finally got tired of just saying no and she said, just go. So she opened the door and I, you know, you walk down into the thing. I'm the only guy in there. And so I'm sitting in my seat, second row, because I think they're still doing warm up and checking my. Doing sound check or whatever. And I think they greeted me like, hey, how you doing? How do we sound? Or something. Pretty friendly guys. And I go, sounded great or something. So they played two songs, I think to me. And then I just remember them going, okay, open the doors. And then the people poured in, you know.
- [49:07]
B
One of those people was Peter Swift, who returned for a second night.
- [49:11]
A
I had so much fun at the Amsterdam show. I ended up, they played Rotterdam the next night. So I got down there and did the same thing there, right up front. And as there was always a little, at least those nights, and I think the other was in Europe, but the small group of Americans who would be right up front and the seats are all filled with, you know, whoever, whoever was living there. And it was a distinctly different group of people where the Americans up front and they're dancing and just getting off on the music. Europeans were not. They're getting off on the music and loving it. But they're very non responsive in terms of dancing. I take a little powder, take a little salt, put it in my shotgun. Rotterdam was very different. Rotterdam is a modern symphony hall. Very sleek and clean cut, not ornate. So it was a different experience that way. Dixon Hall, Rotterdam was much more sort of, I don't know, European modern. Right? Right. Probably cement kind of block outside and lots of woodwork inside. As soon as the lights went out, you just smell the dope everywhere. I wasn't into dope then, although the guy beside me offered me the joints going out. So I remember that and European, so maybe it was more subdued. But I think they were pretty excited sitting because it was a formal hall. So I don't remember anyone getting up or anything here.
- [50:59]
B
Dreisen and his friends had found their.
- [51:01]
A
People, I think, just like us, mainly Older, but they all had long hair and using drugs and I didn't, but all my friends did. So I was very, very clean. They were very respectful. They're enthusiastically respectful of the music. And they were. They clapped enthusiastically and continuously. And so both nights. And I got this sense from the day they just, they were working, they took it upon themselves to work as hard as they could to get people up to dance. You could just sense that that's what they were doing. And by the end of the night, there'd be sporadic jumping up of people just couldn't sit down anymore. But for the most part, and I think it was true in most of Europe, I think there were some people dancing in front of the stage, but Dutch people weren't like dancers at that time. So I don't know a few. We were dancing, that's for sure. We were sitting and listening and as we did at home with the records. And we sat there for four hours.
- [52:19]
B
Grateful they had archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [52:22]
A
The two shows complement each other well. They almost feel like one big long eight hour Dead show. They're back to back nights in different cities in very similar venues, which is to say they're different venues very much, but they're similar sized and they're both spectacularly beautiful. So I think the Rotterdam venue is more of a modern venue.
- [52:46]
B
There was one slight arrangement change in Rotterdam. Notice anything different about this version of good lovin'? There's B3 organ on it. Usually when Pigpen sang Goodlovin, he'd abandon his keyboard battle station and move center stage. So it was for the last four versions of Goodlovin on the Europe 72 tour that Jerry Garcia moved over to Oregon, at least for the duration of the song. Playing guitar for the jam and then moving back to Oregon at the end. They were also, sadly, the last four. With Pigpen.
- [53:35]
A
I was feeling so big if my family doctor on what I had, I said dream, can you tell me, Dr. Dad? And he said.
- [54:06]
B
Good Lovin'. In Rotterdam, another major piece of Europe 72 slid into place.
- [54:40]
A
I mean, they weren't playing Morning Dew on this tour until the end, until that show onward.
- [54:44]
B
It was a little rusty at first, but they had time to work it out. The show was educational.
- [54:50]
A
At one moment in this concert, I can't remember, it was when they played El Paso. And, well, now we know better because El Paso is a Grateful Dead standard. It's a song not from themselves, but it's a standard for that concept. But back then we weren't expecting cowboy songs like El Paso tomorrow A bullet may bite me Nothing's worse than this pain in my heart and at last year I am on the hill overlooking Il Passum I can see roses for you Americans, of course, Marty Robbins. For us it was a dance on.
- [55:39]
B
These are some long shows. Amsterdam was three and a half hours of stage time. Rotterdam three and three quarters in our Dead Cast Stories mailbox we found an anecdote about the Rotterdam show from sjoc.
- [55:52]
A
Here is once and forever my story about my beloved late great roommate Adrian Blockland at Blockland, who attended the Rotterdam grateful concert in May 11, 1972. First of all, Adrian was a guitar player himself, lead guitar in a local blues oriented hippie band in the university city of Leiden. Unfortunately, art died in 2010, so I'm going to tell his story. The name of the band he played in 4m m would stand for Maria Magic, Masculine and more in 1972, Adrian lived in the 4M hippie commune responsible for the distribution of illegal songbooks with the works of Bob Dylan, Crosby, Sells, Nash and more.
- [56:50]
B
Szaak shared the band's logo, drawn by the parent of Dutch underground comics, the late Peter Pontiac, drawn in a serious Rick Griffin west coast pop art experimental style. Odd Blockland sounds like he was invented for the Dead cast right in the thick of the Dutch Underground. I wish we could have spoken with him, though it does sound like he didn't fully reintegrate after his own personal acid testing. Here's a bit of 4m with Odd Blocklin on lead guitar from their unreleased 1973 Roppenberg session.
- [57:43]
A
Three years later I asked him about the concert. He was there with his wife and some friends and had a good time, especially during the Jerry Garcia compositions. I don't remember him mentioning Dark Star, but I'm sure that was his favorite piece of music at the time. What I do remember is the way of making clear how much impact the Dead show had on the audience, the Dutch audience in that time. I can very sharply remember his saying about the concert in Rotterdam. The Grateful Dead kept on playing, he told me, and he kept on playing. Very intensive. We were all impressed and in the second set of the show we were growing more and more curious about how long it would last. And we had also thought, we can't go back by train in time if they go on playing as they do now. So his final words in the story were the Grateful Dead kept on playing until everybody had left Going home. I know this is a way of saying that maybe the Dutch Audience was not very accustomed to such long concerts. So it was an un European experience. The Grateful Dead, life in Europe. And then he smiled at me and I was jealous that I hadn't been there in Rotterdam.
- [59:47]
B
This was perhaps more true than the rest of the tour for one very spacious reason. What song is it you want to hear? The Dead were hard at work on what would become the triple album Europe 72. They weren't looking for a new version of Darkstar, but they recorded takes filled with beautiful and quizzical improvisation, each constituting a mini session on its own. Many have since become standalone LPs. The Rotterdam version would only fit with some 70s ECM style mastering to fly us through the longest all time. Darkstar, 48 minutes, counting the spaced out drum break. Please welcome back our Dark Star correspondent, Graham Boone.
- [60:41]
A
Here you can hear Jerry with his beautiful starting riff twice, three times, and then extending it to land on a. And then now another idea going in the other direction, repeating a third time and going up and extending it, transposing to reach up and down.
- [61:13]
B
It was a slower Dark Star than usual on a tour full of luxurious dark stars.
- [61:18]
A
At the beginning of the tour, they were starting at like 145, 147, and then they would slip down to like 133, right?
- [61:25]
B
And then in this, in this one.
- [61:26]
A
They started at like 132 and then went down to 119. I mean, they really slowed it down.
- [61:32]
B
All kinds of stuff happens in the first part of this Dark Star here.
- [61:35]
A
Jerry's hitting low a really strongly grounding the music. Jerry's getting into riffing on low notes, overlapping with Phil's riffing.
- [61:53]
B
Playing completely different riffs.
- [61:55]
A
It's like a polymetric sound. And then Bob is also in there with his riffs, Bill behind everybody, holding it together. I mean, this is a wonderful moment where the band members have to know.
- [62:15]
B
How to not listen to each other.
- [62:16]
A
As well as listen to create this fantastic polyphony. Notice that Jerry's gotten into a duple rhythm here. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Before, he was doing triple up to high E. Realizing he's out of tune, he stops to tune his E string.
- [62:47]
B
It's a good life lesson. Even when you're out there, and I mean out there, it's still good to stop in tune, even if it means risking forking the timeline and falling through a wormhole. Eventually, Darkstar melts into a drum break. We're going to freeze frame here and use the occasion of the longest ever Dark Star to extend even further and do something that's surprisingly overdue. We're going to focus on Bill Kreutzman's drums and his drumming. A 2018 article in Modern Drummer by Keith Carney describes Kreuzmann's setup in 1972 as a Franken kit, a Lodwig kick drum, Gretsch Thoms and a snare drum by Rogers, Dinosonic cymbals by Ziljian. Thanks to Matt Grady for calling our attention to this article, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast Matt notes that the kit didn't last long gone by the summer, and suggests the intro to Mr. Charlie as a good way to demonstrate the Franken kit's rich sound. This is how it sounded in Rotterdam. Let's loop that for a moment now to talk about Billy Kreutzman's drumming in 1972. The great drummer and drum teacher John Kolpitz, sometimes known as Kid Millions from the wonderful band Oneida, sometimes as Man Forever Kidd, oversaw the drum space segment of the 2016 Day of the Dead tribute compilation.
- [65:13]
A
We know the dark star melody, right? It has a harmonic resolution built into ends on a note that that makes sense as a harmonic progression, right? And then once the band leaps off from that, Jerry and Phil do not resolve the harmonic progression at all. And what makes it exciting for the band and what Kreutzman's contribution is there is that he, in the same way he does not resolve the one of the pulses they would experiment with a floating one, which would just mean they would never resolve the one. Like a strong one is how we hear a groove. Oftentimes it's a kick drum lands on the 1. It's like 1 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. And so if you listen and you count the big cycle of the tune, you can hear that Kreuzmann never lands a kick on the one during at least like the first half of Dark Star, when it's like, not when they're still commenting on the original kind of tune and like have left, haven't like launched off into a crazier territory.
- [66:44]
B
The One Is where youe Think It Is was as close to literal band musical policy as existed in the Grateful Dead. Bill Kreutzman discusses the concept in his book deal, and here's Jerry Garcia describing it to David Ganz and Blair Jackson in one of their 1981 interviews published in the essential book Conversations with the Dead. Thanks immensely to David. You can find a link to the book@dead.net Deadcast in the Grateful Dead There's a certain philosophy about things like that, you know, rhythmically, it's like you always know. Like our policy is that you always know the one is always where you think it is. And it's kind of a Zen concept.
- [67:22]
A
But it really works well for us.
- [67:25]
B
It makes it possible to get into.
- [67:26]
A
A phrase where I can change into.
- [67:29]
B
Little phrase spurts that are like.
- [67:33]
A
Where I'm spitting out little groups of.
- [67:35]
B
Notes that are fives. Actually, they're attached fives.
- [67:39]
A
You'd write.
- [67:39]
B
Write them with a tie and a.
- [67:41]
A
Little five over it as though they were triplets.
- [67:43]
B
But they're five in the space of four, right? Or five in the space of two, which is more common for me, really. Five in the space of two.
- [67:54]
A
And then turn that into a new pulse where those fives become like a 16th note pulse.
- [68:01]
B
And then I'm inside of a hole, irregularly rotating tempo in relation to what the rest of the band is playing, where they're playing the original common time. What that does is that it produces this ambiguity. But all I have to do is make a statement that says end of paragraph and one.
- [68:21]
A
They'll all know where it is. They'll all know where it is. Sure.
- [68:24]
B
And we all have that kind of privilege. I mean, it's like it's partly something we've allowed each other and partly something that we've gained the confidence to be.
- [68:33]
A
Able to do just by spending a lot of time playing.
- [68:37]
B
You know, when we worked in. When we started working on the 11 back in the late 60s, we'd spend.
- [68:47]
A
Hours and hours and hours every day just playing groups of 11 and then.
- [68:54]
B
114 time, you know, to get used to that phrase.
- [68:55]
A
And then we.
- [68:56]
B
We started working out things in seven, and then from seven we started working.
- [68:59]
A
Out things that were like two bars of seven, three bars of seven, four.
- [69:03]
B
Bars of seven, five bars of seven.
- [69:05]
A
And patterns and phrases and licks that.
- [69:07]
B
Were those lengths and play them over and over and over again. And though the Dead's less jammy songs might seem more fixed, they also provide a place for Kreuzmann's commentary to help the music reveal its deepest identity.
- [69:51]
A
It felt like he was like a really, really deep listener because it did feel like rhythmically, Jerry and Phil sometimes assert different, like, rhythmic runs. I think it happens here in the Dark Star. Maybe not as much as it does in some of the other, like, more heavy and straight ahead tunes, but he is maybe parsing Jerry's and Phil's rhythmic vocabulary. He will. He kind of chops it up and Comments on it in a way that helps maybe the listener, like hear the phrases.
- [70:42]
B
Thanks, kid. We've linked to the mini projects of John Colpitz@Dead.netDeadcast Also, if you're looking for an awesome remote drum teacher. Back into the Dark Star zone and.
- [70:54]
A
You can hear how they're listening to each other. Phil gets into this funky riff and then Jerry comes in. So we're in the key of A. Sherry's got a really muted tone. Keith and Bob are out completely. This is a great place in the music where they can really listen to each other, each other and take off of each other. And it's really audible.
- [71:42]
B
Throughout the Europe 72 versions of Dark Star and the other one the band are constantly disassembling into quartets, trios, duos and actual solos. One fun game is to do an inventory of players when the band are in the deepest places and pick out who's present. And around 23 minutes into the Rotterdam Dark Star, they finally wrap up the first jam. Dave Johns wrote in his journal about the Dead show, but didn't actually spend much time on the show itself. He had other concerns that night.
- [72:14]
A
Concluding this jam with washes from Bill and Jerry repeating a riff and. And then coming down and hitting that. That great Dark Star riff. Everybody locks in really slow. Makes for a really interesting verse. Listen to Jerry sing this verse. All this room to add extra flourishes. Turn the slow pace opens up all kinds of nuances. You can hear each player so clearly.
- [73:47]
B
The longest ever. Dark Star gets to one of those places where local physics start to collapse.
- [73:54]
A
Super roiling sounds. Extreme low, extreme high, extreme dissonance. Bob going higher and higher up on the neck. Keith going higher on the keyboard. Louder and more intense. Jerry into complete screeching and growling on the guitar. Monster dyads on the bass. It's.
- [75:03]
B
Giant sounds.
- [75:07]
A
It's like the age of the Monsters.
- [75:17]
B
You can imagine the part where the Dead vanquish the monsters. But then the other Jerry pops back through the tuning wormhole.
- [75:25]
A
Jerry takes a moment to tune his E string, which seems to be going out repeatedly. Bob is beautifully playing a major, supported a little bit by Phil.
- [75:48]
B
Phil just played the riff from Birdsong, not in the Dead's repertoire. In 72. He did it a moment before Graham started talking as well. And slightly later, Garcia picks up on the arpeggio that old time tapers called the Sputnik riff. For reasons lost to history. Though if you know the true origins of the naming of the Sputnik riff, hit us up@stories.dead.net slow freeform storytelling.
- [76:23]
A
Phil and Jerry with Pig in the back settling into a. An almost a baroque polyphony. And there. Chair gets into that arpeggio lick that he likes to do a little bit on. E minor. Very quiet. Harmonizes with Pigpen. It's beautiful. And then Phil. Wow. It's like a baroque. A moment of baroque music. Sounds like an E major chord resolving to a almost. And. And there we are on a nice ending from Jerry. And then here we go into Sugar Magnolia. Bob picking it up very sweetly.
- [77:45]
B
This is not aggressive or exuberant.
- [77:47]
A
It's just heartfelt and in the pocket. It was monumental in my life in the sense of the next 10 years. I just spent as much time as I could just getting into it. And their concerts were unlike any other I'd seen. I'd seen a lot. I saw a lot of groups before them. And these guys were. You could see they were interested in having fun with the audience and working with the audience. You know, that was the vibe. It wasn't. Here we are giving you, giving you a show. They were here to. Let's see what we get going. It's having some fun. And that just emanated out of the.
- [78:26]
B
The Rotterdam show turned out to be the final performance of an old standby in the band's repertoire. Measured in some ways. Caution, do not stop. On the tracks was the Grateful Dad's all the Standby, their first original song, a slight reworking of Mystic Eyes by them. Here's how it sounded in 1965 at the band's first studio session now on Birth of the Dead. And it was the only original tune from the Warlocks era to survive into the band's albums. Appearing on the second side of Anthem of the sun expanded to two drummers.
- [79:43]
A
I went down to see a different woman Just one old day.
- [79:59]
B
There were a lot of missing tapes in the early years of the Dead, so it's hard to tell how rare Caution really was. But not very rare. Though it got sparser airings in 1970, it only really disappeared from the band's repertoire between spring 1971 and spring 1972. And that was probably in part because Pigpen was homesick for some of that time, and in part because he had a whole bunch of new songs when he came back in Europe. It was very much on the table.
- [80:34]
A
One all day I went down and see a gypsum one day Yes, I did.
- [80:48]
B
But Europe 72 is the end of the line for Pigpen as a touring musician, a place he probably shouldn't have been. And yet, 50 years later, inconceivable to imagine without him.
- [80:58]
A
The music sounds great, you know, and even, like, Pigpen was sick, you know, and he would get up and do his thing so beautifully every night, man. And that was, like, unbelievable to see how he'd be green around the gills and so ill, and then he'd jump out there in that spotlight and give those people their money's worth, really. Here. Grateful Dead Blues Liberated.
- [81:21]
B
Pigpen was not at full strength on the Europe tour. Sam Cutler.
- [81:25]
A
You know, it was difficult for Pig Pen, who wasn't very well on the tour, to say the least. So it was hard for him, you know, driving on buses for long, long periods of time. I think it was hard for Jerry.
- [81:36]
B
Janet Furman of Alembic hung out with him a few times during the tour. Both early risers.
- [81:41]
A
A couple of times I had breakfast with him in the hotels, just the two of us. He had such a gruff exterior, but he really, in person, when you sat down and talked to him, he was just a sweetheart. And I just. I found that kind of surprising because his public Persona is so different from the way he was in real life. And I really have very fond memories of that little bit of time that I was with him.
- [82:11]
B
Donna Jean GodShow McKay.
- [82:12]
A
I never did get to be in the band with Pigpen when he was the Pigpen, you know, the full version of himself. And so what I got to experience was the latter version, which he was so sick. But he was just such a presence and such a sweet man and just an amazing soul. And to this day, Pigpen. I'm a huge Pigpen fan. Just huge. And I just think he was amazing. And he was. He was what I would call the first. What would you call it, Freestyle singer. Like, when you talk about rap or that today's music, there's freestyle and kind of verging into rap and all of that. And Pigpen was the first guy, at least in rock and roll, and as far as I know, that had that freestyle thing like turn on your love light. He was one of the innovators of that, really, way before his time. When you're doing something that is part of your life, that is who you are, and you get on that stage and it just. It comes to the forefront forcibly. It just comes out. And I watched Pig Tim do that because he was really sick. But his. His vocals and his ad libs and his freestyling on that Europe tour were just spot on, just spot on. He was amazing, expeditionary Forces on a whole day crew. Time to lose.
- [84:21]
B
This season, we've been very thankful to share a bunch of Pigpen's letters from home written to his parents. The letters in the collection stop after the Paris shows in early May, though it doesn't mean he wasn't writing home to his parents or his longtime girlfriend, Van. But at this point in the tour, Pig was definitely having a harder time. He'd been having trouble sleeping even on the quieter bolo bus, and tried a few different methods, riding with Joe Winslow in the equipment truck, even splurging for a plane ticket to fly from city to city. At one point near the end of the tour.
- [85:20]
A
They just play and they just jam and they just not fool around, but you know they're playing off each other. That's just kind of delightful. You just kind of sit back. But remember, it was long. It was four hours. They did take a 20 minute break, but it was four hours. So at some point, you know, you're kind of bored a little bit and then you pull back in when they play something that you like more.
- [85:43]
B
Dave Johns wasn't going anywhere. Neither were Hirt Dreisen and his friends.
- [85:47]
A
We stayed in Rotterdam. So no, I don't remember that. But I can imagine people who were coming by train or they had to leave to get the last train or something. That's maybe, maybe that was maybe the case, but I'm not sure.
- [86:02]
B
It was a life changing weekend. In the coming months and years, Hirt visited the record store more and more.
- [86:08]
A
And soon enough I was visiting the record store weekly and bought lots of vinyl and suddenly they asked me if I could come and work over there. So yeah, from then on. I do this now for 45 years working in a record shop, 10 years at the store from someone else and then 35 years at our own store. So it was growing huge. My taste was getting broader. It was unbelievable. The crowd, rock was getting in and, well, blues stuff, jazz stuff. And I think the Grateful Dead was one of the reasons why I got into all these kinds of music.
- [86:59]
B
Now he owns the record store. Check out sounds if you're through Venlo Holland. Dave Johns wrote in his journal about the Dead show, but didn't actually spend much time on the show itself. He had other concerns that night.
- [87:11]
A
Since I was going to the concert, I couldn't stay at the hospital because the curfew was 11 o'. Clock. I checked my bag at the station and put my sleeping bag in a locker. The station was closed at 1am so I hoped the concert would be over by then. I could get my bag and sleep in a park somewhere. The concert didn't start till 9pm the dead were really good and played until 2am with only one 20 minute break. The station was locked when I got there, so I had nowhere to sleep and no bag.
- [87:42]
B
It was a rough night for Dave.
- [87:43]
A
And it was just blowing cold. There was another. Somehow he was with a guy. I ran into a guy in the same predicament. So we were just looking for shelter and we went. There were sidewalk cafes. We just tried to sit on a chair but that didn't work. So we actually stole one of their chairs. And you know there's underground walkways under streets and just huddled down there. But it was like a wind tunnel. So I said, I can't do this, I'm out of here. So I just wandered around and then finally just went into a phone booth near the station and it started pouring and I just huddled in there. Station opened up, said my diary at 4:30. I thought it was later and then got my sleeping bag and it says I just lay on the cement floor and put it over top of me and went to sleep.
- [88:36]
B
Yikes, man. Dixon hall and his friends hit the hippie trail back to Amsterdam to catch some more music.
- [88:42]
A
We went back a few days later and saw Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne in exactly the same place. And the Joni Mitchell one, I know we were like in the fourth or the fifth row, you know, stage right there at a grand piano. So that was on the 14th of May, because that was my birthday or is still my birthday. So that was my 20th birthday presentation at the end of the Joni Mitchell show. There's the encore and there's the clapping. And she picked up the roses in a vase on top of this grand piano and threw them out. And I put my hand up and it landed right in my fingers. So There was my 20th birthday present from Joni Mitchell and we sold the van and then I went off and bought a ticket on one of these sort of magic bus things. And there were people that had these large buses who would run intercity roots aimed at the traveling North American and presumably others youth culture. And you'd get on the bus and meet a bunch of guys from who knows where all around the States or whatever and everybody was off doing their thing. I went down to Rome and then from Rome did Florence and whatever and then took the boat across to Greece and spent some time in Athens and out in the islands and then back to Amsterdam and back home. In July or something. So it was a sort of a six month trip and opened your mind, opened your eyes. The dad were a big part of it.
- [90:05]
B
The hippie trail was long and wide and would last another half decade or so, ending more or less. When the Iranian revolution In the late 70s cut off the eastward path in 1972, things were still wide open, lingering in Rotterdam. We're going to zoom outwards from the Dead for a moment. The day after the Dead played in Rotterdam, 12 May, as Dave Johns headed to a hostel and dried off here, Dryson and his friends continued to have their eyes opened. First they went to the movies.
- [90:34]
A
The day after we had Clockwork Orange. I think that was spontaneous. I'm not sure it was shocking. There was me, that is Alex and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim. And we sat in the Corova Milk Bar trying to make up our razoo docs what to do with the evening. Our hair was growing and we wanted to be like those hippies and those peace and love. And then came this movie. It was so brutal. And then, yeah, it was great, but also shocking for youngsters like us. The Korova Milk Bar sold milk plus, milk plus Velocet or Synthamesque or Drenchrum, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra violence.
- [91:39]
B
And that day, as Hirt and his friends had their minds blown by A Clockwork Orange and the Dead began an overnight trek on the Bozo and Bolo buses, another iconic California band arrived in Rotterdam on a parallel Europe 72 tour that would also result in an album. Hirt and his friends were there to see it too. Sorry about the crappy audience tape. That was the Beach Boys. The ahoy in Rotterdam, 12 May 1972, doing the title track of their severely underrated 1967 album Wild Honey.
- [92:24]
A
The venue was bigger and it was sold out. And I think it was 50, 50 and people like us who came for the Dead and the Beach Boys and 1/2, I think came for the hit singles from the 60s because Beach Boys were far beyond that period with all these great albums they made and Smile, Smiley Smile and then bad sounds. So I think it was a mixture of people. People go for the hit singles from yesteryear and album lovers, my friends did, because they always were smoking. But I can't remember seeing people smoking at the Beach Boys concert. I'm not sure. I think it was more happening at the dad show.
- [93:17]
B
The Beach Boys were a week into a Europe 72 tour that was perhaps even more ambitious than the Deads, and the contrasts are pretty fascinating, even if the resulting Beach Boys LP wasn't quite as memorable. Like the Dead, the Beach Boys brought their families and tech crew with them to Europe. Unlike the Dead, the Beach Boys actually settled in the Netherlands for the duration, just outside Amsterdam, using it as a home base for a three month stay while they toured the continent. They took over a recording studio and fitted it for their needs mostly. Brian Wilson was somewhat inoperable as a Beach Boy by then, but joined them there, sort of. As it turns out, they weren't quite as prepared for European electricity as the Alembic team and needed to hire local electricians to sort out the issue. The Beach Boys album Holland, released in early 1973, could be the topic of its own podcast. It did yield the hit single Sail On Sailor, but not one actually written or recorded in Holland. Here's a bit of one of Brian Wilson's contributions to the sessions in Holland, part of the Mount Vernon Fairways Suite.
- [94:27]
A
Hope I see you again Pied Piper I'd better get back again Hope I.
- [94:37]
B
See you again the deeper connection between the Dead and the Beach Boys European sojourns is at its heart an existential question, but manifesting physically for both bands. Where to now read in the most symbolic way, both the Dead and the Beach Boys are equal products of westward migration and expansion, with both bands coding their own version of the United States somewhere deep in their music. Both bands had conquered the States in their own ways, by air in the case of the Beach Boys, years of radio hits, or by land in the case of the Dead's endless touring. The Dead were still on the ascent, the Beach Boys less so. Holland would be their last album following the progressive course set by Petsounds, and before they reinvented themselves, were the best selling greatest hits. The show they saw was one of the last where it might be common to find a 5050 split between those there to hear the progressive new Beach Boys and those to hear the surf rockin old Beach Boys. In some ways the hit song from Holland was a different attempt to split the difference. On that where to now question.
- [95:39]
A
I sail in ocean, unsettled ocean, through restful waters and deep commotion, often frightened, unenlightened.
- [96:03]
B
In the 70s, perhaps, in direct proximity to rock musicians ability to purchase yachts, boating and life beyond the surfline, beyond even the Grateful Dead's mythical West. Hippydom wasn't over, certainly, and punk was still a few years away, while the Dead were in Europe, West Germany more specifically, one of the performers from the original Glastonbury Fair Festival found their own new path, slugging it out in the concert halls of England. At the same time the Dead were in Europe and releasing this as a brand new single backed by the new band the Spiders from Mars.
- [96:34]
A
There's a star the sky he'd like.
- [96:40]
B
To come and meet us but he.
- [96:42]
A
Thinks he'd blow our minds There's a star man waiting in the sky he tells us not to blow it Cuz he knows it's all worth While he's home Let the children use it Let the children use it.
- [97:00]
B
That was David Bowie's Starman, which descended to earth in the last days of April 1972. The dead would eventually come up with their own answers about what to do next. Topics for Future Days in 1972, the counterculture was approaching a turning point, at least on the surface. It had become the dominant popular culture of the English speaking parts of the world, which had been long haired and brightly colored for nearly a half decade. Now LSD was at a worldwide global peak, which would begin to change after the bust of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love later that summer. A story I detail in my book, A Biography of Psychedelic America, now available as an audiobook from Hachette, wherever you get your audiobooks. And In May of 1972, just after Dave Johns caught the Dead in Rotterdam, he discovered another way that underground music was literally becoming part of the dominant global culture. Dave held up his journal for us.
- [97:54]
A
And a sticker from the second British rock meeting. There was a huge rock festival later in Germany that I went to hundred thousand people.
- [98:03]
B
The second British Rock meeting was held on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of May in Germersheim, West Germany. With a huge lineup headlined by Pink Floyd, the Faces and the Post, Jim Morrison Doors, it was surely the only rock festival in history to include both Amon Deuel 2 and Billy Joel. A number of Bickershaw survivors were advertised as well, including the Kinks, Incredible String Band, Brinsley schwartz, Country Joe McDonald and the new Riders of the Purple Sage. But just because a band was on the poster doesn't mean they played.
- [98:35]
A
A lot of the bands didn't show up. And the writers of the Purple Sage, weren't they like an offshoot of the Dead or something? They never showed up. Like there was bands they ever advertised never showed up at this one, but the Doors did. And Pink Floyd and Humble Pie. Like you know how the rock festival they get behind schedule. So all the great bands are coming on at midnight, one in the morning. Pink Floyd.
- [98:55]
B
I fell asleep when he crashed. Dave Johns discovered a peculiar feature of the second British rock meeting.
- [99:02]
A
So. And Germany was full of American forces bases because Vietnam War was on. So there was maybe 20,000American soldiers there. And they just brought tons of gear and set up lean tos and tents. And they just said to people, come on, just sleep, you know, get shelter. So I just kind of passed out at midnight and Pink Floyd's playing. And you could hear the ambulances all night of them picking up the guys who freaked out on lsd.
- [99:31]
B
We spoke with Eric Alden in our West Germany episode. He was one of the servicemen who ended up at the British rock meeting.
- [99:37]
A
I went to a big outdoor concert. It was in May. It was right after the Dead concert because we were all hoping the Dead would show up and play. But it was like two days and 20 bands. It was just like sort of Woodstock knockoff on an island in the Rhine. And I remember the closing band was Pink Floyd. It was a super good show. There was a lot of good music. It was very reasonably priced. It was a great experience. I mean, I'm not saying being in the army or being drafted is a great experience, because that kind of sucked. But the opportunity to have that in my life was wonderful.
- [100:15]
B
The Dead did actually have some off time during those days, which we'll explore next episode. But dropping in on the British rock meeting on an island in the Rhine wasn't their scene. Some sources say that the second British rock meeting was actually financed by the American military, though that might just be a rumor. The military certainly had an enormous presence there, both in the audience and the festival infrastructure, and representative of the way that rock music had been virtually integrated into the United States military life.
- [100:43]
A
People there in the army listened to lots of music. I mean, that's what enlisted men in the army then spent all their money on big stereos and music and substances. We pretty much owned a lot of vinyl. The barracks rooms that I was in were all like eight guys or something in a room. And people would pool their stereos together and power up real big time and their album collections. And so you would have a heck of a lot of good current music available at all times. So we would simply sit around listening to music constantly in the evenings.
- [101:30]
B
In 1972, the idea of the US military sponsoring a rock festival in Germany wasn't a totally illogical thing to have perhaps happened. Historian Michael Kramer is the author of the excellent book The Republic of Music and citizenship in the 60s, counterculture in.
- [101:45]
A
The early 1970s and right up to our own time. The US exerts power around the world by having military installations across the globe. But there's this irony, which is that in maintaining military installations across the globe and American military personnel at them, the US military has to maintain the morale of those troops. And so they do it in the way that they've done it since, you know, World War I, which is to try to import a taste of home.
- [102:20]
B
While Eric Alden and many of his fellow soldiers were draftees, they would be among the last. With the final draft card sent out in December 1972, the Grateful Dead resembled a rock band. But what it meant to even resemble a rock band was changing.
- [102:34]
A
The US Armed forces are in the process of abandoning the draft and switching to the idea of an all volunteer force. So they're desperate to try to maintain morale and to attract a fighting force by this time. So there's this opening up, happening below the surface of US imperialism that I don't know. I think of the Dead coming to Europe as being kind of happening within that. That moment.
- [103:03]
B
It wasn't just the military that was trying to get down with the heads. A few days after the Dead departed Europe in early June was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the world's first environmental conference. Close relatives of the Dead were involved. One of the organizers was former Mary prankster Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth catalog, as well as Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm. It was a bit chaotic logistically and politically. And there was an even more radical counter festival too, the Life Forum. Between the two, there were performances by local psych flag bearers, Trodgrass Oxtenar, as well as the American psych forerunners, the Holy Modal Rounders. In later years, it was erroneously asserted that the Dead themselves played. They didn't, of course, at least not on this timeline. That was Trodgrass Oxtenar's wild version of satisfaction from their 1970 debut. Man, I wish they actually had crossed paths with the Dead. Though Sam Cutler and John Morris had to build the Dead their own touring circuit in Europe with the helps of Barry Visser and others. American imperialism had blazed other trails across Europe. The roots of the American GIs, the roots of the footloose American backpackers with Eurail passes the roots of ideas across the hippie trail. But what were the Grateful Dead bringing.
- [104:45]
A
To Europe in 72? Things are starting to move into the past. From the height of the late 60s but they're not too far in the past. And so from the research I did on rock music in the US and around the world in that time period, what I noticed was that for young people around the world, experience of the Woodstock album and film, maybe knowing someone in the States or knowing a GI from the US who was based. Or someone from the armed forces who was based somewhere around the US Military installations, maybe reading Abbie Hoffman's book Woodstock Nation, but most of all, hearing the album and seeing the film and maybe reading about it in a magazine or newspaper. This idea of Woodstock Nation was really appealing and intriguing to a lot of young people around the world because it gave them a way to connect up their own experiences of joining the modern global society with whatever was going on where they lived. So the idea of a Woodstock transnational is just to be more aware that Woodstock Nation wasn't just an American phenomenon. It wasn't just an Anglo American phenomenon. It was starting to happen around the world in really different contexts. So in. In a place like Brazil, you could say something like the Tropicalia movement, which already was going on even before Woodstock, kind of connected up to this idea of joining a youth, a global youth counterculture. In a place like Czechoslovakia, even behind the Iron Curtain, you get someone like a band like the Plastic People of the Universe, who are really not political. They just are interested in experimental music and art. But they get persecuted by the Soviet authorities, the Czechoslovakian Communist authorities. And so their cause gets taken up eventually by artists who become politicized, like Vaslav Havel and others. So you go to a place like a Muslim country like Mali, where in Bamako, someone like Malik Sidibe, who would become a film critic and professor of film studies as a kid, he remembers wanting to organize a Woodstock in Bamako. And all the teen clubs that kids belong to around the city were named after various soul bands and rock bands. And then in Vietnam itself, the Vietnam War is still going on into the early 70s. And you get young kids in Saigon and elsewhere organizing rock bands, loving the music of the Beatles and finding that they can make a living playing for American armed forces personnel who are still stationed even in the middle of the Vietnam War. And so you get bands like the CBC Band that kind of create a little. I mean, they literally play at a club called the Fillmore Far East. So there's a kind of Woodstock transnational that emerges by the early 70s in which rock music is carrying forward this kind of idea of a global youth culture that anyone could join. It's not joining America. Exactly. It's more joining this thing that's coming from American youth.
- [108:21]
B
When the Grateful Dead went to Europe, in some ways, it wasn't to play for European audiences, but to play for the audiences of what Michael calls the Woodstock transnational, the residents of the global counterculture. The Dead would come to symbolize that even if they resisted being associated with politics, they never resisted being associated with the forces of peaceful social change. In his 2006 play Rock and Roll, British playwright Tom Stoppard employed the version of Chinatown Shuffle from Rockin the Rhine, recorded in Dusseldorf earlier on the tour as a way to channel the mood of the age. Our colleague Gary Lambert corresponded with Stoppard a number of years back, and Stoppard told him that it had a vibe not dissimilar to the Plastic People of the Universe. One of the bands Michael just mentioned. This is the Plastic People of the Universe performing the Tiger, recorded live in Prague about a month after the conclusion of the Dead's Europe 72 tour.
- [109:19]
A
Sam.
- [109:55]
B
Find the others. Timothy Leary once said, if you're interested in the Woodstock transnational and how it manifested both in the United States and abroad, I really do recommend Michael's book the Republic of Music and citizenship in the 60s counterculture. We've linked@dead.net deadcast. While it would surely be simplistic to say that the counterculture absolutely transcended international boundaries in other ways, it absolutely did and does. We used this little bit in our episode last season titled Dead Freaks Unite. This is WLIR DJ Ray White interviewing Jerry Garcia in 1979.
- [110:31]
A
How is it playing over in Europe?
- [110:32]
B
I mean, you must have a lot of Americans. Yeah, well, there's European Deadheads, too. What's the difference between them?
- [110:40]
A
They're accents.
- [110:42]
B
It's sort of a joke, but sort of not.
- [110:45]
A
They're kind of like Deadheads everywhere, except.
- [110:47]
B
That they have their own definition of themselves.
- [110:49]
A
You know what I mean?
- [110:50]
B
They have their own little numbers and.
- [110:54]
A
Stuff, but the kind of input that.
- [110:56]
B
We get from them and the kind of letters that they write and when they.
- [110:59]
A
When we meet people over there and.
- [111:02]
B
Stuff like that, they're the kind of people they are.
- [111:05]
A
Is a lot like American Deadheads, whatever that is. But it's a very specific kind of person. What was it like? They laugh a lot. You know, they have fun.
- [111:14]
B
Having spent a bunch of time recently speaking with Deadheads of many nationalities, I'd agree with that assessment that something about the Dead experience seems to find or transfer itself to a certain kind of head. It's not Absolute. But speaking with European Dead fans this season, I've been frequently reminded of American Dead freaks that I know, despite these European heads being born several decades and oceans apart.
- [111:37]
A
I think that must have been so romantic and alluring to a young kid in Western Europe time, or even a young gi, A young American gi. The Dead arrived with a kind. I mean, they were like visitors from Woodstock Nation. There was the beginning of the idea of Deadheads and this kind of explicit Grateful Dead thing. But I imagine for most people who would go to see them at that time, they were probably kind of vaguely associated with Summer of Love in San Francisco, with maybe people knew from seeing glimpses of Jerry Garcia holding up a joint backstage at Woodstock in the Woodstock film. So they're arriving as these, like, kind of emissaries from this Woodstock Nation saying, come on in, join the Woodstock transnational. Listen, they had that openness of kind of the. You didn't need a passport. You could just come and join in.
- [112:46]
B
The golden road to unlimited devotion from the. The Dead's debut album might have been a little too on the nose about the Dead's mission, even if they never played it again after 1967. It also seemingly remained part of the underlying message, though it was a message that had grown more nuanced. Besides their music, one thing that the members of the Grateful Dead shared was a distrust of authority, including their own. As the late Rock Scully put it.
- [113:10]
A
Our crusade is basically molecular.
- [113:13]
B
From the outside, the Dead and their unruly family might have seemed like ugly Americans. And almost certainly not inaccurately, at times, calling back a few episodes as I.
- [113:23]
A
Was talking to the manager outside a window, right, A television smashed, you know, with, like, the ferocity of a bomb.
- [113:36]
B
But more properly, it might be better to classify the Grateful Dead as weird Americans.
- [113:41]
A
Steve Parrish when we rolled into a hotel, or anywhere we rolled into, it was, here come these American. You know, we weren't trying to be assimilated to the culture, but it was still. We were fascinated by it. And everywhere we went, we would talk about what we saw. My whole life, I was an avid reader, but of one kind of thing, of nonfiction. So when I was a little kid at 7 years old, with a flashlight, I read because they kept it in my room. I slept. I read the entire encyclopedia from COVID to cover. It took me a few years, you know, but it gave me this love for the world and for traveling and for knowing all these places. And so I kept that going my whole life of reading nonfiction.
- [114:29]
B
Here in the Dead Cast bunker, we don't quite have one of those maps with thumbtacks and yarn. But based on triangulation, I'm pretty sure the only time the following story could have taken place was on the haul out of Rotterdam en route back to France. And with this, we'll let Steve Parish sign this off.
- [114:46]
A
Today it was a 14 hour drive and then we're in Belgium and it's storming. It started raining really, really hard. And here I am sitting next to the window. Jerry's right next to me. We're talking, having a smoke and I look out the window and I see, oh, God damn, we're at eepers. I grab Jerry and I go, jerry, look where we are. Because he and I both had spent our youth watching old black and white movies. That was another thing that we, we were bonded on. And so I, as soon as I said eepers, he knew from us studying and him reading all Quiet on the Western Front that we were at this battle site that was an enormous slaughter pit in the First World War. And so we grabbed, he grabbed my arm. You know, we both got a chill down our spine. We said, wow, man, there's where it happened. Can you imagine the mud? You could see the mu and the rain pouring down. And we were transported in our minds, you know, like that. Thanks very much for tuning in and huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including Donna Jean Godshow, McKay, Steve Parish, Sam Cutler, Barry Visser, Alan Trist, Ben Haller, Garrett Dreisen, Dixon Hall, Peter Swift, David Johns, Siak Leichens, Eric Alden.
- [116:35]
B
David Lemieux, Graham Boone, John Colpitz and Michael Kramer.
- [116:40]
A
Also special thanks to friends of the Dead cast, David Ganz and Blair Jackson for providing archival interview audio. Did you travel over to Europe to catch any of the shows in 72? Tell us what the Europe 72 album means to you. Go to stories.dead.net where you can record yourself telling how you feel about the record. Telling a story from the tour. Spread the word to your friends. We'd like to have your input. Please don't forget to like and subscribe and leave us a review. Thanks very much. Next week we wrap up the shows on the European continent. Can you believe it?
- [117:17]
B
See you there.
- [117:19]
A
Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.