Grateful Dead - Europe '72 (Vinyl)

LP1

one of the dead's more popular and successful albums, a live album - of course. This album collects the highlights of their Europe 72 tour. it's a triple album that was eventually certified gold, which is super rare for an album of this length.

Opening with Cumberland Blues off the Working Man's Dead album, the album gets right to the point with the guitar and piano jamming away through this take.

Next up is the mellow "He's Gone", which is based on Lenny Hart's embezzlement of band's money and subsequent disappearance. As a result of the fiasco, Mickey Hart, feeling ashamed of his father's actions, left the band in February 1971, not returning to the group on a full-time basis until 1975. Lenny Hart was an American drummer who owned and operated Hart Music, selling drums and musical instruments in San Carlos, California. He was the father of Mickey Hart, one of the percussionists for the Grateful Dead. Lenny Hart was also the Grateful Dead's original money manager. In March, 1970, he disappeared along with approximately US$155,000 of the group's profits. Hart was located by a private detective and arrested in San Diego on July 26, 1971, while baptizing people and using the name "Rev. Lenny B. Hart". He was convicted of criminal embezzlement and sentenced to six months in jail. There's more to read on it here: https://deadessays.blogspot.com/2019/09/hes-gone.html. The song debuted on the Europe 72 album.

The line “steal your face right off your head,” appears in this song. (“Steal Your Face” had been released earlier that year, but despite the title, He’s Gone wasn’t included on the album.)

One More Saturday Night rolls up next, picking up the pace again. First appearing on a Bob Weir solo album, Ace, in 1972, it was a semi-frequent addition to Grateful Dead live sets.

Side B opens with Jack Straw, based (loosely) on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This was another track that debuted on Europe 72 and was not tethered to an album in particular.

Followed by Hank William's "You Win Again" with a honky-tonk-ish piano weaving throughout, is a fun song. I love the piano work here.

China Cat Sunflower, first recorded for their third studio album Aoxomoxoa, has a brain bug of a guitar riff in it that's slightly annoying. This is the first recorded live version of this song.

LP1 rounds out with I Know You Rider, It was the first song that bass player Phil Lesh rehearsed with the band upon joining. However, Lesh was not confident enough in his own singing abilities to handle the song's lead vocal. During the Grateful Dead's live concerts, it was usually performed as the second half of a medley with "China Cat Sunflower" as is the case here.

No one knows who wrote the song originally, with the earliest known version of this dates back to 1927 by Blind Lemon Jefferson. in the 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, by the noted father-and-son pair of musicologists and folklorists, John Lomax and Alan Lomax.[1] The book notes that "An eighteen-year old black girl, in prison for murder, sang the song and the first stanza of these blues." The Lomaxes then added a number of verses from other sources and named it "Woman Blue". The music and melody are similar to Lucille Bogan's "B.D. Woman Blues" (c. 1935), although the lyrics are completely different. It's been covered by a number of artists over the years but has been a staple of Dead live shows. You can never say Dead cover choices aren't interesting.

LP2

Brown Eyed Woman opens up this side. I don't believe it's connected to a GD album but has been played live over 300 times. Like “Jack Straw,” “Brown-Eyed Women” is set largely in the era of the Great Depression. It tells the story of a family living in a tumbledown shack in mythical Bigfoot County, somewhere back in the hills, it seems, where the family works the land and the father, Jack Jones, makes bootleg whisky. Jack was a ladies man in his youth, but those days are gone. It is a fairly straightforward tale of scraping by in hard times, where the mother, Delilah Jones, bears eight boys (no girls are mentioned, but an early version, on August 24, 1971 - the second performance of the song - mentions 13 children all told), of which four belong to two sets of twins. This is a couple whose attraction to each other is strong, clearly, and this is a woman who has done more than her share of childbearing and rearing. And when she dies, in the snowstorm that caves in the roof of the family home, Jack Jones is devastated - never the same again.

The next slides into a blues cover, Hurts Me Too, by Elmore James.

Side 3 ending with Ramble On Rose, is a meandering (rambling?) but feel good Dead song.

Side 4 opens with fan favorite Sugar Magnolia, the Dead's 2nd most played song. From their album American Beauty - the song is typically split up as two adjoined songs, the proper Sugar Magnolia and the Sunshine Daydream coda and it's the case here on '72. It has been said that the song was written about Bob Weir's girlfriend.

Mr Charlie, I have read elsewhere that, sadly, this is a song about heroin abuse. After McKernan (aka Pigpen) died, the GD quit performing it. The "drums" apparently refer to a throbbing noise in the ears while in the throes of using heroin. The "shotgun" refers to a loaded syringe. He died at the insanely early age of 23 or so.

Regarding Tennessee Jed -In his book A Box of Rain Dead, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter recalled the precise moment he wrote this song. Or at least he made up a great story about the precise moment he wrote this song. Hunter wrote: "Tennessee Jed" originated in Barcelona, Spain. Topped up on vino tinto, I composed it aloud to the sound of a jaw harp twanged between echoing building faces by someone strolling half a block ahead of me in the late summer twilight. As David Dodd points out at Dead.net, the most interesting thing about the Spanish origin story is that "Tennessee Jed" is pure Americana musically and lyrically. It even references a 1940s radio show titled Tennessee Jed, which was sponsored ran from 1945 to 1947 on Wheeling, West Virginia's WWVA radio station. This bit actually went undiscovered until September 2001 when an eBay item caught the attention of Dead historians.. The song is about a man who's on the ropes, having a bad run of things, and just wanting to get home. Perhaps that's how Hunter was feeling that night in Barcelona when he composed the song. If so, the line, "let's get back to Tennessee, Jed," may be Hunter himself wanting not only to get back to the states but back to his childhood when the Tennessee Jed radio show was in full swing. Hunter was born in 1941, so he was four-to-six years old when the show ran. This was the first time the song appears on a pressed album. The song was never recorded in a studio.

LP3

I'm a filthy casual, so it's taken 3 LPs before I come across a song I actually know. "Truckin". Which I've always really enjoyed Dead singles that have charted. When they go 'pop' (more or less) it's always super catchy and works well.

Side 5 ends with Epilogue and Side 6 begins with Prelude, both instrumental tracks. The former more straight-forward jam, the 2nd a bit more experimental.

the album end caps with the Bonnie Dobson cover, Morning Dew. The lyrics relate a fictional conversation in a post-nuclear holocaust world. Recorded originally on the Dead's '67 Debut and self-titled album, it's been a staple of the Dead since there's been a Dead.