Year: 1972
Director: Danish Television
An annual screening of a Dead concert had a hiatus for 2 years due to COVID but was back this year featuring their concert at theTivoli in Copenhagen during their famous Europe 1972 tour.
Pretty tight and in tune, one drummer and Jerry not a junkie this was pretty much peak period Dead. though OOAA.This was the tour with all the clown masks bought before the tour at a novelty shop. These days they looked a bit creepy with all the horror /serial killers shows with clown masks. Fun fact the roadie kept the masks for years but he kept them in a box that was exposed to sunlight so they have all melted.
The concert was filmed for a TV broadcast – the sound was excellent , the video looked a bit like a VHS tape transfer so, given this is touted as a fully restored high definition version, the previous extant copies must have been a bit rough.
An audience of less than 20 at our showing and just one “chick” dead dancing in the aisle.I expected more people but there were there other showings.
A gaunt Pigpen opened the show with It Hurts Me Too but things got moving a few songs in with the iconic Truckin’ and a coupla songs later with I Know You Rider. It really is was and aways will be the Jerry Garcia show – such a beautiful sweet tone to that guitar. Plenty of close ups of his playing was a plus.
It was great to see the Dead in their pomp. Apparently there were discussions about them coming to Australia and performing at Uluru/Ayers Rock. I’m told they wanted over 20 people to accompany them and their rider included a pound of hash – not weed,hash. The tour didn’t proceed.
The show ends abruptly with Saturday Night. No thankyou and good night, no encores. I guess the television station reckoned they had enough footage. Pity, but better than nothing.
Here is the movie pitch for the show :The sixth show on the Grateful Dead’s famous Europe ’72 tour was a return engagement to the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 17, 1972. This ground-breaking concert broadcast event was the Dead’s first major live concert broadcast, and a first in Danish television history. Now, fully restored and color corrected in High Definition with audio mixed from the 16-track analog master tapes by Jeffrey Norman and mastered by David Glasser, Tivoli 4/17/72 features nearly an hour and a half of the Grateful Dead at a peak of their performing career. The show’s many highlights include an overview of the Dead’s 1972 touring repertoire, including magnificent versions of “China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider”, “Big Railroad Blues”, “Truckin’”, and many more of the Dead’s classics, as well as the first live performance of “He’s Gone”, and other new songs including “Ramble on Rose”, “Jack Straw”, and “One More Saturday Night”. Pigpen, on what would prove to be his last tour with the Grateful Dead, is well-represented by three songs, including the broadcast’s opening number, “Hurts Me Too”.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Europe 72
This Dead site suggests the filmed stuff was from the second set of the night but songs from the first set were definitely in the film so I am a bit confused.
https://www.dead.net/show/april-17-1972
Truckin, got my chips cashed in…
What I dislike about them summed up in one vid. Great song from a great album – but amateurish, tentative, underpowered, lackadaisical, lacking in energy, with inevitable pointless freakout. This is one of their anthems – it should be absolutely thunderous.
Which is why, when Mrs thep asked if I wanted to go and see the Grateful Dead movie, the answer was a resounding no.
OOMBA…
Indeed there are.
Dead don’t really do thunderous.
To elaborate, before the Dead there was folk , country and bluegrass and whenever the Dead weren’t touring that was the stuff they were largely playing in side acts.
Not sure of your point. Before the Dead there were folk (Dave Van Ronk), country (Buck Owens) and bluegrass (Stanley Brothers), none of whom would have sent me to sleep.
Goes to Dead not being a rockin band.
@mikethep AnnoyinglyThepwhilst playing our evening backgammon game I put on the Dead and then read out your damning observations. Mrs Wells said said “they’re sort of insipid, he’s right”. So I am packing her off to Murwillimbah. Best start preparing the spare room.
Not being a huge fan of interminable live shows, but that rarity, a lover of the studio band, I found that a delightful swagger. Not ‘rockin’, more an infectious sway. Any pub rock band could be proud of that. (I have decided pub rock the peak of western civilisation.)
She’s welcome any time.
This is heart-breaking! Poor Mrs Wells! An off-the-cuff comment and she is exiled to Murwillimbah for an indefinite period. Such is the Way of the Afterword! Cruel but fair.
I just hope Mike can knock together some decent tucker.
We can all learn from this:
Never speak ill of the Dead!
Spot on assessment, Mike. Tentative indeed. They sound like they’re not quite sure what chord/note/lyric comes next, and I have no idea why Garcia’s pedestrian pentatonic plodding has given him the reputation as a guitar player of note. The career and legacy of this band is baffling.
You too can indulge in pedestrian pentatonic plodding.
https://www.lieberguitars.com/product/the-garcia/
I think the tropics have affected the ears of you two. What’s not to love about Jerry’s playing? A delight to the ears.
Just listen to the 432 (Fact Check needed) “acoustic” albums Jerry played on. Saying his playing is noodles is like saying Gary is not handsome
I’ll have you know that my ears are equipped with the finest Harris Tweed.
I don’t play guitar so this bloke can make the case. Admittedly the clip of Jerry is from 1989 whereas Truckin’ above was 72.
Looks as though at least the video quality is great. I shall go to my grave forever unsure about what I really think of The Dead. I have most of the albums, most of Dick’s Picks and approximately 2716 bootlegs. Would any single track make my own Top Twenty? Maybe a track off of American Beauty? Maybe.
Scarlet begonias
Ship of Fools ?
Friend of the Devil
They covered Erasure? Brave
Ship of Fools or maybe Box of Rain or….. it’s a great album
And of course you could still be a good band and not make your top twenty. Esp if 5 tracks are Little Feat songs.
True dat
Little Feat should have had the success the Grateful Dead had, Feat being an infinitely better band. The Dead are, well, dull.
True dat (apart from the Dead being dull – and I speak as someone who has fallen asleep not once but twice during Dead concerts). I think @duco01 once said something like ” just as you are thinking I can’t take any more of this doodling the band suddenly hits the groove and away we go!”
I suspect The Duke expressed himself somewhat more eloquently
Was that the music or the weed that induced the ennui Lodes?
I only managed to fall asleep once. I must up my game
Get a Fitbit. It will tell you that technically you fell asleep like twenty times. And that was just during New Potato Caboose
I had a fit bit once.
The wife wasn’t happy
Who said variety was dead?
The Afterword is exactly like 60s variety. You only come for
the Beatles and you have
to endure loads of crap comedians (ahem)
60s variety.
Re: Tony the Tiger on the Frosties packet (included in the “Variety” pack.
Decades ago, there used to be a famous Grateful Dead T-shirt which featured Tony the Tiger.
And here – as if by magic – it is:
https://www.shirtmandude.com/grdevirocots.html
Twice nightly!
Only Richard Thompson and Bruce Springsteen managed to send me asleep while at their concerts.
Richard Thomson at the Lowry in Salford, it was his voice, droning on.
Bruce Springsteen somewhere in Paris. It was one of the Boss’s acoustic shows but it wasn’t his fault, I’d been awake for 36 hours.
I managed to see The Grateful Dead in ‘72 at the Lyceum and hardly blinked never mind dozing off.
Many concerts i have dozed off – stuffy hall and a head full of spliff the usual culprit. I have a whole bunch of old ticket stubs. Some shows I cannot recall attending at all. Even more damning some stubs even have my name on the back of them.
I’d be happy with it not being one or the other. Come at music from very different directions.
First time I feel asleep was definitely weed, second was when Jerry decided to “fly”
I want to go back to Thep’s absence of a thunderous Truckin comment. I was discussing Phil Lesh’s bass with friends. One described him as unusual , almost unique. T’other called him really annoying, hate may have been used but he is a very hard marker. He went on to say Lesh sort of plays on top rather than sitting in the pocket. Could this be the source of the criticism – bass and drums not locked into an, ahem, thunderous groove?