Grateful Dead - Europe '72

 As you can see from the lack of activity here, this little hobby of mine may have run it's course. Between time restraints, health issues and just an overall lack of enthusiasm I just haven't been doing much. But, I do have a few more projects that I would like to put up so as the mood strikes I'll post them when I can.

So let's start with this one. Not too long ago my daughter gifted me a Sony Walkman music player to replace my ageing iPods. It's a nice little device that has a microSD slot that can handle high capacity cards. I currently have a 512gb card in there that is about 85% full so I might bump that up to a 1tb card one of these days. Having all that room allows me to carry around a lot of music including full discographies of all my favorite artists and more. But recently while building playlists I ran into a little conundrum that led to the creation of this album.

Back at the beginning of this blog I posted three Grateful Dead albums culled from early '70s solo and live albums collecting Dead songs never recorded for Dead albums. While building a playlist of just the Dead studio albums these were naturally included but I also wanted a playlist of the Dead plus Dead related albums which meant that if I include the solo albums and the albums I constructed from them I would have duplicate songs. If I excluded the fantasy albums I lose the tracks culled from the live albums. I could have just removed duplicates from the list but that would affect the ability to let the playlist play through each album as a whole. To rectify this I constructed this album.

Tracklist

 

Side One

01 Bertha

02 Hurts Me Too

03 Tennessee Jed

 

Side Two

01 Ramble On Rose

02 Chinatown Shuffle

03 You Win Again

04 He's Gone

 

Side Three

01 Jack Straw

02 The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)

03 Wharf Rat

 

Side Four

01 Brown-Eyed Woman

02 Mr Charlie

03 (Walk Me Out In The) Morning Dew

Reality Notes

I started with the original songs and two covers unique to the Europe '72 live album. The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion) was included on CD reissues. I pulled Chinatown Shuffle from the Complete Europe '72 set while also auditioning all versions of Bertha and Wharf Rat but ended up using the Skull and Roses versions as none of the '72 versions had quite the same feel. I then included the awesome version of Morning Dew. Even though it breaks the "unique songs only" rule, the version on their debut album is very different.

I then arranged the songs to fit on four sides of vinyl with each side timing between 19:30 and 20:00 minutes. Each side gets a Pigpen song. Unfortunately there is only one song that features a Bob Weir vocal and that is shared with Jerry but the Garcia-Hunter team were in overdrive at this time and the bulk of Bobby tunes from this period appeared on his solo album so it is what it is.

 

This gives us a nice double live album in contrast to the sprawling triple disc original. Plus it will fit on a single CD if anyone still uses those. A great car album. I reused the cover from one of the reissues. Enjoy.