We’ve been trying to get here for a long, long time, and we eventually, finally, made it. Please welcome, The Grateful Dead… The Grateful Dead.

I find Cutler’s introduction very touching, especially the second time he says “The Grateful Dead.” Resigned, tired; well-aware of what it took to make Europe happen (in addition to everything else, tour-opening venues originally booked in two different locations had to be moved and delayed until this night) but, perhaps, expectant too of the glory this tour would produce.

This venue was not an ideal solution, however, as the tour plan had been for the Dead to play almost exclusively at intimate, acoustically excellent concert halls, and the 12,000-plus-capacity Empire Pool did not fit the bill. But at least they had a place to play–and as an act of good faith to those loyal London fans, the band made amends by arranging to return to town at tour’s end, scheduling four additional shows in late May at the beautiful, old Lyceum. (Plus they cleverly figured out how to fix the acoustics for the next night.)

A unique pause during the intro (mistake?) leads to a fantastic, fast Chinatown, with super tight Jerry guitar, then solo, followed by Keith in top honky tonk form.

After a nine-beat BIODTL, Bob offers the crowd a Happy Fourth of July, a dig at both American independence from England, and at the UK dating conventions, reversing April 7th in July 4th.

“Ace” was not yet out in Europe, though One More Saturday Night had been released as a single in Europe, attributed to “Grateful Dead with Bobby Ace,” with the Bertha from Skull Fuck on the b-side.

“Everybody had a sense of [the Bay Area’s thriving rock community],” says the great British playwright Tom Stoppard, speaking of the kinship between music and arts circles in the two countries. Stoppard, whose international reputation was rapidly rising in 1972 on the basis of such acclaimed plays as ‘Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead’ and ‘Jumpers,’ was aware of the excitement occasioned by the Grateful Dead’s arrival in the U.K., recalling that “the Dead were very central to the hippie/beat literary scene” with which he was affiliated. Decades later, Stoppard would evoke the Europe ’72 tour by including the relatively obscure Pigpen song “Chinatown Shuffle” in his 2006 play Rock ‘N’ Roll, an epic work celebrating the powerful role music played in the lives of Czech dissidents in the years between the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989.

As “Chinatown Shuffle” was in the Dead’s repertoire for only a short time before Pigpen’s death, one wondered if Stoppard might have been inspired to use the song because he’d heard it in person at one of the U.K. stops on the ’72 tour. To the playwright’s great regret, he had not: career demands, the responsibilities of raising young children, and living in a remote, rural area of England all conspired to prevent him from getting out to a lot of concerts in those days. Indeed, he wouldn’t hear “Chinatown Shuffle” (the version from 4/24/72, in Dusseldorf, to be exact) until many years later, when he found himself listening to the Dead a lot while writing Rock ‘N’ Roll, feeling they had “a vibe not dissimilar” to the Plastic People Of The Universe, the legendary underground Czech band central to the play’s narrative.

Class dismissed with this homework.

This Chinatown is a super tight one, with a great Jerry solo, followed by Keith in top honky tonk form. Stoppard blew it.

BIODTL 9

“Y’see, the thing is, the cops haven’t got enough space to dance.”