Grateful Dead's 'Europe '72' gets a massive re-do

COTATI, Calif.  Deep inside Prairie Sun Studios, a ramshackle collection of buildings on a Sonoma County farm, Jeffrey Norman is busy living in the past.

The longtime Grateful Dead sound engineer is remixing the fabled jam band's entire 22-concert tour of Europe in 1972. Highlights from those outings already were collected on the Dead's well-regarded triple album Europe '72, which was released that same year and went double-platinum a decade ago.

When wrapped up this summer, Europe '72: The Complete Recordings will span 72 CDs on Rhino Records. Fans literally can't wait: Although the music won't be available until fall, all 7,200 copies of the $450 box set are sold out. Individual shows will be available through the band's site, dead.net.

"There's more fullness of sound now," Norman says as Truckin' blasts away in the background. "It's like the band is in the room."

Grateful Dead fans notoriously disagree on just when the band was at its best during its 1965-1995 run. But there seems to be little debate that during this April 7 to May 26 blitz through some of Europe's most beautiful concert halls, every cylinder was firing, from Jerry Garcia's soloing on a Fender Stratocaster guitar given to him by Graham Nash to the swing jazz drumming of Bill Kreutzmann.

The surviving members of the band —Kreutzmann, guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Mickey Hart— don't like looking back. But they acknowledge there was magic in the air on that tour.

"Everyone was in a great mood," Kreutzmann recalls. "I don't listen to our old stuff much. But I would dream to have that band together again."

That European trek through a dozen cities was "when the musicians really started to listen to each other and started to become the band we would come to know," says Dead archivist David Lemieux, on hand to guide Norman.

Among the factors that contributed to making this 1972 tour memorable, one is downbeat. The Dead's original blues-belting frontman, Ron "Pig Pen" McKernan, was ailing and would die in 1973. That forced the band to lean on roots-music tracks off American Beauty and Workingman's Dead, which emphasized the band's musicianship.

"On that tour, the Dead really started putting an emphasis on songwriting, harmonizing and experimentation," says David Fricke, senior editor at Rolling Stone. "Add the grandeur of halls like the Olympia in Paris, and they knew they had to be at the top of their game."

Gary Lambert, who co-hosts the Dead-themed SiriusXM radio show Tales From the Golden Road, says this box set "is generating more excitement than any other release" from the group's vaults of 18,000 tapes. "It is truly the Holy Grail. Bits and pieces have come out over the years. But to have all of it, sounding the way it really did, is a treasure."

Back at Prairie Sun, Lemieux and Norman hunch over a laptop watching a video of the band's performance in a TV studio in Bremen, Germany. On the computer's screen, Garcia's fingers fly across the Stratocaster. Behind him are stacks of amplifiers, their fronts covered in tie-dye. Hanging on one such piece of electronic equipment is a sign with big block lettering. It reads: "Danger: Alive."