Grateful Dead’s Europe ‘72 Tour 50th Anniversary: May 3 – Paris, France

In April 1972, the Grateful Dead embarked on their now-legendary Europe ’72 Tour. The band performed 22 times between April 7 and May 26, resulting in the landmark triple live LP, Europe ’72 that was released in October of that year. To celebrate the legacy of the band’s historic tour abroad, JamBase presents a retrospective look back at each of the Europe 1972 Grateful Dead performances.

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The Grateful Dead’s Europe ‘72 Tour brought the band to Paris, France for two shows at The Olympia concert hall on May 3 and May 4, 1972. The Dead and their entourage of friends, family and crew — totaling around 50 people — took two days to travel the 983 kilometers from Hamburg, West Germany, arriving in Paris late on Monday, May 1. The following day, Tuesday, May 2, was a day off that allowed for those on the tour to explore the city.

As guitarist Jerry Garcia would tell Rolling Stone reporter Jerry Hopkins, their plans for sightseeing around Paris were slightly derailed:

“Almost every place we went today was closed,” Garcia lamented. “The Louvre is closed Tuesdays. We went to the Notre Dame and we saw that — really boss, but we couldn’t climb the tower. We went to the Cluny. We saw that. It was sacked by the Barbarians in the year 300, and before that, it was a Roman bath. Flash flash. History everywhere you look. Far-out. Stunning …

“Everywhere we’ve been, the audiences have been Grateful Dead audiences. We’ve had the German equivalent of the guy who gets up on the stage and takes his clothes off. We’ve had the English freakout, the Danish freakout. But we haven’t been playing enough. I’m a music junkie and I have to play every day. The gigs are too far apart. It’s like we’re not fucking off enough to enjoy that or we’re not playing enough to enjoy that.”

The Olympia was a short walk from where the band and their cohorts were staying at the nearby Grand Hotel. When it opened in 1883, The Olympia, or “L’Olympia” as it’s known to locals, was the first music hall built in Paris. The owner was Joseph Oller, who also co-founded the famous cabaret theater Moulin Rouge.

An Oller biography written in 1946 by Ferran Canymeres for Les Editions Universelles described the Spanish-born Oller’s background, stating:

Joseph Oller was a leading entertainment impresario and entrepreneur in Paris during the last decades of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century – the “Belle Époque.” For all of his life was he exceptionally active and creative in conceiving of new business ventures. He was the founder of many music halls, dance theatres, and other distractions, including the famous Folies Bergere. He was also involved with horse racing and betting on horse races, including the invention and early operation of the “pari mutual” system. In the Belle Epoque the entertainment industry moved around Oller – he was known by everybody, and was acquainted with everybody important in society …

On the entertainment side, Oller opened further amusements. The Montagnes Russes was an amusement park that he moved from London. Then there was the big one, the Moulin Rouge. In 1892 he started his own amusement park “Le Jardin de Paris,” and in 1893, The Olympia music hall with a waxworks in the basement.

Oller lived in a house next to his Jardin de Paris. His success was interrupted by WW1 during which he gave his printery to the state. His wife died in Oct 1919. He retired to an apartment in Paris, spending winters on the Cote d’Azure. He died 19 April 1922 and was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery. On his grave is inscribed: “Son intelligence égalait son coeur.”

The Olympia, which has undergone several extensive renovations over the years, continues to host concerts. Prior to the Dead’s arrival in 1972, The Olympia had hosted concerts by the likes of Charles Aznavour, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Édith Piaf, Gilbert Bécaud, Fats Domino, Little Richard, James Brown, Thelonious Monk, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Simon & Garfunkel, Lionel Hampton, Otis Redding, The Who, The Rolling Stones and scores of others. Additionally, The Beatles performed 18 concerts at the music hall in 1964.

On May 1, 1972, a post-Jim Morrison lineup of The Doors performed at The Olympia, while Soft Machine held a concert at the music hall on May 2. After the Dead’s two-night stand, Black Sabbath performed at The Olympia on May 7 and Jerry Lee Lewis kicked off his own two-nighter on May 8.

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Vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux’s first tour with the Grateful Dead was the Europe 1972 run. Her husband, keyboardist Keith Godchaux had started playing in the band in October 1971. Donna spoke about her experience in Paris during a session with Betty Cantor-Jackson – who was part of the Europe ‘72 sound engineering team – at Grateful Dead tribute act Dark Star Orchestra’s 2013 DSO High School retreat in Upstate New York (watch here).

Donna: Of course we had [on Europe ‘72 tour] the good acid … And so we were there for two months, weren’t we Betty, something like that?

Betty: Yep, two buses: the Bolos and the Bozos …

Donna: So eventually, the acid that we had taken from the U.S. got weaker and weaker and weaker. So I was like taking 15 hits every night, before every gig. And then Owsley [Stanley] showed up.

Betty: No, he didn’t show up, he was in jail. He must have sent an emissary, because he was in [prison in] Lompoc …

Donna: He did show up at some point, or sent some.

Betty: He sent some, because I had to smuggle him tapes, my tapes into Lompoc, so he could hear Europe 72. The whole tour … he had a moving van to get out of that place he had so much stuff smuggled into that “low security prison” …

Donna: I didn’t realize that the new batch that we had gotten in Paris was like a new batch … and I didn’t know that, nobody told me. And I took like 15 hits of this fresh, sparkling, batch of acid and kind of halfway during The Olympia Theater in Paris, I found myself – I don’t know how I got there – underneath Keith’s grand piano. During the show!

Betty: I was about as high as you were too that night.

Donna: We were all screaming high.

Betty: I used to watch the meters and think, “Are they moving or are they moving because I’m watching them? Is that an after image?” I swear to god! “Am I hearing it because I’m listening for it, or is it really in the mix?”

Donna: And she’s doing the sound!

Betty: I did. I recorded it all, on a multitrack recording.

Donna: At some point I realized, I went, “Oh my god! I sing with this band!” And somehow, I don’t how I did it, but I got up, and when I was supposed to be singing again, I was up there at the microphone. And I don’t know how I did that.

Betty: I don’t know how I recorded any of that stuff either!

As noted on the recent episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast podcast in which Donna retold the story of finding herself sitting under Keith’s piano at The Olympia, it was likely the first set “Playing In The Band” that snapped the vocalist back to some semblance of reality. After “Playing,” Bobby introduced Donna to the Parisian audience, eliciting her to respond “Hello everyone.”

Prior to that, the 11th of 22 Europe 1972 performances began with Garica singing “Bertha.” After the opener, a French-speaking woman asked the crowd not to use flash photography, which was followed by guitarist Bob Weir leading a cover of “Me And My Uncle” and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan fronting the band for the first of five times that night on “Mr. Charlie.”

The first set also produced the pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” that landed on the original Europe ‘72 live album. The first set’s “Tennessee Jed” was also selected for Europe ‘72. The May 3 version of “Tennessee Jed” on the Europe 72: The Complete Recordings has Garcia slightly altering the second verse from “Listen to the whistle of the evening train” to “Listen to the whistle of the passing train.” Like many of the tracks on Europe ‘72 “Tennessee Jed” featured in-studio vocal overdubs that put “evening” back into the song.

A fourth song from May 3 made it onto Europe ‘72, “Jack Straw” from the evening’s second set. Only the May 26 final show of the tour in London would produce more tracks on Europe ‘72. The May 3 performance of “Jack Staw” likely featured lead vocals exclusively from Weir, but the original version does not circulate. Later in the tour, Garcia began singing parts of the verses, as he did when they overdubbed entirely new vocals for the Europe ‘72 version.

Following “Tennessee Jed,” Pigpen led another of the tour’s excellent and elongated takes on “Good Lovin’” and delivered another exciting rap, once again pleading to “jump in your saddle and ride.” The 16-minute “Good Lovin’” was followed by the tour’s first cover of Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home.” The mournful prison song, sung by Garica with Donna’s backing, would pop up seven more times that tour. As it did more often than not in Europe, “Casey Jones” closed out the first set.

Bobby introduced Donna before the start of the second set, with bassist Phil Lesh jumping in to introduce Keith. “Greatest Story Ever Told,” was chosen to open set two, just as it had at the previous show in Hamburg. Garcia then took them through “Ramble On Rose” and Pigpen played frontman a final time that night with “Hurts Me Too.”

The band then got down to business, driving “Truckin’” into a jam that steered its way into a thunderous “The Other One.” Spanning +30 minutes, two sections of “The Other One” were bridged by a Bill Kreutzmann drum solo, that became a drums/bass breakdown when Lesh joined the drummer. “The Other One” moved on to “Me And Bobby McGee” before making a quick detour back to “The Other One” and then dissolving into “Wharf Rat.”

The aforementioned “Jack Straw,” a rousing “Sugar Magnolia” and the frequent second set trifecta of “Not Fade Away” into “Going Down The Road Feeling Bad” back into “Not Fade Away” rounded out the second set. The Wednesday night concert came to a close with Weir belting out “One More Saturday Night.”

In the Rolling Stone article published after the concert, Garcia and Weir discussed the May 3 show with Hopkins.

“It’s called muscle fatigue,” Garcia said on May 4. “We couldn’t have played any longer if we’d wanted to.”

“Like, I sang three songs in a row there at the end,” Weir told Hopkins. “Forty-five minutes of singing and singing hard, which for any other singer is a whole night’s work and we’d been at for three hours or something before that. When we quit, my chest was fucking heaving, man.”

In addition to being released as part of the Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings box set, the May 3, 1972 Grateful Dead concert in Paris was also issued on limited edition vinyl for Record Store Day 2021.

Here are additional statistics and information regarding the 11th performance of the Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72 tour:

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Setlist (via JerryBase)

Set One: Bertha, Me And My Uncle, Mr. Charlie, Sugaree [1], Black Throated Wind, Chinatown Shuffle, China Cat Sunflower [2][3] > I Know You Rider [2][3], Beat It On Down The Line, He’s Gone, Next Time You See Me, Playing In The Band, Tennessee Jed [2][3], Good Lovin’, Sing Me Back Home, Casey Jones

Set Two: Greatest Story Ever Told [1], Ramble On Rose, Hurts Me Too, Truckin’ > Jam > The Other One > Drums > The Other One > Me And Bobby McGee > The Other One > Wharf Rat, Jack Straw [2][3], Sugar Magnolia > Not Fade Away > Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad > Not Fade Away

Encore: One More Saturday Night

Notes:

• [1] released on Europe ’72 Volume 2
• [2] released on Europe ’72
• [3] released on The Golden Road (1965 – 1973)

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Below, stream the official recording of the Grateful Dead’s May 3, 1972 concert at The Olympia in Paris, France or check out other recordings via Archive.org: