180g Vinyl 3LP Reissue Cut from the Original Analog Album Masters by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering and Pressed at RTI

Nearly 50 years ago, the Grateful Dead released Europe '72, a triple live album documenting its historic trek across Europe that became not only one of the band's best-selling releases, but also set the gold standard for live Dead. The band's first tour outside of North America took them to all sorts of historic and unusual venues in England, Denmark, West Germany, France, Holland and even Luxembourg. Many members of the Dead family came along on what was really an extended working vacation that was designed to both expose the Dead to new audiences and also reward the band for their unlikely conquest of America during the preceding two years.

As a hedge against the costs of the nearly two-month trip, the Dead’s label, Warner Bros., paid for the band to lug around a 16-track recorder to capture the entire tour. This was a band at the top of its game, still ascending in the wake of three straight hit albums: Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty and the live Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses). It had been a year since the lineup had gone to its single-drummer configuration, six months since Keith Godchaux had been broken in as the group’s exceptional pianist, and this marked the first tour to feature Donna Godchaux as a member of the touring band. This would also be Pigpen's final tour with the band.

There was a ton of new, unreleased material that came into the repertoire in the fall of ’71 (after Skull & Roses was out) and during the spring of ’72, including “Tennessee Jed,” “Jack Straw,” “He’s Gone,” “Ramble on Rose,” “One More Saturday Night” and “Mr. Charlie.” All those future classics were interspersed with songs from the aforementioned hit albums such as “Cumberland Blues” and “Sugar Magnolia,” as well as spectacular versions of “Truckin’” and  “I Know You Rider.”

Features:
• 180g vinyl 3LP-set
• Released in conjunction with the Europe 72 box and Europe 72 Vol. 2 2CD release
• Lacquers cut from the original analog album masters by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering
• Pressed at RTI
• All original replica packaging, including an 8 page book