Grateful Dead slipped the shores of America and crossed the pond for its first-ever major European tour in April 1972. The legendary 22-show run spawned Europe ’72, a live triple album that remains one of the band’s best-selling and most beloved releases. A tour this momentous deserves a boxed set of historic proportions and Dead.net has stamped your passport to relive every note from the European tour with EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS—an individually numbered, limited edition collection that includes more than 60 discs with over 70 hours of music featuring every show from what is arguably the Grateful Dead’s greatest tour.
EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS is housed in a replica steamer trunk reminiscent of the ones prevalently used at the time. Along with the music, a vast majority of which is previously unreleased, the travel chest contains tour memorabilia, a coffee-table book with never-before-seen photos, and a comprehensive essay by noted Dead author Blair Jackson. Each performance will also be accompanied by an essay specific to the show written by top Dead scholars including David Gans, Gary Lambert, Nicholas Meriwether, and Steve Silberman.
Jeffrey Norman, the primary mixer of the Dead’s archival multi-track material for the past 15 years, is mixing each show from the original 16-track recordings, with the high-tech Plangent Processes transfer and restoration tools used to bring the master tapes back to life. Two-time Grammy®-winning engineer David Glasser is mastering the music to HDCD specs. While many of the recordings heard on Europe ’72 were sweetened in the studio after the tour, those tracks will be included in this collection without overdubs, where possible.
Due to ship in September, the boxed set is available exclusively from Dead.net, which will take orders beginning on January 19. The price of the collection is $450, which works out to the remarkably low price of about $20 for each show, or roughly the cost of a transatlantic flight from New York City to London in 1972 (price of time machine not included).
