Grateful Dead's first European tour

The power never went out on the Grateful Dead the first time they toured Europe, in the Spring of 1972.

Just months before their transatlantic arrival, Dan Healy — the Dead’s steadfast audio technician and electrical handyman during their hazy San Francisco incubation — rejoined the crew after catching a Manhattan concert at the end of 1971 and being dismayed by its haphazard production.

That night in New York, co-founder Jerry Garcia and drummer Bill Kreutzmann asked Healy for help. They were soon headed to Europe for a two-month tour of historic theatres that held thousands, and they needed their mountain of gear to work for these prospective fans. Healy began polling bands that had already toured Europe about the challenges — “Stage power,” members of The Rolling Stones’ entourage repeated.

Healy decided to eliminate the risk entirely, especially since so much of the Dead’s appeal depended on long form improvisation and at-will segues; losing power would devastate such flow. He invented a system that used massive wires to tap into a city’s electrical grid before it arrived in a century-old building like London’s Lyceum or Paris’s Olympia. The electricity then fanned out into a network of circuits the crew could control, independent of venues with outdated infrastructure. “If the whole theatre went down,” Healy says, “we would still be on.”

No other band had done something so daunting to ensure their performance remained uninterrupted, though the practice soon became de rigueur. Such willpower defined the Grateful Dead’s 22- show marathon through Europe, where a caravan of 53 California freaks thriving on a mix of acid, hash and booze not only found a new musical apotheosis but also reinvented perceptions of what a tour could be, how it could operate, and just what it could produce.

The Dead’s European debut proper represented a fortuitous confluence of preparation, circumstance, and what some on hand called magic. They had more than a half-dozen new songs to test on-stage with an inchoate line-up that included two keyboardists, only one drummer (after years with two), and a Southern soul singer. Two years after the release of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, they synthesized their roots impulses with the electrified wonder of their past and future. Inspired by scenery of ancient castles and verdant landscapes, they were simultaneously comforted and entertained by two busloads of family, friends, and employees they’d brought along for what guitarist Bobby Weir called a “working vacation”. They even had the foresight to record it all with emerging technology.

Indeed, less than six months after the tour ended, the Dead released a two-hour distillation of what they accomplished overseas, simply dubbed Europe ’72, that went double-platinum.