JPG: With all these, for lack of a better word, “rules” in there about not repeating songs from “Europe ’72” or use songs that were included in previous releases, did it make creating “Volume 2” easier or harder to put together?
DL: Neither. It was a unique set of challenges and that was all. There’s so much other good music. It certainly was never a case of scrambling and it was the kind of thing where if we come across a “Cumberland Blues” and think, “Gee, I wish we could have put that on there, but there’s already…” But you know what? The best version of “Cumberland Blues” from the tour is already on the original album, though it didn’t bother us at all. The only thing that really did was for the most part every “Other One” on the tour came out of “Truckin’,” which was already on the original album. So, putting another one on disc two was problematic. And likewise, most of the “Dark Star”s went into “Sugar Magnolia,” which was also on there. So that was a problem.
Luckily, Bickershaw [Festival] had the “Dark Star”>”Other One” but it didn’t have either a “Truckin‘” or a “Sugar Mag” attached to it. And it was something we wanted to get out anyways. So the “Dark Star”>“Other One” [at Bickershaw] in terms of the jams, that was one of the top two or three jams of the entire tour. The fact that it didn’t have a “Truckin‘” or a “Sugar Mag” was like that perfect storm where you say, “Well, great! This is a script writing itself where this is a thing we wanted to get out and we don’t have to deal with the limitations.”
JPG: You used Stanley Mouse for the “Europe ’72 Volume 2” cover. Makes sense since he did the original one. Was it easy or difficult to get him to do this?
DL: Rhino has an excellent relationship with Mouse. So, it seemed like a natural fit to have him do the cover for Volume 2, which he was very happy to do. We were all happy with what he came up with, and he was very open to suggestions. However, working with an artist of Stanley’s talents and history, we very much let him do his thing and were thrilled with the results. Working with Mouse is a trip, as he has a knack for delivering the perfect piece of art for any given project.
Working with Mouse is fun, as he presents a series of ideas in rough sketch form, and we all agree —Rhino and Mouse — on what’s the right one for this project. Then, a little while later, out appears the finished art, perfectly executed. I didn’t think there was much coaxing involved. Rather, everyone thought it was a good idea. I believe Stanley is still very busy. You can check his web site, www.mousestudios.com, to see what he’s up to, and the breadth of his work.
JPG: Also, I saw a photo of Bob and Phil with what looked like a backstage ceremony in relation to Europe ’72. It featured what looked like approximately a dozen or so Mouse designs on it. Are those related to the box set? Any chance of those being available in some other manner such as t-shirts or posters?
DL: That Bob and Phil photo was taken backstage at the Greek in LA on October 5th, 2011 at the Furthur show during the set break where they were receiving their RIAA-certified gold records for the Europe ‘72 boxed set. It had been certified gold a couple of weeks earlier. The small [art] designs are actually the 22 individual cover arts for the 22 shows in the box, and are the same as the 22 individual shows if bought as the music-only edition or on their own. They were done by our good friend Scott McDougall, who did the Road Trips cover art. The 22 new covers were in the style of Mouse’s original, an homage to the original artwork. We’ve been working so closely with Scott the past few years, we all felt he was the right guy to be able to deliver 22 individual album covers in a short time. And he nailed it, perfectly.
Rhino has created some great merchandise using these cover arts including shirts, magnets, posters and other cool things.
JPG: When you were solely responsible for the archives, did you always have an idea of what you were sitting on with these shows? Were there notes from [original Vault archivist] Dick Latvala, Europe ’72 tapes, 4 stars, so you knew that if you wanted to someday put the whole thing out…
DL: There weren’t…Dick definitely had his favorite shows from the tour but it was the kind of thing where if we had decided to put out Europe as a much smaller release — a 10 CD compilation or maybe the three best shows — we certainly would have looked into Dick’s notes as well as the band’s original notes. Remember, they worked very hard on the original album. They had listened to everything incredibly closely. So, there were a lot of notes from the band and some of them we did actually pay attention to for the compilation.
But when you’re putting out the whole tour it becomes…we would joke that for me, obviously, I oversee a lot of aspects of the audio, of the transfers, the packaging and that kind of thing, but when you’re doing a complete tour some of the usual challenges, which is, “Well, which show are we going to pick?” or “Which versions of..?” we didn’t have those challenges because we did the whole tour. It’s the kind of thing where if we’d released these shows and people said, “Oh, they should have done these.” Well, we didn’t have that.
The only thing on the compilation we certainly did pay attention to were the band’s notes about versions that they liked back in 1972, which is to say songs, they considered for the original album but didn’t make the cut. Some of those ended up on Volume 2. Virtually everything that they wanted on that original album ended up on there with the exception of three songs. And those now ended up on Volume 2. So, we’re very happy to get those out.
JPG: I read that when you originally brought up this project Rhino was not too excited.
DL: I think perplexed. “Is this guy for real?” I, generally, bring a fair amount of credibility and rationality to the table and in this case I kind of got the look of, “Man, is he crazy?” It wasn’t even like a passionate argument from anyone except for me wanting to do it. I think it was very dismissive, and you know this goes back to early 2007 when I was started pitching this. Fortunately, I kept pitching it a couple of times a year when we would have our idea sessions. “Well, what do we want to do over the next 18 months?” That’s what we generally do. We kind of map out things, maybe not specific shows as we were talking about earlier with the Dave’s Picks but we do know that we want four Dave’s Picks in 2012. We map this stuff out 12 to 18 months in advance. Whenever we’d have these sessions, which were a couple times a year, I would always bring this up, “You know if you really want that major release. I think it would blow some minds, and it’s great music. This is the one to do.”
What had happened was we did the Fillmore West box set, 10 CDs. And then we did Winterland ’73, Winterland ’77 and the Warlocks. In the course of these, it became very clear that there was an interest in complete runs of shows of nine, 10 CDs, seven, six CDs, whatever. The natural progression from that was to do a complete tour. If there is a complete tour to do it is Europe ’72 to start with. There are definitely others. If you start something you should start with a bang. I’m not a big fan of soft launches. I’m of the mind where I don’t want to sit on things because…”Well, we’ll start with something of lesser interest and then we’ll build up.” I don’t ascribe to that. I figure if we’re going to ever try this, just as when we started it with complete runs… that’s why we started with the Fillmore West because that’s the best complete run we had and we wanted to test the waters with that. And clearly it was popularly received as was Winterland in’73, ’77 and Warlocks.
So, the natural progression from complete shows to complete runs is complete tours and Europe was the one. It wasn’t like I was just randomly throwing this out there. I made a very rational case of why Europe ’72 would be a good project to do this with.
Then in 2010, luckily, a very senior person at Rhino agreed. He said, “You know what? This is a great one.” And then, there were some changes at Rhino around the summer of 2010 right as this project was getting rolling and the new person, Mark Pinkus at Rhino in charge of the Dead world, he was 100%. He was a Deadhead too. He was completely on board with it. It literally took a couple of conversations with him to, I won’t even say convince, he was convinced. But he just wanted the rationale behind it and the overall vision of how I’ve been envisioning this over the last three years. Once he got that, he championed it. He pushed it through at Rhino and he said, “This is absolutely a great project.”
What it came down to is Mark and myself having faith in it. It was nothing more. Nobody was heavy-handed with it or anything. We just had faith that this is what people would want. And it wasn’t like we were proven right and somebody was proven wrong. It wasn’t that at all. It was just, sometimes, when you just have faith in something and you know what you’re doing, you’ll be rewarded. And clearly, I think Rhino feels that way, having faith in this to the point that we’re already beginning to look at another big complete run. Hopefully, we’ll get something else in the next 18 months.
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