On Surfing, Exploring, and Finding Meaning

I don't think I'll ever really surf, but William Finnegan's Barbarian Days contains everything there is to know about surfing without ever having to surf, which isn't really the point. The point of Finnegan's book is to tell a life through surfing adventures. Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer.

I could relate to Finnegan's surfing life through my love of hiking. Like hiking, surfing is monomaniacal and anti-social. It can be so all-engrossing that nothing else matters. You drift through the work week, looking forward to nothing but getting away and doing it again. In a world increasingly devoid of meaning, surfing for Finnegan and hiking for me offer a new way to see the world.

Like hiking, surfing can be both hyper-local and a way to explore the entire globe. You could spend your whole life at one spot, getting to know it throughout the seasons, and seeing how it changes in response to natural and human-made changes. Or, you could go on a wild international adventure to far-flung places like Fiji, Australia, and Madeira, places that Finnegan learns by surfing, which gives him a unique view both at an ecological level and at a community level by meeting people there directly and indirectly involved with surfing. Surfing takes Finnegan to apartheid South Africa, an experience that marks him, as he becomes a reporter in zones of conflict, like El Salvador where, of course, he also surfs.

Finnegan is slow to reveal himself as a surfer to his reporter friends because he's afraid that people won't take him seriously, but what the reader gets from this book is how deeply you get into the world by surfing.

Like hiking, or anything else worth really doing--fishing, music, art, cooking--you could spend your entire life and never really master how to surf, to predict how waves will perform in a given situation. Jerry Seinfeld, who claims he will be doing stand-up comedy into his 80s compared himself to surfers, and nails the pursuit so well: "What are they doing this for? It's just pure. You're alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You're always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you're going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form." It's this brief, meaningless art form that keeps Finnegan surfing well into his sixties as he writes.

Finnegan describes his surfing adventures with a Broadway dancer, who sums up the art and that searching aspect to surfing in a comparison to dancing: "With music as with waves [...] you are 'yielding to something more powerful than yourself.'"

When I hike, I'm also yielding to higher powers. You're at the mercy of the elements, which is a really pure feeling, in comparison to so much of the rest of my waking life in front of a screen in a temperature-controlled office.

On the surface, surfing, for Finnegan, and hiking, for myself, are an escape. But they're much more than escapes. They're a deep search for that meaning and connection to something more powerful. Connection to the planet. To the earth's processes and its life. To a spirit with higher meaning. As with music, I yield to the earth's higher powers.

The search for waves for any surfer is a great exploration. Surfers dig in deep like mad scientists. As Finnegan notes, "All surfers are oceanographers, and in the area of breaking waves all are engaged in advanced research. Surfers don't need to be told that when a wave breaks actual water particles, rather than simply the waveform, begin to move forward. They are busy figuring out more arcane relationships, like the one between tide and consistency, or swell direction and nearshore bathymetry. The science of surfers is not pure, obviously, but heavily applied. The goal is to understand, for the purpose of riding them, what the waves are doing, and especially what they are likely to do next. But waves dance to an infinitely complex tune. To a surfer sitting in the lineup trying to decipher the structure of a swell, the problem can indeed present itself musically. Are these waves approaching in 13/8 time, perhaps, with seven sets an hour, and the third wave of every set swinging wide in a sort of dissonant crescendo? Or is this swell one of God's jazz solos, whose structure is beyond our understanding? When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I've been reduced on certain magnificent days [...] to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam."

Finnegan creates a haunting picture of how a place can change over time. In the pre-Internet days, armed with only ocean charts, he and a friend go on a wild search for waves throughout the South Seas in places like Samoa and Fiji. Listening to weather reports, guessing when swells would hit, and looking at the bathymetric charts, they attempt to find a spot and how guess how sets would hit it in order to create ridable waves. During "the search," a 2-year quest for the perfect wave in the South Seas, a "two-dimensional chart suddenly became a multidimensional vision of ridable waves. You could isolate half a dozen factors on the chart alone. But studying charts of places we had never even seen? We were flying blind. This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Baston, the great oceanographer, who wrote in Waves and Beaches, 'This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.'" Finnegan and his partner find the ultimate location by hitching rides with fishermen and comparing notes with yachters. A remote island. Tavarua, in Fiji. Filled with deadly sea snakes, they use bonfires to communicate with the fishermen who gave them a ride to the island. They spend several weeks in this paradise surfing the best, most consistent waves of their lives.

Years later, a surf mag falls in Finnegan's lap and there is the wave that probably only a handful of people had surfed before them. They learn that the island had been bought by Californian entrepreneurs who created an exclusive surf resort where guests pay thousand of dollars to have a wave to themselves. Finnegan's travel partner is especially sick to his stomach upon hearing the news and vows never to return. But decades later, Finnegan goes to the resort and finds the wave has changed a bit but there's an even better wave that you can only get to with a power boat supplied by the resort. These sorts of changes are constant throughout Finnegan's surfing life, as he witnesses waves literally ruined by the crowds, and the same goes for any other sacred places. There are so few of them left--we see trailheads for hikes that look like the parking lot of a Walmart. At least people are out and not staring like zombies at their screens. But we're seeing a breaking point. When you put too many rats in a cage or too many fish in an aquarium, you see the stress levels rise, bullies emerge, causing even more stress. Surfers and hikers and other outdoor recreationists are the first to see that we need more open space. And yet still we as a society build more malls and more McMansions, which are the last things we need.

It's important to note how fickle waves are--just like life, which can be senselessly cruel: "Here's how ridable waves form. A storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chop--smaller and then larger disorganized wavelets, which amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What we are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm, radiating outward into calmer waters in the form of wave trains--groups of waves, increasingly organized, that travel together. Each wave is a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the surface. All the wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. The swell. The swell can travel thousands of miles. The powerful the storm, the farther the swell may travel. As it travels, it  becomes more organized--the distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, increases. In a long-interval train, the orbiting energy in each wave may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like chop or other smaller, shallower swells that it crosses or overtakes."

Surfing is a life and life is surfing for a surfer. Finnegan describes his time with an oncologist in San Francisco who is obsessed with the huge waves at Ocean Beach, an unlikely spot for surfing, where the frigid water numbs body parts and the waves literally crush human beings. The oncologist makes an important observation that he's not as interested in cancer as he is in people's response to it: "A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can't afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I'm really interested in is the human spirit--in how people react to stress and adversity. I'm fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface." This is how Finnegan fights through his life and how the oncologist surfer lives, surfing the enormous waves in the City by the Bay. It's not by living the fake smiling, superficial conversations. It's about a deep search that never ends.

On the set of a Western noir

On the "Trail to Hell" near Republic, Washington. Near the location of the Strawberry and Nc'cin wolf packs. Perfect location for a long chase on horseback, a wild animal encounter, or a hot hike.

The Tiffany Highlands: A Corridor

The Tiffany Highlands cosy up to the Canadian Rockies in a relatively large roadless area that includes a vast zone of dry coniferous forest dominated by Ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, and Engelmann spruce part of the Okanogan National Forest.

Washington state's big-sky country provides an abrupt transition zone that encompasses the eastern flank of the rocky, glaciated Cascades and the beginnings of the high desert that spreads further east. Roadless and wild, its forests are only disturbed by fire.

The Tiffany Highlands meadows support reclusive and rarely seen lynx, wolverines and grizzlies.



A large mule deer, but no large predator sightings to report, we did however see large patches of lupine, Indian paintbrush, krummholz (densely matted trees stunted by wind and snow), a couple of boletes, honey mushrooms, the grasses and sedges that grizzly like to forage through, and juniper. From our panoramic view from the peak of Tiffany mountain, we could see the British Columbia's Snowy Peak, the glaciated peaks of the North Cascades, the Pasayten peaks, Loup Loup Pass, and a wonderful expanse of high alpine forest tundra mixed in with a high-desert feel.

























The Tiffany Highlands are an important corridor, both for large and rare predators, in addition to the unique flora and fauna that tend to thrive in these roadless places. Other major corridors include northern Idaho, where the Selkirk mountains cross over from rugged British Columbia.

Being in a corridor is inspiring--it gives hope that there are places on this planet still relatively untouched by humans. Their ruggedness gives the impression that they are places to visit and not dwell.

Because they're roadless, these corridors are lonely places. They're some of the last places in this country where you can truly see stars. (When we camp on the west side of the Cascades, for example, our star viewing is still impaired by light pollution from the Vancouver suburbs.) Even as seemingly wide open as the West is, still the furthest you can travel without hitting a road is something under 50 miles.




Here in the Tiffany Highlands, we ventured into roadless territory, just scratching the surface of roadlessness. But we could get a sense of the loneliness, which is the draw for us.

Roadless places, like the Tiffany Highlands, are so rugged and rare that one hopes they'll never be permanently inhabited by humans.

As human populations continue to grow, corridors and that unique flora and fauna that either dwell in them or just pass through disappear. And it doesn't just affect the grizzlies. Because there are too many of us, we've built upon the corridors, squeezing them ever narrower. Bringing terrible ethical considerations when it comes to fire. It's healthier for forests if we just let them burn. The fires clean up the debris and the overcrowding underbrush, allowing bigger, healthier trees to survive and thrive. But people build their vacation homes in places they shouldn't. Because they want their homes to be safe, like everybody else, these homeowners want fire suppression. Which makes the next fires even worse. When it hasn't been maintained by a regular routine of natural forest fires, the out-of-control underbrush explodes like a tinder box . But we continue building. The more we build, the more we squeeze the corridors ever narrower, creating even worse fires for the next year.




The corridors bring up another ethical question. According to a recent poll, most people in the Pacific Northwest would like to see the grizzly re-introduced into the North Cascades. I, too, would love to see the grizzly re-introduced here. And probably much moreso than the cardboard coffee-drinking polite happy talk people in places like Mulkiteo. I just wonder how much other information was presented. Because one needs to ask oneself: "Where the hell are we going to put these grizzlies?" East-West highways, like the I-90 and the beautiful Highway 20 that we all love driving on, make it very difficult, if not impossible, for large predators to move north-south along the Cascade crest. Nobody knows how many grizzlies use that corridor, but the 8 or 9 grizzlies that probably currently walk through the border to the U.S. side of the Cascades using the corridor, barely have room to themselves.

Daily, thousands of Subarus criss-cross the North Cascades, driven by well-meaning butterfly netters who think it'd be cool to see a grizzly while hiking but have no idea of what it's really like to run into a grizzly, which isn't to say I'm paranoid about running into a grizzly (one of the most heart-stoppingly amazing experiences one can have in the wild), I'd just like to minimize those experiences for the bears' sake.

Given vegetation and habitat needs, brown bears in this part of the world need something like 250 square miles each. I'd love to see grizzlies one day have this space to themselves again. And given potential political realities, maybe we'll eradicate ourselves from existence, leaving the bears and wolverines more than just a corridor to wander through. But before we have this re-introduction, we need to ask ourselves about just how much space are we willing to cede or at least come to grips with the noxious consequences we bring both intentionally and unintentionally to creatures like grizzlies when we encroach on their space. The human population will need education, in addition to a come-to-Jesus moment in which we realize that when we build vacation homes, when we procreate, we are encroaching on space that's shared with other animals. To establish ourselves too deeply, as we have, would mean continued extirpation of species over time or at the very least greatly reduce genetic diversity, as animals can no longer pass from one viable habitat to another. Which is fine, if that's what we want. We just to have balance in these considerations, weigh them in our priorities, and recognize that everything we do has consequences.

When we venture into these ethical questions of large predator populations and how they mix with humans, and how they use land and the corridors through which they travel, we have to weigh so many variables that are seen from so many different stakeholders' points of view. In the case of corridors, like the Tiffany Highlands, these perspectives cross international, state and other local jurisdictions' boundaries (parks, wilderness areas, recreation areas). We have to weigh in on natural resource extraction, impacts caused by recreation, among other impacts we have on this planet just by breathing. There are so many interest groups and their respective constituencies to consider that it almost becomes mind-boggling that we are able to co-inhabit places with animals like grizzlies or wolves, let alone consider the possibility of re-introducing these animals in places where they will more frequently run across human beings. There are no neat and tidy answers. The only thing we should know, and this is the only thing I can say with any certainty about every piece of knowledge I've gained in close to 40 years of existence and it goes for questions of predator re-introduction or climate change or land conservation or any real decision we make as human beings and I bold it to completely emphasize the only thing that I know for certain in this life and the only thing I'd really like to share with my fellow human beings: Every action we take as human beings, even with our best of intentions, is fraught with more problems for us to sort out.

The view from the precipice

Microcosms

There’s a feeling you get about an hour, hour-and-a-half into a steep hike. As you breathe, so does the world around you. Pulsating, taking on new shapes and colors, shapes and colors that were already there but take on new meaning as you travel deeper. The trees come alive. Clearly, they were alive before, except for the snags, but they might talk to you. Not necessarily in a speaking voice, but it’s like you have a telepathic connection with the trees, the plants, the tiny beetle digging through the dirt.

Frequently, I find myself lying down in the forest. There’s something that happens with depth of focus. If your eyes were a camera lens, they’d have a really wide aperture. That small beetle, the dirt, the undercover becomes a world within itself. You can see that there are many worlds in one when you lie down and hold your gaze at a pocket of ferns, which becomes a copse of large jungle trees when your eyes are 3 inches from the ground. If you focus with even more intensity, you can watch the ants climb up the branches of this pocket of ferns, which becomes like an Ewok village.



The sound of water from a small creek trickles in the background and may come to the foreground. With our senses in a hyper-sensitive state, perception changes.Look closer.

Europe '72: Just Exactly Perfect

When I was 16, Europe '72-- in my time a 2-CD album  (but originally a triple LP) of selected recordings from their 22-concert 1972 Spring tour of Europe--was what made me "get on the bus" with the Grateful Dead.

Going through the 70-plus disc box set with pristine recordings of all 22 shows from that spring tour,  I realized why while listening to the "China Cat Sunflower --> I Know You Rider" from the May 3rd show at the Olympia Theater in Paris. This sequence made it onto the original album, and it's no wonder why. The "China-->Rider" sequence is definitive Dead--a really groovy but idiosyncratic baroque folk-psychedelic tune that magically blends into pure Americana, a song from the mining days in California, a 49-er miner tune, all about those lonesome San Francisco blues. There's a segue in between that stretches all of what's beautiful and good about American music, covering the best of bluegrass and Jazz and blues and everything in between. At the time when I first listened to the Europe '72 album, I was schooled in Jazz, played in the high school jazz band and was really digging improvisational music, loving cats like Coltrane, Monk and Miles. I listened to a lot of classical music growing up, too, which schooled me in impeccable attention to detail with my ear, and I remember spending hours on end listening to the freewheeling ragtime Scott Joplin on family road trips. The 10-minute "China-->Rider" sequence covered all of these musical interests but added so much more.

Europe '72 is the tour of perfect contrasts that define the Grateful Dead:

Tight-Loose
Mellow-Intense
Simple-Complex
Rocking-Introspective
Technical Chops--Freewheeling instinct
Rowdy-Intellectual
Based on standard classics of American music (blues, R&B, country, Jazz)--Totally original
Rooted-Experimental
Ragged-Refined
Loud-Quiet
Folk-Modern
Americana--Stockhausen-like Euro-classical with Chopin-esque frills
Spacey-Ripping
Utterly and completely Californian to the core--Utterly and completely infused with numerous other cultures

All of these above contrasts, I think, define my own interests and personality, so Europe '72 is a very personal album. I'm gonna spend some time and go in depth here figuring out what it was that made it so special and why it's important to me...

Without letting their egos get in the way, the Grateful Dead were as loose and as tight as it gets.

Before listening to all 22 shows from spring '72, I was under the mistaken impression that the original album was made up of the greatest hits from the tour. And yes, the album contains the high points very well, but it turns out that the entire tour was a greatest hit. There were so many truly groundbreaking musical sequences that were never officially released until 2011 when the Grateful Dead made quite a bold move, unheard of at the time, of releasing a single offering/recording of an entire tour. All 22 shows. On 70-plus CDs.

I spent a lot of time going through some other great, great shows during the time it took to go through all 22 shows--particularly enjoyed the new release of the 7/8/78 Red Rocks show, which is a top 5 show. But immediately after finishing Red Rocks, I put on the end of May 3rd, 1972 Paris, and well, it reminded me that all 22 shows on the '72 Europe tour are Top 3 shows, which makes my math a little off, but it's my tribute to Spinal Tap mathematics.

What's special about the  '72 Europe tour is that the band is just glowing--it's like they're literally levitating they're so high on the music they're playing. Listening again, with headphones on and attention to detail, there are so many little things that I appreciate. And rather than go show-by-show, blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute, like this forum does very well, with in-depth analyses of the jams, I'm going to try to answer the questions: Why was this tour so special and what mark did it have on me? And just why was the band so on fire at this time, even moreso than during other times in their career?

Here is a band at the peak of their art and really at the peak of all art ever created, riding the crest of a wave that doesn't break for 22 concerts.

The first obvious explanation to why the band is on fire is that the new environs inspired them. Getting out of their usual space helped them discover something new about themselves. In Lille, France, Dead-ologist Dennis McNally notes: "For [bassist] Phil [Lesh] especially, it was one of the truly spectacular experiences of a lifetime, as though for an hour or two he lived inside a Seurat or a Cezanne." As it was for Hemingway, France was a seminal moment for Phil and it shows in the music, as Phil is consistently inspired throughout the tour. Hemingway writes in his memoir of the inspiration he also felt in France and his time in Europe. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone." In his journals from his time in Europe, later published posthumously as A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes that he worked every day and if he got stuck, he told himself to "write one true sentence." The Europe '72 tour was a culmination of this important thesis. Stuck, with lots of difficulty re-creating in a recording studio the folk-baroque psychedelic music they were known for in concert in the late 60s, the Dead returned to their folk roots with their 1970 albums American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. American Beauty, in particular, was that "one true sentence." That album's songs were developed in concert, molded and polished down, perfected in time for the spring '72 European tour. And there we have peak perfection: Start simple. With the basics. Explore from there. Don't forget where you started, but don't forget to take us further. Easier said than done. And when it worked out, as Bob Weir would say when the tech crew would fix a problem on the stage, it was "just exactly perfect." Obviously, nothing in this world is perfect, but when the Dead were on, like they were for the entire Europe '72 tour, it was just exactly perfect. They make their transition from baroque psychedelia to Americana, and this is the moment that the Grateful Dead go from being a short-lived, flash-in-the-pan meteor just passing by to becoming an absolutely timeless classic American band. They etched themselves into the collective American soul.

Europe '72 is really when the band hit that perfect blend of country/western + space jazz, typified by that transition to a more Americana sound. The "China-Rider" I describe in paragraph 2 really epitomizes this transition. This blend is why I love their music, a perfect amalgamation of my own musical interests...jazz and country, slight bend of experimental classical music + space exploration. Americana at its finest. That the band could turn on a dime after a monstrous exploratory space jazz sequence and then suddenly do something like Hank Williams' "You Win Again," almost better than Hank did it, is testament to a band that is just on fire. A perfect example of this ability to move through a variety of genres (though you could point to just about anything on the tour) is the 5/24 "Other One," just blistering, jazzy, atonal, wild, percussive, rocking, all at the same, and then after 30 minutes of musical madness, it just dissolves into a perfect version of Merle Haggard's country gospel tune "Sing Me Back Home," a song that defines the Grateful Dead ethos of redemption, salvation, forgiveness, karma, reincarnation. The Dead take us from deep Appalachia to Mississippi to Memphis to Detroit to Chicago to San Francisco to Germany and back.

Beyond the new environs, musically there are some unique forces that come together during the Europe '72 tour. Though the band as a whole was what made this time so great, individual performances were also really important.

If we could single out one musical aspect of the Dead that makes their work special, beyond their cohesive, group-mind think, it's the interplay between Jerry and Phil, which reaches a pinnacle on "The Other One" from the last night in London, with Billy playing the best drums of his life. The second most interesting musical aspect is Bobby's idiosyncratic rhythm guitar playing, which is extremely colorful and energetic. He is to Jerry as McCoy Tyner was to John Coltrane--there is no number one, like Jerry, without a number two, and Bobby put his ego aside to compliment Jerry so well. Bobby has finally completely emerged as a leader in '72 and it takes pressure off Jerry and Phil musically and Pigpen frontman-wise. It wasn't just his playing improving, Bobby's confidence is high, and it freed Jerry and Phil up to do more exciting things. Bobby also is like the glue that holds them together. I really love the sounds Bobby was getting at this time with that beautiful Gibson ES-345 guitar and believe that at no other time in his Grateful Dead career did he play so wonderfully with such a great jazzy sound--he had just this jangly jazz vibe to his rhythm guitar playing that to me is the essence of classic Grateful Dead.

I love the Gibson wide body ES-345 guitar that Bob Weir was using during the '72 tour. He just gets a perfect jangly, jazzy rhythm guitar sound  that pairs well with Jerry's lead.

The song that makes Bob and sorta tells his story is "Playing in the Band." I don't know if this is true, but I've felt that "Playing in the Band" was Bobby's way of saying, after being kicked out of the band in '67, that he was proud to just be "playing." He gleefully sings, "I can't stop for nothing/ I'm just playing in the band." For Bobby, it was always about the music. And still is. At 68, he's still leading band members on tours around the country and is showing no signs of slowing down--it's his eagerness to keep playing and this song's childlike enthusiasm that is really an anthem for him, for music, for the band, and oh the deliciously spacey, jazzy jams that this song could produce, especially at this time. Each of the 22 versions from the Europe tour of "Playing in the Band" crescendos into a torrent of beauty, each band member a finger on the hand that plays the music. 

Jerry is unquestionably at the height of his powers during the Europe '72 tour. He is wonderful throughout the mid-70s, playing particularly well in late '73 with the Dead and as a banjoist with his bluegrass band Old & In the Way and his own Jerry Garcia Band in the mid-70s, but this wonderful period starts in the Spring of '72. It would not be hyperbolic to state that he was eclipsing even the likes of Hendrix at this time. Band manager at the time Rock Scully in his biography wrote that in his spare time between concerts, particularly at this time, Jerry would spend his tour money on...ice cream and Fender chord books. So that even between shows that lasted 3 to 4 hours, and Jerry would also play pedal steel for the New Riders, who opened a lot of these shows for the Dead, he would spend his spare time practicing.

Like Jerry, or anybody else that plays American music, I was rooted in the blues, but like Jerry, it was also a more chromatic version of the blues, and much more than just an emphasis on the flatted 7th and 3rd. It was really about the notes between the notes.There are so many solos he plays where he is just burning and doesn't want to stop, yet due to his shyness and thankfully his good taste, he does stop. He was never a show-off. He always leaves you wanting more.

Some time in college, when I played baritone sax in the Jazz band, my Jazz professor, a Grammy winner, said something to me to the effect of "Kendall, I like the way how when you solo you hit a wide range--low, middle, and high registers." This was easily the best, most meaningful, authoritative and clearly most memorable of any compliment I ever received as a Jazz musician. And I think this effort at getting a wide range, in all registers, came from hours of listening to Jerry, who also covered all of the registers so well. He hit the high notes, the mid range, and could also move real fast through the lower notes, without ever really wearing out any notes--his playing was so chromatic. He never reverted to lazy, cliche licks, especially during this tour.

Just as Europe '72 was how I discovered the Grateful Dead, Phil was my entry point. When I put on headphones and listened to what Phil and Bobby, too, were doing, I could hear how good the whole band was. There are better bass players, but what Phil did was break trail. It's easier to follow a beaten path, but Phil broke trail on a whole new way of playing bass--more like a cello in a baroque quartet than the bottom rhythm line typical of most (boring) rock bands. Phil, if he had been born at another time and in another place, would have made a perfect concert cellist in a hip baroque quartet. Or, as a pure jazz player, like a Scott LaFaro in the Bill Evans Trio. His approach to the bass, from his classical music training, is amplified by the big woody bass sound he gets from that Alembic bass that he was playing at the time.

You can't tell me that Phil in another life was not a virtuoso cellist.He just has that nerdy librarian cellist look.

For a brief time in the history of the Dead, we have the  beautiful interplay between Keith on acoustic piano and Pigpen on organ, which only really happens during these brief two months in the 30-year existence of the Grateful Dead. This double-barrel shotgun (acoustic piano-organ) adds a special punch that later '72 shows don't offer, as Pigpen was unable to tour with the Dead after the Europe tour. I also really like the Fall of '72 tour, but with Pigpen's health not letting him tour, his organ and his presence are missing. Many Deadheads regard 8/27/72 from Veneta, Oregon as a top 5 show, but it's without Pigpen and his organ, and so I'll put all 22 of these Europe shows in the top 3 of all Dead shows, because Pigpen not only contributes so much with  his organ, but his heartfelt deep feeling of the music. Because even though he was sicker than a dog and about to die on the Europe '72 tour, Pigpen was also at his very best with a couple of several new-at-the-time songs he wrote--the infectious "Chinatown Shuffle" and "Mister Charlie" and his haunting, tear-jerker "The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)".

Europe '72 is all about Keith coming together and gelling with the band and adding so much color. He can be Cecil Taylor-ish on the "Dark Stars" with transitional flights that are spellbinding that really add a lot to the sound. He's also a rambling, gambling saloon player on songs like "Loser." He's a honky-tonk blues player on the Pigpen tunes. Keith is starting to find his powers here in his beginnings playing with the band. I really love the acoustic piano sound here, too. Later, the band stopped touring with a full piano, which is a shame.

Bill Kreutzmann on drums, as Phil Lesh noted, "played like a young god on this tour. I mean, he was everywhere on the drums, and just kickin' our butts every which way, which is what drummers live to do, you know." And what better compliment could a drummer get. His set-up was so simple, which is what made it good---a high hat, a bass drum, a snare, some cymbals, a few toms. The greatest compliment that I could pay to Bill the drummer is that he was not driven by ego, like so many bad drummers. He knew how to follow the music, drive it, infuse it with energy, and color it, without taking over. A perfect example is his Elvin Jones-esque playing on the 5/4 "Dark Star," a very jazzy, complex 40 minutes of improvisation that Bill drives without dominating. In a recent interview, Bill talks about first seeing Jerry Garcia play in a jug band with Bob Weir and Robert Hunter before they became the Grateful Dead. And he said to himself about Jerry, "I'm going to follow him forever." And that Billy did. And what a smart man, because he saw the magic and the excitement in life and that brilliant ability to totally encompass everybody around him that Jerry had. And what a great decision to follow Jerry for some 30 years.

A simple, no-frills drum set for a drummer who was playing "like a young god" according to Phil.

Another aspect of the Dead's playing that comes together in Spring '72 is the programmatic work that would eventually be the Dead's standard formula for concerts for the 22 years of the rest of their career. Developed and perfected on the European tour, I would summarize as follows:

1st set: Garcia/Hunter and Weir/Hunter and Weir/Barlow standards peppered with tasty covers like Hank Williams' "You Win Again" or cowboy songs like the Mamas and the Papas' "Me and My Uncle," a song like "Tennessee Jed," the perfect song for an afternoon buzz right after a beer and a half in the hot sun (see Munich for a good version)>Warm-up Jam like "Playing in the Band" and/or "Good Lovin,'" almost always closing the first set with "Casey Jones"
2nd set: Standards again to warm up>Jam Sequence (averaging 57 minutes on tour; see chart below)>Spiritual Ballad (i.e., "Wharf Rat" or "Sing Me Back Home">Closing sequence of high-energy rockers like "Not Fade Away"

Date	Venue	Jam Length in minutes	Jam Sequence
4/7/72	Wembley Empire Pool: London	57	Truckin' >Drums>Other One>El Paso>Other One>Wharf Rat
4/8/72	Wembley Empire Pool: London	58	Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Caution (Do Not Step On The Tracks)
4/11/72	Newcastle City Hall	57	Truckin'>Drums>Other One>Comes A Time
4/14/72	Tivoli Gardens: Copenhagen	65	Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Good Lovin'>Caution(Do Not Stop On The Tracks)>Good Lovin'
4/16/72	Stakladen: Aarhus University	53	Truckin'>Jam>Other One>Me and My Uncle>Other One>Not Fade Away>Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad>Not Fade Away
4/17/72	Tivoli Gardens: Copenhagen	66	Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Caution>Johnny B. Goode
4/21/72	Beat Club Bremen (TV performance)	33	Truckin'>Drums>Other One
4/24/72	Rheinhalle: Dusseldorf	61	Dark Star>Me and My Uncle>Dark Star>Wharf Rat>Sugar Magnolia
4/26/72	Jahrhundert Halle: Frankfurt	69	Truckin'>Drums>Other One>Comes A Time>Sugar Magnolia
4/29/72	Musikhalle: Hamburg	58	Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Caution
5/3/72	Olympia Theater: Paris	62	Truckin'>Other One>Drums>Other One>Me and Bobby McGee>Other One>Wharf Rat
5/4/72	Olympia Theater: Paris	47	Dark Star>Drums>Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia
5/7/72	Bickershaw Festival: Wigan, England	65	Dark Star>Drums>Other One>Sing Me Back Home
5/10/72	Concertbegouw: Amsterdam	62	Truckin'>Drums>Other One>Me and Bobby McGee>Other One>Wharf Rat
5/11/72	Rotterdam Civic Hall	87	Dark Star>Drums>Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Caution>Who Do You Love?>Truckin'>Uncle John's Band
5/13/72	Lille Fairgrounds	50	Truckin'>Drums>Other One>He's Gone
5/16/72	Radio Luxembourg	34	Truckin'>Drums>Other One
5/18/72	Kongressal: Munich	40	Dark Star>Morning Dew
5/23/72	Lyceum Theater: London	42	Dark Star>Morning Dew
5/24/72	Lyceum Theater: London	54	Truckin'>Drums>Other One>Sing Me Back Home
5/25/72	Lyceum Theater: London	61	Uncle John's Band>Wharf Rat>Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia
5/26/72	Lyceum Theater: London	71	Truckin'> Epilogue> The Other One> Drums> The Other One> Prelude-> Morning Dew> The Other One> Sing Me Back Home
	Average Length of Jam (minutes)	57

Without question, the two months of the Europe '72 tour contain some of the best jams the Dead ever did. I'm defining Jam as an uninterrupted sequence of collective improvisation usually touching on and developing a set of musical themes, sometimes formless, other times shaped by the band's songs (i.e., "Truckin'" frequently "Dark Star"). The jam could be the music between the "words," but I include the entire medley of songs uninterrupted rather than just the 40 minutes of music that pass between the words, for example, on the 5/11 "Dark Star." The jams could otherwise be segmented by recognized patterns--some of the themes were given "unofficial" names by Deadheads. For example:

Feelin' Groovy inspired by and reminiscent of the rhythm/melody from a Paul Simon song of the same name,
Spanish Jam, inspired by Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain album, which was originally inspired by the works of Spanish composers like Rodrigo,
Mud Love Buddy and Mind Left Body  (no explanation necessary--names say it all),
Space typified by atonal spatial exploration
Feedback These are the passages that are frightening, all-enveloping sensory overload, difficult to listen to for the uninitiated, but these passages build up tension for the all-encompassing beautiful releases that made it all worth it.

I would define a good jam as having well-developed themes, seamless transitions, and good variation and/or depth in the themes. A good jam would touch or combine the segments mentioned above but take them somewhere new.

The jams from spring '72 epitomize the Americana Jam phase of the band's period and could be described as "electronic dixieland," which is how David Crosby described the band's sound. The jams, particularly from the Europe tour and I would highlight the 5/4 and 5/11 "Dark Star" and the 5/24 "Other One" jams as perfect examples, have a deep questing quality, as if the band were taking us through deep, dark forests and up huge mountains. Indeed, the band takes the songs and the audience out for a walk in the woods and it usually involves some serious off-roading. A great jam takes you through many rugged landscapes. Like a journey. Which is why I would consider the Dead great American road trip music, though never do their songs merge into the cliche. Jams are the pinnacle of the concept of tension followed by release, which is really the basis of all music and drama.

Length of Jam does not equal quality, but there is a strong correlation. Maintaining an uninterrupted stream of collective improvisation for 57 minutes is emotionally and physically exhausting, and when the jams work best is when there is a sustained flow--each theme, each thought, each note, each idea, each emotion, flowing into the next.

Taken on their own, I think we could select one of their jam sequences--for example, the "Dark Star" from Rotterdam, 5/11/72 or the 5/24 "Other One" and make it into its own experimental album. I went through the 5/11 Rotterdam "Dark Star" with headphones and can't imagine not taking the care to shut oneself  in a dark room and invest in a very nice pair of headphones to listen to something as beautifully complex as what the Dead were doing with it. To give the music the care and attention it deserves. I laid on a beach in Sitka by the totem park at sunset, 10:30-11pm on a summer solstice day and digested every second of the Rotterdam "Dark Star" jam. I couldn't have imagined what the 5/11 "Dark Star" would have been like to digest live. I'm not sure if I could have even processed its complex strangeness. I don't have a time machine, but if I did, I'd like to be with Meriwether Lewis when he first saw the Rockies or William Clark when he wrote "Ocean in view...O the joy!"in 1804 near Astoria, Oregon. And if I had a time machine, I'd like to see this entire '72 Europe tour. These things would truly melt my brain and I would make special attention to be close to the stage and follow every movement of the band on the Rotterdam "Dark Star," because oh Lord, that is the pinnacle of art.

As a side note, this particular Rotterdam "Dark Star" was the favorite of Dick Latvala, who was the original keeper of the Dead's vault of live recordings, originally released as the Dick's Picks series. On its own, this jam would eclipse a lot of the most emblematic of vanguard jazz--Miles Davis's Bitches Brew or Coltrane's A Love Supreme (not to take anything away from Coltrane or Miles because the Dead were clearly under the influence of a staggering amount of Coltrane and Miles)--or the most canonical of classical music--Beethoven's 9th, Mahler's symphonies, Mozart's sonatas. A really good jam, like this 5/11/72 "Dark Star" draws its power from both formless spiritual energy but also a rooted form and the magic happens when you can't separate the form and formlessness.

Europe '72 consists of the finest jams the Dead ever did--strong arguments could be made for Fall of '73 and summer of '74, but the magic isn't quite there, like it was in '72. Magic, to me, is that je ne sais quoi that's hard to explain but, in this case, comes from the Dead's youth--they're still new to creating this bottled energy, and you can feel in the music that their energy is also surprising the band members in the moment in which they are creating it--this happens earlier in their career with some of the magic they were creating, especially in '69 and '70, but you combine it with their improved chops that they had in '72, and it's even better. It hadn't become a "regular" thing just yet, as it would later come to define their careers.

Yet, even with the unique special-ness of the jams, what will make us remember the Dead 300 years from now is the songs, through which all jams flow. Songs like Weir/Hunter's "Jack Straw" are just about as timeless as it gets. I like how poet/lyricist Robert Hunter is listed as a band member on the Europe '72 tour albums. It would haunt Hunter that the Dead never recorded in a studio an album's worth of his timeless classics, like "Ramble on Rose," "Tennessee Jed," or "Brown-Eyed Women," whose definitive versions are those recorded live for the Europe '72 album. You can even hear the band writing a song on the road, as you can easily tell at the beginning of the tour "He's Gone" is brand new, not developed. They make several changes throughout Europe and it's not quite final (what Grateful Dead ever occurs in its "final" version?), but the last night in London version is pretty good. Though he was mainly the lyricist and the Dead were mainly known as a more musical band (rather than a lyrics-focused sort of band), Hunter was instrumental to the success of the band for the Europe '72 tour.

Europe '72 is the proof that the band had songwriting chops to put them in a category close to Lennon/McCartney. Their tunes aren't as catchy as those of The Beatles, but they do have a lasting, haunting quality. The lyrics are stories of universal truths, hard to fathom and amorphous enough to be interpreted in numerous ways. Hunter's lyrics breathed so much life into the music and clearly were an inspiration to Jerry and Bobby when they sang his words, his stories of this strange American life.

Following the Jam would usually come a spiritual ballad, something to invigorate the soul in a deep and powerful way, usually Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home" or the Hunter/Garcia standard "Wharf Rat," which many times blended into the uninterrupted jam sequence. Then would follow the  high-energy rockers (usually a sequence of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and the Dust Bowl Woody Guthrie classic "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad") and then Bobby's classic "One More Saturday Night," which seems so fitting for the Dead, because every night for them was just one more Saturday night, but they never took that Saturday night feel for granted in '72.

After 3.5 hours of music, there were several instances in which they did not perform an encore, but given the consistently high energy of these closing sequences, it's understandable. In this wonderful interview with band members and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey, the interviewer asks the band: "Why are Grateful Dead concerts so long?" Bobby replies, "The fact is we like to play together" and Jerry adds, "We're in it for the playing" (that, and of course it takes the band a long time to warm up, a frequent complaint of non-Deadheads). What beautiful responses that sum up what the band is all about. Attendees of these shows got their money's worth and then some.

Another very special ingredient to the Europe '72 tour is the wonderful venues--the famed Olympia in Paris or the Lyceum in London. It's the idea that this "new," "modern," technologically savvy band from California came in and painted these intimate woody, gaudy venues in rainbow colors, that's what's special. For example, we've got the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, an acoustically near-perfect symphony hall that hosted an orchestra and 500-voice chorus performing Bach, Handel, Beethoven and Wagner when it opened on 4/21/1888. On 5/10/1972, when the Dead played there, they performed songs by Merle Haggard, Buddy Holly, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Dixon, and others from the American music genre. Before playing "Me and My Uncle," Weir announces "Here's a song about the American West." And for a brief time, the Grateful Dead brought sunny California and all of its optimism, both a spiritual optimism and a faith in technology, to cold, gray, staid Europe.

Probably the most unique of the show venues is the April 16th show they did in a student dining hall (Stakladen) on the Aarhus University campus in Denmark. There is a wonderful description in the liner notes about how cramped the student cafeteria was with people hanging from the hall's beams that are not unlike the beams in old farmhouses (Stakladen is actually a Danish word for where straw and grain are stored, like a barn, and the student cafeteria appeared like a barn inside). 45 cafeteria tables and 400 chairs were moved aside for the show. There was no real stage in the student cafeteria, band at the same level as the audience. The proximity was common for Dead shows, as you would always see more roadies, family members, and friends on the stage at Dead shows than actual band members, but for this show, at least how it's described, there is no division between band and audience. Zero security--none required given the tight connection between band and audience. If you listen on headphones, you are right on the stage with the band. What really makes it happen is the jam sequence in Stakladen's second set, very different from the rest of the tour. Jerry and Phil have an excellent duet out of a highly energized "Truckin'," with Phil's bass really percolating and popping, pushing everybody along. Phil totally takes his bass and bass playing out to new levels on the 16-minute sequence between Truckin' and The Other One with some of the most interesting playing I've ever heard. Required listening for all Phil fans like me. The track is labeled "Jam," but I think a better name would be "Passage" because it's a journey between two songs and along the way takes us to otherworldly moonscapes. This Passage is quieter, subtler than other jam sequences from the tour. Then they segue back into a quick "Other One," singing only the first verse. It was like they were too tired to finish it but their dreamy state takes them to new places. They re-visit what they discover on this night throughout the rest of the tour with Bobby and Phil returning to the theme, developing it further in the Paris show a few weeks later (5/3/72); it sounds wonderful in Lille on 5/13, and it comes to perfection perhaps on 5/24 in London, and then just exactly perfect on the very last night in London on 5/26.

The beams on which concertgoers sat at the Stakladen show. 

One thing I wanted to check out was how the songs from the original classic album of "selections" sounded "in situ" or how they fit into the shows in which they were originally played. Like, you can tell that the "Sugar Magnolia" on the original album was preceded by a  powerful jam and you catch the last 3 notes of it, but I wanted to listen to the 40+ minute "Dark Star" that is the intro into the classic and absolutely definitive "Sugar Magnolia" on 5/4/72 from the original album. It wasn't until I was able to listen to this Paris show in its entirety did I realize how special the night was, and the 40-+ minute jazzy "Dark Star" immediately before "Sugar Magnolia" is just as good as it gets. Finally, after the very high energy, canonical "Sugar Magnolia"--with all band members just cooking, in unison, and just about as on an in sync as perfect Harlem Globetrotters team or an exquisite Baroque quartet--we hear some words from Bobby that I had been expecting to hear a lot earlier on the tour: "We're gonna take a moment and catch our breath." Considering that every night they played 3 to 4 hours of music and cover some ground in Europe, putting on a lot of miles, you'd think they'd be tired, and it isn't until this moment that Bobby cries "uncle." They catch their breath and then they plow into 45 minutes more of high-energy music to finish out one of truly the greatest Dead shows ever.

Same thing with the "Truckin'" and what was labeled "Prelude" and "Epilogue" from the original album--these were parts of a 71-minute jam that were cut to fit onto the original album. Here is why Deadheads are so big on not just releasing the highlights of a show, but the show in its entirety, something they always complain about if a show is not released with all the songs, zits and all. As they started releasing shows in their entirety, the next logical conclusion was 3-night runs. I really like the 3 nights at Winterland in SF from '77 and the 3-night run from '73. But then, an even better way to do it is an entire tour, like this Europe '72 tour. You can feel the build-up. You can witness each song, each show, in situ.

I would say that the band builds and grows throughout the tour, but show number 2 from the tour (4/8/72 in London) provides us with one of, if not the best versions of "Playing in the Band," out of all 22 versions, in addition to one of the most raucous and most developed jams in the 58-minute Dark Star>Sugar Magnolia>Caution. What a thrilling ride. But show 22 could be considered the best. The last show of the tour, at the Lyceum in London, McNally notes while the band is playing the legendary Prelude prior to "Morning Dew" that makes it onto the album, that Jerry is "playing with his back to the audience, tears streaming down his face, the music playing the band...Ecstasy on every level." There is another very special moment at the end of the first set when the band finishes another smoking version of "China-Rider" and the Lyceum crowd spontaneously starts clapping the Bo Diddley-esque rhythm of "Not Fade Away." Through headphones you can hear the band sheepishly and incredulously grin and oblige the fans by starting off into a fiery version of the song.

But what was it about the Europe '72 tour? Why so perfect? Their repertoire isn't as deep as it was in '73 and '74, let alone the rest of their career. In 1995, their repertoire consisted of 143 songs versus just 87 in '72. You could argue that the jamming was better in '74--and though I love '74 for the monstrous jams, when you re-listen to the "Dark Star" from the 5/4 Paris show (ideally with headphones) or the 5/11 Rotterdam show, which is just monumental, '72 is just as good or better. You could argue that the energy is higher in '69 and earlier with the Primal Dead, but then listen to some of the '72 closing sequences. You could say the band was tighter in '77 or '90, but you could listen to just about any of the first sets on this tour, like the Radio Luxembourg show, and you'd realize they were as tight as they ever were in their 30-year career. I like the way they were positioned on stage at this time--the band standing close together, great eye contact when needed, and all were gathered around Bill on drums.

Part of the reason the band played so tight is that they positioned themselves so tightly on stage to hear each other better

Though all the released live recordings are left as is--zits and all--with no overdubbings (how these 22 shows are presented to the listener)--the original Europe '72 album had some overdubs--they added a layer of vocal harmonies here and there and tinkered with Jerry's voice, when it was a little ragged from the road weariness. What survives is truly remarkable, with impeccable sound quality, too, given that even musical groups with more organized concert programs and music much more programmatic than the Grateful Dead's made as many mistakes or more and with less richness to their sound. The Dead, who always flew by the seat of their pants are just about flawless here. And it must be noted that they were always capable of the graceful recovery-- many times a missed chord, a flubbed vocal, an off-key harmony leads to something great. They were able to easily pardon each other's mistakes and pick up on the mistake and make something great. "Wizard," one of the Dead's recording engineers at the time, noted of one of the Dead's greatest virtues (and flaw to some), "the fact that they were willing to always take chances and embrace mistakes as possible magic." It's like woodworking or writing. It's not what you build but how you sculpt down the mistakes and weave them together to make art. No band that I can think of was better at listening to each other--rock, classical, not even Jazz, a genre which requires the musicians to be incredibly good listeners--and this is why the Dead were especially good in '72.

What's not perfect about the '72 tour is the lack of a "Bird Song" (though Phil teases it on the 5/11 "Dark Star"). Another favorite of mine, "The Wheel," hasn't debuted yet. Other favorites of mine and others hadn't been written yet, like the massive "Help On The Way">"Slipnot">"Franklin's Tower" or "They Love Each Other" or "Scarlet Begonias">"Fire On The Mountain."  Other imperfections include the lack of depth in sounds. Starting in late '75, as even addressed in the lyrics of their song "The Music Never Stopped," the band's thesis became more like a rainbow of sound, achieved through different guitar sounds, use of electric keyboard, the two drummers rather than the simpler 5-piece jazz-like set-up used by Billy on the Europe '72 tour. And now in 2016, the drummers use Mac Laptops, in addition to incredibly complex, handmade, custom-made drums and rhythmic inventions. Not a founding member, but certainly integral to the band's sound from '67 to '71 and then '75 on, Mickey Hart's contribution is missed. But the simpler set used by Billy is crucial to the '72 sound, just as Bobby's jangly ES-345, Jerry's strat, Phil's woody bass, Keith's acoustic piano. But there isn't quite the rainbow of sound, as achieved in later years.

I cannot think of any night below 5 stars out of 5 (except for the Bremen Beat Club TV performance, which at least is interesting historically as the only surviving video footage of the tour besides the selections from one of the Tivoli Gardens shows), and there were many 6-star nights (following once again my Spinal Tap mathematics logic): The two Paris shows, Rotterdam, Frankfurt, the last nights in London, all could be considered the greatest performances that the band left us with.

Europe '72 beautifully illustrates that, despite all the horrible news we are bombarded with, we have more in common and less that separates us than we think. At one point during a show being broadcast from Luxembourg around Europe and the North Atlantic via short-wave radio, Bobby plays with the idea of being broadcast live on international radio by declaring, "Here's your news on the hour: 'Everything's going to be alright.'" In our age of 24-hour news cycles with all news being hyped up as if it were the Super Bowl, and so much negative news, we need more of this "Everything's going to be alright" thinking. Good music and good times are what we need and Europe '72 brings those good vibes to us in droves. Europe '72 is the perfect time capsule of a time when not just American music but the American optimism that infused the world with so much energy was at a peak.