An Ode to the “Last Ever Rock ‘n Roll Gig” at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw
It was long. It was loud. It was 1972. It was the Grateful Dead.
Perched royally, as if at the head of the table, flanking the west face of Museumplein opposite the Rijksmuseum, sits Het Concertgebouw (say: con-CERT-huh-bau).
Completed in 1888, with its quintessentially pragmatic Dutch moniker, “Concert Hall” opened to a full house with support from 120 musicians and a 500-person choir who performed music by Wagner, Handel, Bach, and Beethoven.
With plush velour seating for two thousand, Amsterdam’s elegant performance hall was specifically designed (acoustics and sightlines) for orchestra. In time, the programming became as eclectic as its host city, and in the 1960s the venue’s repertoire expanded to include contemporary acts of the day including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors.
Man. Imagine seeing Jim Morrison in here in 1968!
Nope. The Doors did perform, but according to Dutch documentarians’ amazingly detailed accounts, Morrison swallowed a ball of hash earlier that day and washed it down with “gulps of whiskey” and whatever else was around.
He missed the pre-show soundcheck and arrived during the latter part of opener Jefferson Airplane’s set. Heavily impaired, he waltzed onstage, performed a funky dance alongside Grace Slick, fell unconscious, was given oxygen by paramedics, whisked off to be revived at a local hospital.
Band members Ray Manzerik and Robbie Krieger were undeterred. They shared vocal duties and delivered a spirited set (“Break on Through,” “Hello, I Love You” “Light My Fire”) much to the satisfaction of the Dutch fans.
Four years later the Grateful Dead came to Amsterdam.
May 10, 1972 was the Dead’s 14th show of their ambitious and now famous 22-show spring tour, known simply by Deadheads everywhere as “Europe ‘72.”
The band brought their crew, their fans, and their families. They also brought their own sound system.
Obsessed with high fidelity audio, the band’s crew hauled speakers, amps, lights, cables and everything else all across Europe through 17 different venues and 10 border crossings in 48 days. The logistics, absent modern day communication devices, was a lot.
According to Dead historians (Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip, Steve Parish’s Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead) the strain of the tour broke the band. Reeling from the seven-week party, just a few months later, founding keyboard player Pigpen’s liver failed, and he joined members Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and later Jim Morrison in the inauspicious 27 Club.
By the time the Dead came through Amsterdam for show #14 of Europe ‘72, the band was frisky, road-tested, and amped. Dead nerds on the Internet have unsurprisingly dissected every song of every show, and here’s what you need to know about this show: it was long.
I should know. I just listened to all 3 1/2 hours of it beginning to end.
I didn’t skip ahead (not even once!), and even went back once or twice. The trippy 34-minute “The Other One (part 1)” for sure got a second listen.
Did I mention it was long?
The 16-song first set alone clocks in at over an hour-and-a-half at 1:33. Deadheads may recognize “He’s Gone” which was plucked from this set, overdubbed, and placed on its Europe ’72 double album.
But, for my money, the best song of the show is the energetic “Greatest Story Ever Told” which caps off the first set before a set-break to refuel for the longer and trippier two-hour set that would follow. According to Dennis McNally, there was plenty of fuel backstage indeed. In his book A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, McNally indicates “the cocaine was far too good” which the spouses were reportedly none too pleased about.
Phil Lesh much later famously survived a long struggle with alcohol use disorder including a liver-transplant, and McNally’s book indicates we can all blame Amsterdam as the genesis for that saga.
The free-flowing cocaine that night just might explain the selection of the second set opener in “Casey Jones” (“…driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you bet-ter, watch your speed”). And, it also might explain the lengthy second set that got pretty weird in a few places.
No encore
Toward the end of the second set, after three hours of music, the band elected not to bother with the charade of making the audience earn an encore, and instead jumped right into a concluding finale.
For the truly curious, you might consider giving the 17-minute “Not Fade Away” → “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” → “Not Fade Away” closing sequence a spin next time you are on the elliptical or mowing the lawn.
Local Dutch music journalists offered luke-warm reviews of the spectacle. Dutch NRC newspaper reporter Peter de Vries liked the huge sound system and light show, but offered only cordial enthusiasm about the rest. He called it smoky and colorful, which sounds pretty legit to me.
De Vries was not the only ambivalent bystander. It seems that after the 1972 Dead show, the pristine concert hall’s programming committee became a hard “no” to any further rock concerts.
No more rock shows at the Concertgebouw. Why?
Lead singers collapsing on stage? Check.
Burn holes on the red velvet seats? Check.
According to longtime Grateful Dead band manager Rock Scully’s memoir Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the last straw was the crew’s desecration of the building’s elaborate ornate gold leaf.
Good old, Ramrod. And, Pigpen had a go at the 300-year-old pipe organ? Of course he did, may he rest in peace.
To this day, claims get made: The last ever rock ‘n roll gig ever performed at Concertgebouw.
End of an era.
It’s too bad. But, in the end, I guess rock-and-roll in Amsterdam’s high-end classical music concert hall wasn’t the magic chocolate & peanut butter combo people might have hoped for. The majestic building is simply not cut out as a host when rock stars get unleashed in Amsterdam.
Yet, aren’t traditions are made to be broken? I reckon Phish in the Concertgebouw in 2023 is a pretty good idea.
When impulses collide
OK, but why the long boring story about an obscure show 50 years ago Simply an itch that needed a scratch.
An American Deadhead living in Amsterdam (according to Google Maps the Concertgebouw is two-minutes on the bike from my house), I’ve long wondered about that night in 1972.
And, in 2022 the stars aligned.
- It is the 50th year commemoration of Europe ’72. Tribue band Dark Star Orchestra is even touring Europe and recreating shows (though not invited to the Concertgebouw).
- Deadheads around the world have celebrated what would have been Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday on August 1, 2022.
- In the early morning hours of April 18, 2022, a budding timelapse photography enthusiast, I shot the full moon as it gracefully set over the same building, 50 years later.
- I finally listened to the full show for the first time, beginning to end.
Worlds collide in a single 28-second video:
If you read all way to here, you deserve a gold star. Or, maybe some gold leaf. If you actually liked this story, here are a couple others:
