EuroDead i.e. Le Grateful Dead au Château d'Hérouville

Time to get back to some shows 'round here!

Grateful Dead June 21, 1971 Château d'Hérouville Hérouville, France

1st Set: Jerry interview, Hard To Handle, Deal, Morning Dew
China Cat Sunflower-> I Know You Rider, Playing In The Band,
Big Boss Man, Black Peter, Bertha

2nd Set: Casey Jones, Cryptical Envelopment-> Drums->
The Other One-> Wharf Rat, Sugar Magnolia, Sing Me Back Home,
Johnny B. Goode

This recording is crap at the beginning, unfortunately. Pure garbage. An interview conducted with Jerry sounds interesting on the face of it... but someone is translating in French what Jerry is saying. That overlay doesn't allow us English speakers to truly hear all that's being said. Of course, if you speak fluent French (mine isn't that fluent) then you might be able to understand all that Jerry is talking about and all that the translator dude says afterwards. The interview quality isn't so bad compared to the first song of the show.

A patch from AM radio was used for the first few songs and Hard to Handle just sucks every kind of ass in the world. Seriously, you're better off not even listening to it. The quality drastically improves with Deal (still not great but better.) The following Morning Dew would probably be worth positively noting... except that what's here is just a fraction of the song. The same is true with China Cat and Rider. Oh well, I mean, what are ya gonna do? These songs may not even be in the Dead's vault today so this is probably all we have. It happens.

A nice Playin' -- "A song in a semi-philosophical vain" -- kicks off the better sounding part of this recording. Don't worry, if you don't speak English then Bobby translates for everyone: "Semi-philosophique."

Big Boss Man and Black Peter are excellent before the set-closing Bertha which has some minor lyric flubs but I'm really diggin' it thanks to this nice mix, good Jerry on guitar, nice Phil on bass and Pig on that Hammond B-3 of his! Quick and to the point, this is pretty cool capper to this four-song run which ends the set/starts the very good quality portion of this show.

A straight-forward Casey Jones kicks off the Set 2 but the following 18-minute Cryptical-> Drums-> O1 has got to be the highlight of the show for me. Add onto that 10½ more minutes of Wharf Rat and that's a pretty sweet almost half hour of music.

Bobby whiffs on some of Sugar Mag but it's still a nice little smokin' version. Before the almost encore of Johnny B. Goode -- "a rock and roll classique" -- the quiet beauty of Sing Me Back Home helps wrap this up the Dead's second set of tunes.

A Grateful Dead show on the first night of summer at a castle built in 1740 in the French countryside... what a beautiful time this must've been!!

found at: http://paris70.free.fr/auvers71.htm ”The group's most exotic gig in 1971 was a one-shot in France. "We went over there to do a big festival, a free festival they were gonna have," Garcia said. "We went over [at the promoter's expense], but the festival was rained out; it flooded. We stayed at this little chateau [Chateau d'Herouville] which is owned by a film score composer who has a 16-track recording studio built into the chateau, and this is a chateau that Chopin once lived in; really old, just delightful, out in the country near the town of Auvers, which is where Vincent Van Gogh is buried. ... "We were there with nothing to do: France, a 16-track recording studio upstairs, all our gear, ready to play, and nothing to do. So, we decided to play at the chateau itself, out in the back, in the grass, with a swimming pool, just play into the hills. We didn't even play to hippies, we played to a handful of townspeople in Auvers. ... We played and the people came — the chief of police, the fire department, just everybody. It was an event and everybody just had a hell of a time — got drunk, fell in the pool. It was great." --Jerry Garcia-- "The Dead started to play just before the sky got dark, but their entire set was illuminated by bright lights from the Paris socialized television station Link Two, which rebroadcast the event the next week. Their film technique was flawless, as one would expect from a French film team; the camera people were completely unobtrusive on the musicians; the lights bugged Phil a little. Pig Pen just barely recovered in time to sing after downing his two bottles of duty free Wild Turkey . . . Weir was in fine primal scream voice, and Garcia settled into his trancelike lassitude from which emanates the famous electronic genius that is particularly his. They played for three hours, and during this time the workers and the fire department and little children lit hundreds of candles and placed them around the pool as if it were a religious shrine . . . a Lourdes or place of healing waters. As the party progressed, the candles were extinguished by the bodies of of various drunken celebrants being thrown in the pool by other drunken celebrants. The Dead played louder and louder; the locals had never heard anything like it before and they were delirious." --Hank Harrison-- The Dead Book: A Social History of the Grateful Dead

source
Soundboard Master Reels> ???> DAT> CD
beginning thru Rider patched with AM master reel> reel> cassette> CD

sound quality
starting with Playin' it's a pretty solid sweet A!
there's some minor noise (hiss) in between songs
but some might even still say A+

6/21/71 Chateau d'Herouville at Archive.org:
you can listen to the SBD

-or- Download the Soundboard Right Here Grateful Dead - June 21, 1971, Herouville, France - Part ONE Part 2 of Chateau d'Herouville - 6/21/71 (SUBSTITUTE THIS) I Know You Rider (FIXED FILE)

6-21-81 aka 06-21-81 aka 6/21/71 aka 06/21/71 aka 71-06-21 setlist 320 kbps mp3 SBD download

Jerry at Château d'Hérouville