The Grateful Dead Munich Fire Incident Of '72 [Highlight From Episode 307]

Author Brian Anderson recounts the story of when the Grateful Dead caused trouble with the Munich Fire Department in 1972.

Listen to Episode 307: The Grateful Dead's Wall Of Sound: A Musical Revolution

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booked on
Rock Brian Anderson. He's the author of Loud and Clear,
the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound. In the Quest for
Audio Perfection.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
That very famous europe seventy two tour, they hit Munich
and the fire Marshal and the fire Brigade were like
really hassling the crew when they were setting everything up.
You know, they were like looking at the manifest of gear,
like the inventory that they had with them, asking all
these questions about like how much power they're going to

(00:29):
be using it and so forth. The show gets going
and the fire Brigade in Munich doubled the number of
fire brigadiers I guess present on the scene, So like
the venue was crawling with folks from the fire brigade.
They were backstage, they were standing on the stage behind

(00:49):
the back line, which was like kind of a no
no at the time. They were out in the crowd,
and supposedly some of these fire brigadiers had buckets of
sand to like snuff out fires, right, So they were
convinced that the Grateful Dead were like using up so
much power through this like crazy electronic beast that they

(01:10):
were going to set the venue on fire. Right, So
as the show got going, on top of Garcia's on
top of one of his amplifiers, he had like a
big hash joint, right that he was.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Well, it was the exact wording from the book, a huge, fat,
badly rolled hash joint.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
There you go, a huge, fat, badly rolled hash joint.
So and that was like sat at top of his amplifier.
You know, the smoke from that was like going up
into the into the lights, and apparently one of the
fire captains freaked out and instead of a bucket of sand,
got a bucket of water and threw it like kind

(01:49):
of over Garcia's amp and the whole place went dark.
You know. The audience in response started you know, lighting
matches right in the darkness, and that like pissed off
the fire captain even more, right, So eventually they got
the power restored to finish the show. And there's some

(02:10):
conflicting reports because you know, memories from this time. It's
memory is a funny thing, right, and I talk about
this in the book, but there's some people who remember
that incident leading to like half of Munich being like
blacked out that night and supposedly you could hear, you know,
later on after the show at night, you could hear

(02:32):
like transformers around town, just like ohasting. Yeah. So that
sort of thing was just sort of illustrative of the
dead being way out on the edge, insisting that they
do everything their own way. And you know, they knew
they couldn't rely on some of these old decrepit European

(02:56):
venues to like supply enough power. So what they would
do is they would clamp into the main city, like
the municipal line, which is crazy. They would like drill
down into the ground and like clamp on to like
get enough juice. Right, There's all sorts of stories in
the book about like you know, close calls like that,
you know, and everything was electric. It was such an

(03:17):
electric time.