It covers the band's tour of Western Europe in April and May that year, and showcases live favorites, extended improvisations and several new songs including "Jack Straw" and "Brown Eyed Women".

The European tour was expensive and logistically complicated, and the band's record company hoped that a live album would recoup its costs.

Keyboardist Keith Godchaux was recruited, in September 1971, initially to augment founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who had been hospitalized and was experiencing increasingly poor health.

[3] Additionally, Godchaux's wife Donna (a former session singer who had worked with Percy Sledge and Elvis Presley) officially joined the band as a backup vocalist in March, shortly before the tour commenced.

[4][5] As the band became more popular and they were booked into larger venues, the touring entourage encompassed extra road crew, administrative staff, friends and relatives, growing to 43 people who became known as the "Grateful Dead Family".

[8] The Dead returned to the UK to play the Bickershaw Festival on May 7 (Kreutzmann's birthday),[9] progressing through Continental Europe again (including a show recorded for Radio Luxembourg) and ending with a four-night stand at the Lyceum Theatre, London on May 23–26.

[12][13] By the time the tour started, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia had switched from using the Gibson SG to a 1959 Fender Stratocaster.

[14] Songs such as "Jack Straw" stemmed from these influences,[15] while "Cumberland Blues" and "Tennessee Jed" had lyrics relating to American historical culture.

The Dead began performing "China Cat Sunflower" (from Aoxomoxoa) as a medley with the traditional "I Know You Rider", linking their psychedelic past with the group's new direction.

[17] The band hoped that the expensive trip to Europe would be financially offset by the release of a live-album documentation of the tour.

[20] The new songs were never officially released in studio form except "One More Saturday Night", which came out as a single to promote the tour and then appeared on Bob Weir's solo album, Ace.

In contrast to the band's previous albums, the artwork is set against white, mostly-empty panels of (originally) a triple gatefold sleeve.

A color booklet contains photos of European sites and the concerts (including part of the entourage waiting to board a DFDS ferry at Newcastle), references to Revelation and the Feast of Fools, and a long account of how the tour split into two factions, the "Bozos" and the "Bolos".

[36] A retrospective AllMusic review praised Pigpen's contributions, ranking them as some of the best in his career, and noted the triple-LP format allowed the group's extended concert jams to be presented faithfully on record.