Joe Jackson - Rainbow Music Hall, Denver, CO, 5-6-1979

I like most of Joe Jackson's music, and his latest album, 2019's "Fool," is excellent. That said, my favorite era of his music is 1979, with his "Look Sharp!" and "I'm the Man" albums. Jackson has released some live material here and there, but generally from 1980 onwards. (There are five songs from 1979 on his "At the BBC" collection.) So since there's no official 1979 live album, this is my attempt to create something that could stand in for that.

Luckily, it turns out that a handful of Jackson's 1979 were professionally recorded and played on radio stations at the time. So I listened to the best bootlegs of the "Look Sharp!" tour from the middle of 1979, most of which come from those radio shows, and I found the one I thought was the best, especially in terms of sound quality. That was a show at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver, Colorado, in May 1979. It clearly is a soundboard, so much so that there isn't much audience noise at the ends of songs. I didn't attempt to boost the volume of the cheering. But I did break the talking between songs into their own tracks, and I often raised the volume of those comments.

The Denver show is 56 minutes long. That was fairly long for his concerts in that year, which all seem to have been an hour long or less. However, this album isn't just the Denver show. I've added six songs to the beginning of the album from other concerts around the same time that didn't get played at the Denver show. That makes it n hour and 18 minutes long.

Thanks to these added songs, every single song from the "Look Sharp!" album is included, as well as five songs from the "I'm the Man" album, which had yet to be released at the time. There also are four cover songs: "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" by Ben Bernie and His Orchestra, "Pressure Drop" by Toots and the Maytals, "Come On" by Chuck Berry, and "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino. I've included versions of all four of those on the "The Harder They Come" stray tracks album, but those are different versions.

Speaking of that "The Harder They Come" album, I just updated it today, because I found two more songs to include on it. You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/05/joe-jackson-harder-they-come-1980.html

01 [Do The] Instant Mash (Joe Jackson)
02 Friday (Joe Jackson)
03 talk (Joe Jackson)
04 Fools in Love (Joe Jackson)
05 talk (Joe Jackson)
06 Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries (Joe Jackson)
07 talk (Joe Jackson)
08 Pressure Drop (Joe Jackson)
09 talk (Joe Jackson)
10 Geraldine and John (Joe Jackson)
11 One More Time (Joe Jackson)
12 Pretty Girls (Joe Jackson)
13 talk (Joe Jackson)
14 Look Sharp (Joe Jackson)
15 talk (Joe Jackson)
16 Sunday Papers (Joe Jackson)
17 Baby Stick Around (Joe Jackson)
18 talk (Joe Jackson)
19 Is She Really Going Out with Him (Joe Jackson)
20 talk (Joe Jackson)
21 It's Different for Girls (Joe Jackson)
22 Kinda Kute (Joe Jackson)
23 talk (Joe Jackson)
24 Happy Loving Couples (Joe Jackson)
25 I'm the Man (Joe Jackson)
26 Throw It Away (Joe Jackson)
27 talk (Joe Jackson)
28 Got the Time (Joe Jackson)
29 talk (Joe Jackson)
30 Come On (Joe Jackson)
31 Ain't That a Shame (Joe Jackson)

https://www.imagenetz.de/j3ucY

For the album cover, I could have chosen an ordinary photo of Joe Jackson from 1979. But I found one of him wearing novelty oversized sunglasses, and I thought it would be more interesting to use that one.