Spirit - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 5-16-1970

Here's something I'm particularly psyched to post. Back in 2020, I posted a live bootleg of the American band Spirit, at the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969. That's an excellent sounding concert, though a rather short one. But as I noted at the time, it seemed to be the only excellent live recording of the band in their prime, when they released four albums from 1967 to 1970.

Until now, that is. This concert sounds as good or better, and is longer. A merely okay sounding audience bootleg of this Fillmore West 1970 concert has been traded for ages, but that's not exactly what this is. I just recently realized that in 2022, much, though not all, of this concert was officially released as part of a new edition of the band's classic 1970 album "Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus." I gave that a listen, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that they'd used a much better soundboard version of the exact same concert that has been popularly traded in audience bootleg form. 

But there were some odd things about it. For one, a good chunk of the concert was missing. One song ("Mechanical World") sounded great, but was from a different concert, in 1969. Two of the songs that were included, "Dark Eyed Woman" and "Uncle Jack," sounded much worse than the others. It seems they were taken from the audience bootleg instead. (I'm guessing the soundboard recording only survived for part of the show.) There also was virtually no banter between songs, or any applause at the ends of songs. Additionally, the song order was sometimes messed up in comparison with the audience boot, which seemed to be one continuous recording.

So I set out to fix these things, to create the best version of this concert possible. First off, I discarded "Mechanical World" since it didn't fit, and "Dark Eyed Woman" and "Uncle Jack,"since the sound quality was so much worse than the rest. Second, I aligned the song order with that of the audience bootleg as best I could. Third, I kept the excellent soundboard recordings for the actual songs, but patched in the cheering at the ends of songs from the audience bootleg. I also included what little banter there was, while editing out dead air and tuning between songs. So now it sounds much more like a natural concert recording.

The one bummer about this concert is that a bunch of songs are on the audience bootleg that aren't included here because the sound quality is significantly worse than the rest. Those include: "Mechanical World," "I Got a Line on You," "Morning Will Come," "Groundhog," "Me and My Lady," "Shotgun," and "Hambone," plus the two mentioned above, "Dark Eyed Woman" and "Uncle Jack." But I think, in this case, less is more, due to such a dramatic difference in the sound quality. I believe the end result is better than the official 2022 release.

Happily, even with all those missing songs, this still is a healthy hour and six minutes long. Also, as an aside, as lead guitarist Randy California mentioned in a comment in this recording, he wrote the classic song "Nature's Way" earlier the same day of this concert.

I believe this features the band's original line-up of Randy California, Ed Cassidy, John Locke, Mark Andes, and Jay Ferguson. According to the band's Wikipedia page, that line-up stayed together until January 1971. But I've seen some conflicting things about that. Perhaps someone with good ears can tell if Ferguson is singing on some of these songs or not, and then let me know, since he was one of the band's two lead singers.

01 talk (Spirit)
02 Sweet Stella Baby (Spirit)
03 1984 (Spirit)
04 Country Echo [Instrumental] (Spirit)
05 Jealous (Spirit)
06 talk (Spirit)
07 All the Same (Spirit)
08 Fresh Garbage (Spirit)
09 It Shall Be (Spirit)
10 talk (Spirit)
11 Nothing to Hide (Spirit)
12 Ice [Instrumental] (Spirit)
13 Mr. Skin (Spirit)
14 talk (Spirit)
15 Animal Zoo (Spirit)
16 talk (Spirit)
17 Nature's Way (Spirit)
18 I'm Truckin' (Spirit)
19 So Little Time to Fly (Spirit)
20 Fog [Instrumental] (Spirit)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15172665/Spirt_1970_FillmorWestSnFrancscoCA__5-16-1970_atse.zip.html

In 1969, Spirit appeared on the German TV show "Beat Club" and played the song 1984. The recording isn't that good, because the guitar of lead guitarist Randy California went out of tune halfway through his solo. But I took a screenshot from the YouTube video of that performance for the cover. (One band member was off to the side and didn't get included.)

For the band name text, I used some special lettering taken from a concert poster. I then added psychedelic colors. And I imitated that style for the bottom text.