The good news is the sound quality is excellent, just as good as the 1970 Royal Albert Hall concert I posted from the release I recently posted. The bad news is this one has the same flaw as that one, namely that all the banter has been removed, as well as most of the applause at the ends of songs. But this one actually was a bit worse is that even some music at the starts and ends of songs was missing. I fixed all those cases by using bits from the Royal Albert Hall show. The more serious cases have "[Edit]" in the titles.
Another disappointment is that the set lists between the Royal Albert Hall show are very similar, although the song order is somewhat different. Only the Royal Albert Hall show included the songs "Avalanche" and "Don't Pass Me By (A Disgrace)," and only this one included the song "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy." Some bits of spoken poetry are different too.
However, this concert has two obviously improvised songs, and there's nothing similar to that in the other concert. "In the Interests of Those Who Are Not on the Stage" is short and simple. But "News from the Authorities" is six minutes long, and is quite amusing and creative for being thought up on the spot.
For the Royal Albert Hall show, I had the idea to add in the banter that had been deleted by using banter from a concert that took place four days earlier. I thought that worked out nicely. I wanted to do that here as well, but I couldn't find the raw material to do it. There are only a few bootlegs from the 1970 tour, and most of them either sound terrible or were recorded by bootleggers who cut out the banter in order to save tape space. (That was a common practice back in that era.)
As a result, if you're a purist, you'll be happier with this version. However, I still did another kind of edit that I did for the other show: I fleshed out the applause after every song, In fact, I used the same applause from the other show, since all applause basically sounds the same.
By the way, this concert was rather odd in that the song "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" was played twice. But by chance, most of the first version was missing. I'm guessing there was a problem with the recording there, because the end of the previous song, "The Stranger Song," was missing too. I fixed "The Stranger Song," but since there were two versions of "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" anyway, I decided just to not include the mostly missing version.
Overall, if you're not a big Cohen fan, you probably don't need this and the Royal Albert Hall show, since the set lists are so similar and even the performances are very similar. However, this one does have those two fun improvised songs, as well as a unique spoken poem ("As the Mist Leaves No Scar") and a unique song ("Seems So Long Ago, Nancy").
This album is an hour and 24 minutes long. That's significantly shorter than the Royal Albert Hall show, mostly due to the lack of "Please Don't Pass Me By," which is 13 minutes long.
01 The Stranger Song [Edit] (Leonard Cohen)
02 Bird on the Wire (Leonard Cohen)
03 So Long, Marianne (Leonard Cohen)
04 News from the Authorities [Improvised Song] (Leonard Cohen)
05 In the Interests of Those Who Are Not on the Stage [Improvised Song] (Leonard Cohen)
06 Dead Song [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
07 Lady Midnight (Leonard Cohen)
08 One of Us Cannot Be Wrong (Leonard Cohen)
09 Joan of Arc (Leonard Cohen)
10 Tonight Will Be Fine (Leonard Cohen)
11 The Partisan (Leonard Cohen)
12 Sisters of Mercy (Leonard Cohen)
13 Diamonds in the Mine (Leonard Cohen)
14 Story of Isaac (Leonard Cohen)
15 Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen)
16 Sing Another Song, Boys [Edit] (Leonard Cohen)
17 Suzanne (Leonard Cohen)
18 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (Leonard Cohen)
19 As the Mist Leaves No Scar [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
20 You Know Who I Am (Leonard Cohen)
21 Seems So Long Ago, Nancy (Leonard Cohen)
The cover is based on a poster from this exact concert. However, I had to make a few changes to get the rectangular poster fit in a square space. For instance, I vertically squished the text quite a lot.
Next up, I'll post the best of the studio tracks from the copyright extension collection. I don't plan on posting all of them because there's a lot that would only be of interest to die-hard fans. For instance, many incomplete studio takes of songs. There also are two more 1970 concerts, one from the Olympia in Paris and the other from the Henderson Hospital in London. Both of these would be interesting, except that all the banter has been removed. For instance, the Henderson Hospital one was performed in front of a very small audience of mental patients, maybe about 40 people, so the banter there would have been fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if you are a die-hard fan and want every single file, I've just started sharing all this stuff through SoulseekQT, so you can get it that way. Just search for Leonard Cohen and copyright and 1970, and hopefully it'll pop up.
link is dead - it says "file was deleted by user"
ReplyDeleteHuh. I see what you mean, though I certainly didn't delete anything. But I replaced it. Try it now.
Deleteworks great now thanks!
DeleteThanks for making this available!
ReplyDelete