Beck - Liquid Room, Tokyo, Japan, 3-31-2003

There are tons of Beck concert bootlegs (and NO official live albums), but there are surprisingly few with soundboard-level quality, for some reason. I'm posting an audience bootleg here. But before you run away, sometimes audience boots can sound just as good as a solid soundboard boot, and this is such a case. It was a long mostly acoustic concert with a solid performance, interesting banter, and lots of interesting song selections, including a bunch of cover versions he never officially released. This is one of the best Beck live recordings, period.

In 2003, Beck was still touring to support his acclaimed and most acoustic 2002 album "Sea Changes." So naturally there are lots of songs from that. 

For most of the first half, it was basically a solo acoustic concert. But other band members gradually joined in here and there. By the song "The Golden Age," it sounds like the full band was playing. Then the rest of the concert continued in more of a full-band sound while still retaining an acoustic vibe.

I had very little problem with the sound on this one, until the second half. When the full band joined in, Beck's vocals were drowned out a bit by all the instruments, compared to before. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program for all the songs from "The Golden Age" on to boost the lead vocals relative to the instruments. So even if you had this concert already, this version sounds better.

By the way, here are the covers: "Kangaroo," "Love," "Do You Realize," "Magnolia," "She Thinks I Still Care," "No Expectations," "Sleepless Nights," and "Sunday Morning." Note that I added a bunch of the cover versions from this exact concert to the stray tracks album I made for this time period. Oh, and there's a very strange "goth version" of "Loser" that's almost unrecognizable.

This album is just a few seconds shy of two hours long.

01 talk (Beck)
02 Guess I'm Doing Fine (Beck)
03 talk (Beck)
04 Kangaroo (Beck)
05 talk (Beck)
06 The Cherry Blossom Song (Beck)
07 talk (Beck)
08 Lost Cause (Beck)
09 talk (Beck)
10 Nobody's Fault but My Own [Harmonium Version] (Beck)
11 talk (Beck)
12 Love (Beck)
13 talk (Beck)
14 Do You Realize (Beck)
15 Asshole (Beck)
16 talk (Beck)
17 Debra (Beck)
18 talk (Beck)
19 Magnolia (Beck)
20 talk (Beck)
21 She Thinks I Still Care (Beck)
22 talk (Beck)
23 Side of the Road (Beck)
24 Round the Bend (Beck)
25 No Expectations (Beck)
26 talk (Beck)
27 Sleepless Nights (Beck)
28 talk (Beck)
29 The Golden Age (Beck)
30 talk (Beck)
31 Dead Melodies (Beck)
32 It's All in Your Mind (Beck)
33 talk (Beck)
34 Already Dead (Beck)
35 talk (Beck)
36 Ship in the Bottle (Beck)
37 Canceled Check (Beck)
38 talk (Beck)
39 We Live Again (Beck)
40 talk (Beck)
41 Loser [Goth Version] (Beck)
42 Little One (Beck)
43 Sexx Laws (Beck)
44 Get Real Paid (Beck)
45 Nicotine and Gravy (Beck)
46 talk (Beck)
47 Sunday Morning (Beck)
48 Lazy Flies (Beck)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dgh37

Luckily, the cover art is a photo from this exact concert, the only one I could find. From left to right, that's Joey Waronker, Smokey Hormel, JMJ, and Beck. There was one more band member, Greg Kurstin, who is not shown in this cover.