ZZ Top - Toledo Speedway, Toledo, OH, 8-17-1980

It's sad to me that rock and roll is slowly declining in popularity. But at least we still have the old stuff, and ZZ Top could really rock. Here's an excellent concert from 1980.

Recently, I wanted to hear some live ZZ Top from the 1970s, since I'd never heard any of their concerts from early in the career. I quickly realized why there's this gap in my music collection: all the bootlegs from that time period have poor sound quality. The first year with good sound is 1980. There's an official album from that year, plus a couple of stellar soundboard boots. Then, again, many years go by with very few live recordings with worthy sound quality. Strange.

Thankfully, there's this one. It's pretty similar to the "Rockpalast" concert from 1980 that's been released. However, it's about fifteen minutes longer, and there are some different songs. One nice treat is the inclusion of their cover of "Barefootin'," which they never officially released and apparently only performed a few times in 1980.

The source of this recording is a great soundboard. However, there was one problem in that it was almost too good, because very little of the audience noise was captured. Each song ended with an almost eerie silence. But modern technology allows me to fix this. I ran all the songs through MVSEP, separating the crowd noise from everything else. Then I drastically boosted the crowd noise at the beginnings and ends of songs. Now, it sounds like normal crowd reactions.

There were a couple more audio problems, one that I could fix and another that I couldn't. The first minute or so of the first song was missing. I patched in the missing portion from another soundboard recorded at Pine Knob, Michigan, in 1980. The problem that I couldn't fix is that one of the channels was missing for about the first twenty minutes. So the recording is in mono for that portion of the concert. 

This recording first publicly emerged in March 2025. So let's hope more bootlegs of this quality show up, especially from earlier in the band's career. (Apparently the band itself is sitting on many great recordings, but they haven't released any of them yet.)

This album is an hour and 11 minutes long.

01 I Thank You [Edit] (ZZ Top)
02 Waitin' for the Bus (ZZ Top)
03 Jesus just Left Chicago (ZZ Top)
04 talk (ZZ Top)
05 Francine (ZZ Top)
06 I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide (ZZ Top)
07 Manic Mechanic (ZZ Top)
08 Lowdown in the Street (ZZ Top)
09 Heard It on the X (ZZ Top)
10 A Fool for Your Stockings (ZZ Top)
11 Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings (ZZ Top)
12 Barefootin' (ZZ Top)
13 Cheap Sunglasses (ZZ Top)
14 talk (ZZ Top)
15 Arrested for Driving while Blind (ZZ Top)
16 Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers (ZZ Top)
17 La Grange - Sloppy Drunk - Bar-B-Q (ZZ Top)
18 Dust My Broom (ZZ Top)
19 Tush (ZZ Top)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BR3T55dy

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/lT2GKQnAp01aHyC/file

The cover photo is from a concert at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, Illinois, on March 14, 1980.