Don McLean with the Persuasions - PBS Soundstage, WTTW Studios, Chicago, IL, 2-18-1975

I'm very psyched to be posting this album. This was on my list of "PBS Soundstage" episodes that I wanted but couldn't find. Happily, an anonymous helper who is a big Don McLean fan sent this to me. So hats to that person! So here it is, Don McLean with the Persuasions. 

I had only been able to find videos of a couple of songs on YouTube. But this version is complete. The visual quality of the file sent to me was very poor, but luckily the audio quality is pretty good, though not great.

I've already posted several albums by McLean, so I don't need to say a lot more about him. The Persuasions were one of the most popular mainly acappella musical acts, existing from 1962 until 2020. PBS Soundstage had a tradition of having a second act for many concerts. But McLean gave them a larger role than most second acts. They played four songs of their own in the middle of the concert, and then joined McLean for three songs at the end.

Here's their Wikipedia page:

The Persuasions - Wikipedia 

This album is not only unreleased, it's been extremely hard to find! So thanks again to the person who sent me a copy. As mentioned above, the sound quality is pretty good, but not great. There was some extra crackling on the first song that I got rid of using the Izotope 10 program. And there was a really bad glitch in the middle of "Vincent" where the entire recording went way out of key for a couple of seconds. Luckily, it was between vocal lines. I fixed it by patching in some music from elsewhere in the song. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title.    

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 Castles in the Air (Don McLean)
02 talk (Don McLean)
03 Homeless Brother (Don McLean)
04 talk (Don McLean)
05 All I Have to Do Is Dream (Persuasions)
06 talk (Persuasions)
07 Did You Stop to Pray (Persuasions)
08 Oh What a Night (Persuasions)
09 Lean on Me (Persuasions)
10 talk (Don McLean)
11 Vincent [Edit] (Don McLean)
12 American Pie (Don McLean)
13 Dreidel (Don McLean)
14 The Legend of Andrew McCrew (Don McLean)
15 talk (Don McLean)
16 Crying in the Chapel (Don McLean & the Persuasions)
17 Midnight Special (Don McLean & the Persuasions)
18 Happy Trails (Don McLean & the Persuasions)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3MdPDWh2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/uI3CY17E6DD3ku8/file 

As I mentioned above, the image quality of the video was quite low. But I wanted an image of McLean with the Persuasions for the cover, so I took a screenshot from one of the last songs here. It's not great, but I think it gets the job done. It was helped a lot by the Krea AI program.