R.E.M. - B&L Warehouse, Athens, GA, 4-24-1981

Here's a really interesting, great sounding concert recording by a very early version of R.E.M. This was so early in their career that they hadn't even released their first single yet. ("Radio Free Europe" would come out as a single in July.) This concert was available as a middling sounding audience boot for a long time. But apparently it was only a few weeks ago when a high-quality soundboard version emerged. That probably makes this the best sounding concert recording from this very early era for the band.

This was sent to me by musical associate Lil Panda. He got it from Rob, who is the person who runs the dB's Repercussion music blog. It's an excellent blog, and one I've mentioned before, but here's the link if you're not aware of it:

https://dbs-repercussion.blogspot.com/

Anyway, Rob wrote some notes about this concert, which I've included in the download zip file. In those notes, he mentions this: "T. Patton Biddle (aka Pat the Wiz) of Athens, GA, is the source for this recording. He was the sound tech for many of R.E.M.'s shows in and around Athens in the early 1980s. This comes from a first-generation analog copy of the master reel, recorded by Pat as he ran sound for R.E.M.'s opening set." So thanks to Lil Panda, Rob, and Pat the Wiz!

This contains all the songs the band performed. (It was a short set, since they were the opening act for XTC.) Unfortunately though, the taper didn't start taping until about a minute into the first song, "Radio Free Europe," and he ran out of tape after about a minute and a half of the last song, "Gardening at Night." So I found different early live versions of those two songs (from a concert in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1982), and used those to fill in the missing portions. I had to make some changes to get them to fit. It was especially noticeable that this version of "Radio Free Europe" was much faster than the 1982 one. Anyway, that's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

When I first saw the song list to this concert, I was confused, because I didn't recognize about half of the songs. It turns out the band played some pretty obscure songs, all originals. Four of the songs here remain officially unreleased: "Body Count," "Dangerous Times," "Hey Hey Nadine," and "That Beat." Three more are rarities from the "Dead Letter Office" compilation album: "All the Right Friends," "Burning Down," and "Windout." Another, "Gardening at Night," is from the band's early EP "Chronic Town." That just leaves four songs from the "Murmur" album, which would be released in 1983, and the "Reckoning" album, which would be released in 1984.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Radio Free Europe [Edit] (R.E.M.)
02 Burning Down (R.E.M.)
03 Dangerous Times (R.E.M.)
04 All the Right Friends (R.E.M.)
05 Shaking Through (R.E.M.)
06 Body Count (R.E.M.)
07 talk (R.E.M.)
08 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
09 [Don't Go Back To] Rockville (R.E.M.)
10 Hey Hey Nadine (R.E.M.)
11 talk (R.E.M.)
12 That Beat (R.E.M.)
13 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
14 talk (R.E.M.)
15 9-9 (R.E.M.)
16 Windout (R.E.M.)
17 Gardening at Night [Edit] (R.E.M.)

Note that I try to always post two links. But it seems I'm being banned from PixelDrain for a week, due to a copyright issue about a Police album from 1983 that got posted a while back. I'll post the PixelDrain link just as soon as the ban ends, knock on wood. 

https://bestfile.io/xOZB57vKBuvuc2r/file

The cover image is from an advertisement for this exact concert. When I came across it, I saw that it was close to square (I widened it a bit), so I thought it would make a good cover. The only change is that the concert actually featured XTC and R.E.M., with XTC the headlining act. So I erased XTC and made R.E.M. larger to fill in the difference.