Up until now, all of the albums I've posted from this festival took place on May 18, 1968. But this one (and the last one I'll be posting) took place on May 19th. That's why I'm calling this "Part 1" in the title, instead of "Part 6," because it's Part 1 of May 19th.
I said quite a lot in my write-up for the first album I posted from this festival, the Youngbloods set. I recommend you read that, because most of that applies to this set too. Most importantly, note that this is sourced from an audience bootleg, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. I had to do a lot of work to fix all sorts of flaws. The final results sounds pretty decent for a 1968 concert, in my opinion, but you need to be tolerant about the flaws that still remain.
In some previous write-ups I've done for this festival, I extensively quoted a review of this concert from the San Francisco Examiner. It didn't say much about the music, but the reviewer highlighted a few favorite performers. In addition to calling the Steve Miller Band "astonishing", it said "Mike Bloomfield and Buddy Miles in the Electric Flag, Jerry Garcia's guitar with the Grateful Dead, and the blues of Taj Mahal were also outstanding over the weekend."
I couldn't find much written about this festival on the Internet. However, I found a now defunct website that had some commentary about this performance. It starts with an extensive quote by an unnamed person who attended the concert:
"In the mid-afternoon onstage came the Electric Flag, a group I was aware of but had never heard. I didn't know what to expect as the bunch of them hemmed and hawed and fumbled around the stage for a bit, distractedly looking around and mumbling with each other. After a few minutes of this, [Nick Gravenites] came downstage and announced from a vocal mic, ‘Hey, Mike, if you can hear me, come on, man! It’s time to play. Drop the chick and get your ass up here ... now!’ Another minute went by [and] all of a sudden this lanky, frizzy-haired freak came running onstage, laughing and grabbing up his guitar. He then proceeded to burn his memory into my head forever."
Here's an archival link of the whole article:
Electric Flag: An American Music Band
This band was talented, but maybe too talented, because different creative members wanted to go in different directions. It turned out this was one of the band's last concerts. The band's stellar lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield quit the band about a week later. However, the band still had more concerts they had already booked. Bloomfield played a few more shows into early June before quitting for good. The rest of the band broke up not long after that.
As I've mentioned previously, I did extensive work trying to rescue these songs from poor sound quality. Two of the songs in this set had special problems, which is why they have "[Edit]" in their titles. In the original version, there was a short gap in the middle of "Hey Joe." I patched it up. And about the last minute of "Texas" was missing. So I filled that in with another version from a different bootleg.
This album is 43 minutes long.
01 Soul Searchin' [Instrumental] (Electric Flag)
02 Groovin' Is Easy (Electric Flag)
03 Hey Joe [Edit] (Electric Flag)
04 Sweet Home Chicago (Electric Flag)
05 Killin' Floor (Electric Flag)
06 Texas [Edit] (Electric Flag)
07 Another Country (Electric Flag)
08 Wine (Electric Flag)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/Eqw8pS64
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/48IWSe0AjgAPFKL/file
The cover photo of Mike Bloomfield is from this exact concert. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.
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