Al Kooper - Live at the Record Plant, Record Plant, Sausalito, CA, 10-23-1974

Here's a solo acoustic piano concert by Al Kooper in front of a small audience for the "Live at the Record Plant" radio series. 

To be honest, I didn't expect much from this. I knew of Kooper from his roles as a session musician, producer, and songwriter, but I'd never heard much of him as a performer. But I was quite impressed, actually. He played a lot of good songs, a mix of covers and originals, and had some interesting banter between songs. 

Here's his Wikipedia entry:

Al Kooper - Wikipedia

This recording sounded pretty good, but it did have some trouble with hiss. I did some audio editing to get rid of most of the hiss on the talking tracks, with the help of the MVSEP program. But I didn't touch the hiss on the actual songs, for fear that would hurt the music. But it isn't nearly as noticeable there anyway. It only stood out when the background was mostly silent.  

This unreleased album is 56 minutes long. 

01 talk by Tom Donahue (Al Kooper)
02 Brand New Day (Al Kooper)
03 talk (Al Kooper)
04 Without Her (Al Kooper)
05 talk (Al Kooper)
06 Autobiography in 725 Bars (Al Kooper)
07 talk (Al Kooper)
08 Sam Stone (Al Kooper)
09 talk (Al Kooper)
10 Just One Smile (Al Kooper)
11 talk (Al Kooper)
12 New Fashioned Love Song (Al Kooper)
13 talk (Al Kooper)
14 Drown in My Own Tears (Al Kooper)
15 talk (Al Kooper)
16 Don't Hang Up (Al Kooper)
17 talk (Al Kooper)
18 I Can't Quit Her (Al Kooper)
19 talk (Al Kooper)
20 [Be Yourself] Be Real (Al Kooper)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/soLq1wmj

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/KXyFmbi6xNJWwfy/file

The cover photo was taken at a concert at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 12, 1973.

Blood, Sweat & Tears - Psychedelic Supermarket, Boston, MA, 2-23-1968

Here's a very unusual and interesting concert recording. When Blood, Sweat and Tears released their debut album "Child Is Father to the Man" in early 1968, they were practically a different band compared to when they released their next album, "Blood, Sweat and Tears." The main difference was they lost their band leader and main lead vocalist, Al Kooper, and gained a new lead vocalist, David Clayton-Thomas. For decades, it was thought there were no live recordings of this original, Al Kooper-led version of the band. But in 2006, this bootleg emerged. It's been widely shared since then, but I've made some changes to make it sound better than ever before.

Blood, Sweat and Tears started out of the ruins of the Blues Project, which broke up in mid-1967. (As an aside, I recently posted one of their last performances as part of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.) Both Al Kooper and Steve Katz left the Blues Project and became the two main leaders of the new Blood, Sweat and Tears. Both of them wrote songs and sang lead vocals, though Kooper sang more of the songs. The new band started playing concerts in late 1967, but they'd only played a dozen or so concerts until performing the concert presented here. It took place only about four days after the release of their album "Child Is Father to the Man."

This version of the band didn't last long. Their album got very good reviews and limited but promising sales for a new band. (It reached Number 47 on the U.S. album chart.) However, some other band members, especially Katz and drummer Bobby Colomby, thought the band could do much better if they had a stronger lead vocalist. So they kicked Kooper out of the band in April 1968, at the end of their short tour to promote their debut album. This was a pretty shocking move, because Kooper was the de facto leader of the band. In addition to singing and writing songs, he was largely responsible for picking the many cover songs the band did, and coming up with arrangements in the band's unusual horn section-heavy style. Keep in mind this was about a year before other rock bands with horn sections like Chicago and the Ides of March had a lot of success.

What makes this album even more interesting is that only three of the songs performed were from the debut album that had just been released ("I Love You More than You'll Ever Know," "Morning Glory," and "Somethin' Goin' On"). They played three songs that would be on their very successful next album ("More and More," "You've Made Me So Very Happy" and "Smiling Phases.") All three of them were already arranged by Kooper, and the versions on their next album would closely follow his arrangments. But on that album they would be sung by Clayton-Thomas, whereas this gives one a chance to hear how Kooper sang them. Furthermore, there's the song "Camille." Kooper announced during the concert this would probably be the band's next single. In fact, that wouldn't be the case, because he wrote it and he would be kicked out of the band. So it showed up on his solo album released in early 1969, "I Stand Alone."

Okay, so that's some history of the band and this concert. Now, let me explain this recording. I've included the text file from an earlier version (posted by someone named Knees) because it contains a lot of interesting information in greater detail than what I'm writing here. To make a long story short, around 2005, a rock journalist decided to go looking through some old cassettes to find an interview that person had done with Jimi Hendrix. They found the Hendrix interview, but let the tape keep playing and discovered this forgotten concert recording on it as well. They sent the Hendrix interview to the Hendrix estate, and asked them to make a digital transfer of this concert as well, which they did. Even Al Kooper was pleasantly shocked when he learned about it and heard it, because he thought nobody had ever bothered to record any live performances of the original Blood, Sweat and Tears.

This recording is just an audience bootleg. The person mentioned above named Knees made many audio edits to improve the sound quality. It sounds very good for an audience boot. However, one problem I noticed was that the lead vocals were way down in the mix. I was able to fix this with help from the MVSEP program. Now, one could easily believe this was a soundboard boot instead.

I don't know the real name of the original recorder. They may have purposely left their name out of this, since they were a rock journalist. And strong evidence that they were comes in the form of the bonus track. This is a twenty-minute long interview with Jim Fielder, the bassist of the band. The band was opening for Big Brother and the Holding Company, starring Janis Joplin. The interview took place shortly after their set finished. One can tell because one can hear Joplin faintly singing in the background during the interview.

This album is 47 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 More and More (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
02 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
03 I Love You More than You'll Ever Know (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
04 talk (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
05 Morning Glory (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
06 talk (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
07 Camille (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
08 talk (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
09 Smiling Phases (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
10 Somethin' Goin' On (Blood, Sweat & Tears)

Jim Fielder Interview (Blood, Sweat & Tears)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QpUKe5Dj

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/s1XnN8VvPQ0i8Ga/file

The cover shows, from left to right, horn players Dick Halligan, Jerry Weiss, and Randy Brecker, and then Al Kooper on keyboards. It was taken at one of the band's very first concerts, at The Scene, in New York City, on November 25, 1967. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Canva program, plus some touch-ups with Photoshop.

The Blues Project - The Matrix, San Francisco, CA, 9-1966

I previously posted a couple of albums featuring the Doors playing at the Matrix in San Francisco in 1967. That put me in the mood to post this, which also is a concert that took place at the Matrix. Like the Doors concerts, the sound quality is fantastic. Since it is known the owner of the Matrix recorded the Doors with professional equipment, I strongly suspect that's what happened here, a few months earlier.

Let me explain some about the Blues Project, if you're not familiar with them. Chances are you don't know much about them, because they had a lot of talent and potential, but broke up too soon. They were formed in 1965 and broke up in 1967. They had some reunions in the 1970s and after, but their moment was gone. 

Unfortunately, the band's name was misleading. While they did play blues, they also played folk, soul, jazz, rock, and pop, and mixed them together in different combinations. They had a lot of variety because they had several talented singer-songwriters. The best known is probably organist Al Kooper, who already had co-written the song "This Diamond Ring," which was a Number One hit in the US by Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965, and would go on to more success by founding Blood, Sweat and Tears. But the band's guitarists Steve Katz and Danny Kalb also wrote and sang for the band, and had later success as well. 

Having different talents like this in the band made it something special for a brief time, but it also caused the band to split up, in the same way that Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young always seemed to be squabbling, reuniting, and breaking up.

This concert recording happens to have taken place at an excellent time. At this point, the band was still united, and would put out their second album, "Projections," two months later. But in the spring of 1967, Kooper and Katz would leave, then more would follow, with the band ending in the summer of 1967, shortly after appearing at the Monterey Pop Festival.

This concert has been kind of released over the years. What I mean is, several versions have come out, but they appear to be "grey market" releases that aren't entirely legal, and no profits go to the artist. The sound quality is excellent, as I mentioned above. However, the vocals between songs were very low, to the point that one could barely hear them. I boosted those quite a lot. I had to boost them so much that that resulted in a lot of hiss for those bits. So I used some noise reduction on them. I'm very, very reluctant to use that on any actual music, but I figure it's far less of a problem using it only on the talking between songs.

This concert features two sets by the band on the same night. You can hear when they took a break. Fortunately, they only played one song in both sets, "Flute Thing," and that was an instrumental jam with lots of variation with each take. It's also not known which night this was exactly. As you can see from the cover art, the band played the Matrix for a week in September 1966, so it could have been recorded on any of those days.

If you like classic rock from the 1960s, I suggest you give this a listen. I'm sure this band would be much more famous today if they'd stayed together longer. And the bland name didn't help either. I'd argue this is probably their best recording, better than any of their official material.

This album is an hour and 37 minutes long.

UPDATE: On January 26, 2026, I updated the mp3 download file. The song list is the same. However, I ran all of the songs through the MVSEP "denoise" filter, to get rid of hiss. I think they sound better now.

01 talk (Blues Project)
02 Louisiana Blues (Blues Project)
03 talk (Blues Project)
04 Steve's Song (Blues Project)
05 talk (Blues Project)
06 I Can't Keep from Cryin' Sometimes (Blues Project)
07 talk (Blues Project)
08 Caress Me Baby (Blues Project)
09 talk (Blues Project)
10 Flute Thing [Instrumental] (Blues Project)
11 talk (Blues Project)
12 Wake Me, Shake Me (Blues Project)
13 The Way My Baby Walks (Blues Project)
14 talk (Blues Project)
15 Love Will Endure (Blues Project)
16 Jelly, Jelly (Blues Project)
17 talk (Blues Project)
18 Cheryl's Going Home (Blues Project)
19 talk (Blues Project)
20 You Can't Catch Me (Blues Project)
21 talk (Blues Project)
22 Shake That Thing (Blues Project)
23 talk (Blues Project)
24 Catch the Wind (Blues Project)
25 talk (Blues Project)
26 You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover (Blues Project)
27 talk (Blues Project)
28 Flute Thing [Instrumental] (Blues Project)
29 talk (Blues Project)
30 Hoochie Coochie Man (Blues Project)
31 If You Don't Come Back (Blues Project)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/E711b9qt

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/q3roDRpQ57BmosQ/file

As mentioned above, the cover art is a poster for the week long set of shows the band played at the Matrix from which this concert comes. Since the original poster was rectangular, I squished it some vertically, and cropped out the top and bottom. I also removed a few small words, such as the club's street address, and added "1966."