Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks - New Old Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, 4-10-1970

Here's a great Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks concert bootleg that wasn't in the public domain until today - as I write this on October 7, 2026. It was made public as part of the Bob Matthews collection that I talked about previously.

In late September 2026, I posted a handful of concerts from the Bob Matthews collection. Since then, new bootlegs have continued to become public from that collection, at roughly one per day. But I haven't posted any in a while for one reason or another. For instance, there has been a big stretch of releases of Youngbloods concerts - nine of them in the last two weeks. They're all pretty similar, so I was good with posting just one. Some others were only partial concerts. But whenever I come across one I like, such as this one, I'll try to make posting it a priority.

The venue of this concert confused me at first: "The New Old Fillmore." The history of venues in San Francisco with the name Fillmore in it is confusing. At first, there was "The Fillmore," which was run by promoter Bill Graham from 1966 to 1968. But the neighborhood was getting dangerous and the place was rather small, so he moved to a new location (previously known as the Carousel Ballroom) in the summer of 1968. He opened up another venue in New York City at the same time, so these two places became known as the Fillmore West (San Francisco) and Fillmore East (New York City). 

What happened to the old Fillmore though? I didn't know this until putting this album together today, but from about mid-1969 to mid-1970 it was taken over by new management and renamed "The New Old Fillmore." So that's where this concert took place. This new management was associated with the band the Flamin' Groovies, so I presume they played there a lot. And, in fact, the Bob Matthews collection has already released a Flamin' Groovies concert at this venue from the day after this, April 11, 1970, but I didn't post it because it's partial recording consisting of two and a half songs. However, I managed to find out that on at least April 10th and 11th, there were four acts on the bill each night: the Amboy Dukes, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, the Flamin' Groovies, and the headliners, Hot Tuna. Since this has been posted and that partial Flamin' Groovies one has been posted too, I'm hopeful we'll get the other sets from those days as well. We'll see.

By the way, the Fillmore West and Fillmore East closed down in the summer of 1971. The original Fillmore eventually reopened in 1994 and has stayed open ever since. Once again, it's just called "The Fillmore." (Although, given that it's technically the successor to the "New Old Fillmore," maybe it should be called the "New New Old Fillmore!") 

This is a fun set. I wasn't familiar with Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks until recently, but I'm liking them more and more. The sound quality is fantastic, like most of the Bob Matthews collection so far. There was some background noise on the talking tracks, but I got rid of most of that with the help of the MVSEP program. 

This album is 45 minutes long. 

01 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
02 How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
03 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
04 By Hook or by Crook (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
05 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
06 Canned Music (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
07 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
08 Cheaters Don't Win (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
09 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
10 Shorty Falls in Love (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
11 News from Up the Street (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
12 talk (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
13 Milk Shakin' Mama (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
14 I Scare Myself (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)
15 talk by emcee (Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RPJdAkHT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/BMnOEGgeAxWktSZ/file

The cover image comes from a TV show appearance from around this time. It might be the Flip Wilson show, since I found a low-res video of the band performing there with the same clothes and background, but they might have used that background and wore those same clothes as a regular thing at the time, I don't know. Anyway, the photo was in color but rather small and low quality. I improved it with the use of the Gemini program.

The Youngbloods - Family Dog on the Great Highway, San Francisco, CA, 3-29-1970

Here's another concert from the great Bob Matthews collection I've been raving about recently. To quickly review, a sound engineer mostly working for the Grateful Dead for decades recorded many hundreds of concerts without anyone knowing, and now they're getting publicly released almost on a daily basis. So far, they are soundboards with excellent sound quality. This 1970 concert by the Youngbloods follows that same pattern.

I'm still trying to figure out the contours of the Matthews collection. The person who has it and is releasing it to the public, Charlie Miller, isn't giving many advance hints, but we can start to surmise some things from the concerts posted so far. One thing I'm learning is there are many very similar concerts getting posted. For instance, in the last week (writing this on September 27, 2026), all the posts have been of 1970 concerts by the Youngbloods. There were concerts from this venue on March 27th, 28th, and 29th. But there's also a Youngbloods concert at Santa Clara University, one from Berkeley Community Theater, and one from a club called Euphoria in San Rafael. Out of those six concerts, I only plan on posting this one, because they all have very similar set lists and this one is the longest, with the most songs performed. But it's interesting in that it suggests there are recordings from many venues, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1969, the band released the album "Elephant Mountain." In my opinion, it's their best album. It's got a lot of critical praise. For instance, it was included in the popular book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die." Naturally, a lot of songs performed here are from that, as well as unreleased songs that would come out on their next albums. In late 1970, they would release a live album called "Rock Festival." The songs from that come from five different Bay Area venues. It's not clear which songs were from which venue, but at least one song came from this exact concert. So this could explain why this and other Youngbloods concerts are in the Bob Matthews collection, because the band was recording a lot of concerts with the intention of making a live album.

Weirdly, though, for this concert as well as the ones on the two previous nights at this venue, the song "Darkness, Darkness" wasn't performed. That was their biggest original hit song, which was released as a single in 1969 and then again in 1970. (It did better the second time.)

I've included all the songs and banter from this concert. However, there was a fair amount of dead air between songs, consisting either of guitar tuning or just near silence. I removed about ten minutes total of that.  

This album is an hour and 28 minutes long.

01 On Beautiful Lake Spenard [Instrumental] (Youngbloods)
02 Josiane (Youngbloods)
03 talk (Youngbloods)
04 Sugar Babe (Youngbloods)
05 Interlude [Instrumental] (Youngbloods)
06 It's a Lovely Day (Youngbloods)
07 Sweet Little Sixteen (Youngbloods)
08 talk (Youngbloods)
09 Hippie from Olema (Youngbloods)
10 talk (Youngbloods)
11 Quicksand (Youngbloods)
12 On Sir Francis Drake (Youngbloods)
13 Peepin' 'n' Hidin' [Baby What You Want Me to Do] (Youngbloods)
14 talk (Youngbloods)
15 Lovesick Blues (Youngbloods)
16 She's Long, She's Tall [She Weeps like a Willow Tree] (Youngbloods)
17 talk (Youngbloods)
18 Good Times (Youngbloods)
19 talk (Youngbloods)
20 Peace Song (Youngbloods)
21 Beautiful (Youngbloods)
22 Let's Get Together (Youngbloods)
23 talk (Youngbloods)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BkdWkG7o

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/O05zchQobMARyuo/file

The cover image of lead singer Jesse Colin Young is a screenshot I took from a video of the band performing on an unknown TV show around 1969. 

The Joy of Cooking - Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, CA, 8-2-1970

Yesterday, I posted a concert of the Joy of Cooking performing at the Family Dog at the Great Highway on August 1, 1970. This time, it's the same band at the same venue, but the next night, on August 2, 1970. The set list is fairly different, so I suggest getting both concerts. This is another previously known soundboard, coming to us thanks to the gradual release of the Bob Matthews collection.

Like I mentioned yesterday, I think this is a really underrated band. If you like music from this era, I strongly recommend you give this a listen.

As an aside, the person who is releasing the Matthews collection, Charlie Miller, hasn't dropped many hints of what's coming. But he has already posted a few concerts from the Family Dog at the Great Highway venue, and I noticed yesterday that he posted a photo of some reels of Dan Hicks and His Hot Links concerts still coming from there. It seems increasingly likely that we'll be getting more music from that venue (though his collection is sourced from many other venues as well). 

So I looked up the venue at setlist.fm. It was only in operation for about a year, from June 1969 to December 1970. Here's a list of all the musical acts that performed there during that time, and the number of concerts they did in parentheses. This list very well may be incomplete, but it should give us a general idea. I checked bootleg sharing sites, and it seems all of this music has been unheard by the public so far, with the exception of a bunch of concerts by the Grateful Dead (and spin-off acts like Mickey and the Hartbeats, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan), a few by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, and two by Jefferson Airplane. Let's hope we can hear a lot more of these in the months to come: 

New Riders of the Purple Sage (18)
Grateful Dead (16)
Charlie Musselwhite (9)
Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen (9)
The Elvin Bishop Group (8)
Jefferson Airplane (7)
A.B. Skhy (6)
It’s a Beautiful Day (5)
Big Brother & the Holding Company (5)
Quicksilver Messenger Service (4)
Albert Collins (4)
The Velvet Underground (4)
Hot Tuna (4)
The Sons of Champlin (4)
Harvey Mandel (3)
The Fourth Way (3)
The Kinks (3)
Poco (3)
The Golden Toad (3)
Lonnie Mack (3)
David LaFlamme (3)
The Congress of Wonders (3)
Danny Cox (3)
The Rhythm Dukes (3)
Zoot Money (3)
Canned Heat (3)
The Youngbloods (3)
Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks (2)
Kaleidoscope (2)
Steve Miller Band (2)
Joy of Cooking (2)
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (1)
Tower of Power (1)
Johnny Mars (1)
The New Lost City Ramblers (1)
Cleveland Wrecking Co. (1)
The Charlatans (1)
Floating Bridge (1)
Santana (1)
Brewer & Shipley (1)
Mickey & the Hartbeats (1)
Aum (1)
Beggars Opera (1)
Womb (1) 

This album is 40 minutes long.

01 Laugh, Don't Laugh [Instrumental Version] (Joy of Cooking)
02 Red Wine at Noon (Joy of Cooking)
03 Piece of Paper (Joy of Cooking)
04 talk (Joy of Cooking)
05 Laugh, Don't Laugh (Joy of Cooking)
06 Did You Go Downtown (Joy of Cooking)
07 talk (Joy of Cooking)
08 Bad Luck Blues (Joy of Cooking)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/evCm7bY2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/XRcG30Y7eRjRdrz/file

Like I mentioned in the Joy of Cooking post I made yesterday, I could find almost no photos of this band playing in concert. However, I found a YouTube video of them from around 1970, and I took some screenshots. The one I posted yesterday, highlighted one of their lead singers, Toni Brown, on keyboards. This one shows the back of Brown, but has more of a highlight on the other lead singer, guitarist Terry Garthwaite. I used the Ask Gemini program to improve the image quality.  

The Joy of Cooking - Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, CA, 8-1-1970

Here's another previously unknown fantastic sounding bootleg from the Bob Matthews collection. This time, it's a concert by the Joy of Cooking. (Technically, their name doesn't include the "the".) If you're not familiar with them, I'm not surprised. They only had one minor hit in the early 1970s, in the U.S., and that didn't get close to the Top Forty. But if you like music from this time period, you really should check them out. I think they're excellent. I've been wanting to post something from them for a long time, but just never got around to it. This new release gives me the perfect opportunity.

Here's the intro to their Wikipedia entry:

"Joy of Cooking was an American music ensemble formed in 1967 in Berkeley, California. Associated with the hippie culture, the band's music combined rock and roll with folk, blues, and jazz. The band released three studio albums on Capitol Records in the early 1970s as well as a minor hit single in 1971, "Brownsville." Led by guitarist Terry Garthwaite and pianist Toni Brown, who both shared lead vocals, Joy of Cooking was a rare example of a rock band fronted by women."

I can't emphasize that last point enough. There were quite a few musical acts led by women in the early 1970s, especially in soul music or the singer-songwriter genre. But there were very few in the rock genre. Garthwaite and Brown wrote songs, were excellent singers, and were very talented at their instruments to boot. In my opinion, they should have been much more popular than they were. Maybe part of the problem, in addition to the usual sexism in the industry, is that they weren't around for long. They only released three albums together, in 1970, 1971, and 1972. Garthwaite and Brown did tour together some after that into the late 1970s, and put out a couple other albums together also, but they lost a lot of momentum because they didn't keep using the Joy of Cooking name.

Note this album is relatively short, because they were the opening act for It's a Beautiful Day. (Let's hope the Bob Matthews collection releases that too.) But they returned to perform again one night later, and that also has been newly released. A good number of the songs are different, so I plan on posting that one here as well.

I didn't have to edit much here. The sound is fantastic, as good as you could hope for from that era. 

This album is 43 minutes long.

01 Brownsville - Mockingbird (Joy of Cooking)
02 First Time, Last Time (Joy of Cooking)
03 Too Late, but Not Forgotten (Joy of Cooking)
04 Piece of Paper (Joy of Cooking)
05 talk (Joy of Cooking)
06 If Some God [Sometimes You Gotta Go Home] (Joy of Cooking)
07 Red Wine at Noon (Joy of Cooking)
08 Pilot (Joy of Cooking)
09 Laugh, Don't Laugh (Joy of Cooking)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/67WGgHF8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/oKPPiV6noM9PI11/file 

The cover image shows Toni Brown. There are very few images of the band in concert. Luckily, I did find a YouTube video of them performing "Brownsville" for a TV station. I took this screenshot from that. It was rather low-res, so I used the Ask Gemini program to improve the detail level.

Van Morrison - Medicine Ball Caravan, Antioch College Golf Course, Yellow Springs, OH, 8-21-1970

Here's another album from what I am now calling the Bob Matthews collection. Hopefully, these are just the first out of hundreds more bootlegs to be released from that collection. I also posted some albums from the "Medicine Ball Caravan" concert in Canterbury, Britain. As I mentioned in previous write-ups, that was the final concert in a short Medicine Ball Caravan, with the ultimate goal of making a movie and soundtrack from it. There were about half a dozen concerts across the U.S. before that concert in Britain, and this is from one of them. It's a pristine soundboard of Van Morrison in his absolute prime, a few months after the release of his classic "Moondance" album.

This isn't as exciting as some other recent releases from the Bob Matthews collection, because this performance had already been released as a soundboard. In fact, I was planning on posting it in a few days, inspired by the other Medicine Ball Caravan releases, when I saw this got posted. This is the same music as the existing version, but with markedly better sound quality. Both versions are soundboards, but the other one had probably passed through different hands, with copying and loss of quality along the way. By contrast, this sounds like it was locked in a vault from then until now, which is probably more or less exactly what happened, thanks to sound engineer Bob Matthews. So even if you have this already, please do get this version instead.

It was known Matthews was involved the audio of the British concert mentioned above. It was said to have unusually good sound for an outdoor concert as a result. But the fact that this has also been released from the Matthews collection leaves open the exciting possibly that we'll get recordings of some or most of the rest of the short tour. As I mentioned in a previous write-up, that could mean sets by B.B. King, Doug Kershaw, Hot Tuna, Alice Cooper, Stoneground, possibly Joni Mitchell (there are conflicting accounts of that), and unknown others. Time will tell, hopefully soon.

One can tell that this performance (at a random golf course in Ohio, apparently!) was done primarily for the film footage. At one point after "Crazy Love," a voice got on the microphone and explained there was a short pause in order to change film reels. That makes me wonder where the heck is the footage of this concert, not to mention the rest of the tour? What came out in the movie was generally very disappointing, with many great musical acts, including Morrison, not included at all. I haven't seen it, but people say that only a couple of songs performed by B.B. King were impressive. Let's hope the footage of this prime Van Morrison concert still exists in the vaults somewhere.

Morrison was a couple of months away from releasing his second album in 1970, the classic "His Band and Street Choir." So a couple of songs here are from that ("I've Been Working" and "Domino"), with most of the rest from "Moondance." Note that there's a verse of "Domino" that didn't make it onto the album version.

I made a couple of improvements. The first five seconds or so of "Brown Eyed Girl" was missing. Luckily, that was a repeated riff, so I was able to patch in the missing bit from elsewhere. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title. Also, the audience applause was rather low in the mix. Not nearly as low as in the British Medicine Ball Caravan concert, but still, I used MVSEP to remix all the songs, boosting the applause. I also cut out some dead air between songs. 

This album is 36 minutes long. 

01 Brown Eyed Girl [Edit] (Van Morrison)
02 Moondance (Van Morrison)
03 Crazy Love (Van Morrison)
04 talk (Van Morrison)
05 Come Running (Van Morrison)
06 I've Been Working (Van Morrison)
07 Domino (Van Morrison)
08 Cyprus Avenue (Van Morrison)
09 talk by emcee (Van Morrison)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AtAuwJUi

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/hSaP7PRp8r7NTst/file 

I don't know where the cover image is from, but I got the impression that it's from around 1969, give or take a year. The original was in black and white. But I used the Ask Gemini program to colorize it.

Mott the Hoople - Medicine Ball Caravan, Charlton Park, Bishopsbourn, Britain, 8-31-1970

Here's another excellent soundboard from the Bob Matthews collection that was previously unknown and unavailable to the public until now (as I write this in September 2026). As I've explained in previous posts, Bob Matthews was a sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and other bands, and hundreds of concert recordings he'd kept are now getting released. This one features Mott the Hoople.

I just posted concerts by Al Stewart and the Faces prior to this one. All three come from the same 1970 Medicine Ball Caravan rock festival. I've given a long explanation about just what the Medicine Ball Caravan was. In short, it was a concert tour across the U.S., culminating in this lone concert in Britain, to make the raw material for a movie. The movie came out in 1971, but it was a flop for various reasons.

At the time of this concert, Mott the Hoople were not well known. They had released their first album, the cleverly titled "Mott the Hoople," in 1969. They were on the cusp of releasing their second one, "Mad Shadows," which would come out a couple of weeks later. But these albums only sold moderately, and would provide no hits. The band wouldn't become well known until 1972, with their big hit "All the Young Dudes," followed by more hits.

As far as I know, this is the only concert recording of this band with sound quality this excellent. There is a BBC concert from later in 1970, but even that one doesn't sound as good as this one. So this is a very big find for fans of the band.

I'm getting the impression that the recordings from this festival all share the flaw of having the audience recorded way too quietly. So just like I did with the Al Stewart and Faces sets, I used the MVSEP program to greatly boost the volume of the cheering at the ends of songs. It should have the appropriate level of audience reaction for a concert now. 

So far, a Stoneground set from this festival has also been made public in recent days. I'm going to wait on posting that though, to see what else comes out of this festival before posting that, because we only have part of the set. There may be other partial sets I could pair it with, for instance. Besides, I doubt there would be a demand for the relatively unknown Stoneground like there is for some other bands.

On a somewhat different note, this is the first Mott the Hoople album I've posted, so here's the band's Wikipedia link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mott_the_Hoople

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 talk (Mott the Hoople)
02 Darkness, Darkness (Mott the Hoople)
03 talk (Mott the Hoople)
04 Laugh at Me (Mott the Hoople)
05 talk (Mott the Hoople)
06 Rock and Roll Queen (Mott the Hoople)
07 talk (Mott the Hoople)
08 Thunderbuck Ram (Mott the Hoople)
09 talk (Mott the Hoople)
10 Half Moon Bay (Mott the Hoople)
11 talk (Mott the Hoople)
12 Keep A-Knockin' (Mott the Hoople)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/gRn6WHJW 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/nRUKP72tpNcC4BC/file

The cover image shows the band's lead singer Ian Hunter at Birmingham Town Hall in Birmingham, Britain, on December 26, 1970.

The Faces - Medicine Ball Caravan, Charlton Park, Bishopsbourn, Britain, 8-31-1970

Yesterday, I posted about an amazing newly revealed treasure trove of hundreds of bootlegs starting to be made public. I'm going to call it the "Bob Matthews Bootleg Collection" and add a label with that name to help you find all the albums I post from there. Here's a short 1970 concert by the Faces from that collection. There had never been any public audio recording of this, and now we have a pristine soundboard!

As I mentioned in my write-up yesterday to an Al Stewart set from this same concert, Bob Matthews was a long-time sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and related bands from about 1966 until the mid-1980s. He died in 2021, and now, in 2026, another person named Charlie Miller has his collection of unreleased music and is in the process of making it public. It seems Matthews almost entirely worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there was a rare exception of him going to Britain to help record this concert for reasons I'll explain in a minute. So that's why we now have this recording.

This concert was part of an unusual music project called the "Medicine Ball Caravan." It was conceived by radio DJ Tom Donahue. Even though his DJ career began way back in 1949, he was sympathetic to the growing "hippie" counterculture movement in the late 1960s. For instance, he helped pioneer "underground" rock played on FM stations starting in 1967. He came up with an idea to get a collection of rock bands, and various associated hippies, and have them travel around the U.S. performing concerts in unusual places, and possibly clashing with mainstream America. The entire thing would be professionally filmed and made into a movie. At the time, the "Woodstock" movie had just been released and was doing very good business, so a movie company agreed to fund this project.

Originally, the headlining band for this tour was supposed to be the Grateful Dead, which would have been amazing. However, they backed out at the last minute and the much less well known band Stoneground took its place. But Bob Matthews (the one mentioned above with the treasure trove of bootleg recordings) was a sound engineer for the Dead at the time, so that's how he came to be involved. 

The concert tour went ahead as planned, but it was a fiasco. The film crew was French, and they barely spoke English, so there were a lot of problems with that right there. But it seems they also were hippies who soon discovered LSD and other drugs. Apparently, they were high and incompetent nearly the entire tour. The film the shot was a mess. Martin Scorsese was brought in to try to make something out of the footage. He would later go on to become a very famous movie director, but his movie career was just getting started. He was chosen because he'd been an editor on the "Woodstock" movie mentioned above. He tried his best for many months, but the original movie was so bad that there wasn't much he could do. The movie came out in 1971 under the name "Medicine Ball Caravan," but it was a flop and was quickly forgotten. 

A soundtrack came out at the same time, but it was rather short, with a mix of live versions from the tour and some previously released studio versions. It had a few good moments, especially a couple of live songs by B.B. King, but it lacked big names. It was a quickly forgotten flop as well.

However, the tour definitely had some musical highlights. As far as I can tell, there were only about half a dozen concerts across the U.S. But in addition to Stoneground, each concert tended to have other musical acts join in. Some acts that played sets at one of the concerts include Van Morrison, B.B. King, Doug Kershaw, Hot Tuna, and Alice Cooper. Some accounts say Joni Mitchell played a set, but I haven't seen any evidence of this at the official Joni Mitchell website, which has thorough details of all her concerts. So I'm not sure of that, but it's an exciting possibility. Furthermore, just today as I write this in mid-September 2026, the person releasing the Bob Matthews bootlegs released the Van Morrison set from a concert in Ohio that was part of this tour. That suggests to me that Matthews was involved in recording part or all of the whole tour, so we may have other great previously unheard music from it to look forward to.

That finally brings me to this concert. For some reason, after having a few concerts across the U.S., the idea was to have one final Medicine Ball Caravan concert in Britain. Stoneground came over from the U.S. to play in it, but most of the other bands were British. In my opinion, it was a pretty impressive line-up: the Faces, Al Stewart, Mott the Hoople, Edgar Broughton, Caravan, Shawn Phillips, and some lesser known bands like Daddy Longlegs, Silver Meter, and Formerly Fat Harry. The headliner was Pink Floyd! Already as I write this, sets from the Faces, Al Stewart, Mott the Hoople, and Stoneground have been released from the Bob Matthews collection in recent days. Apparently, most of the rest exists and is coming soon (with only two missing reels), including the Pink Floyd set! The curator of the collection, Charlie Miller, has posted a photo of all the Pink Floyd reels. That's very exciting for Pink Floyd fans because there are no known audio recordings of this Pink Floyd set, not even any with terrible sound quality. But this recording will be a pristine soundboard!

This entire concert was "professionally filmed" in order to be used in the movie. Although it was done by the same French film crew mentioned above, so I use the word "professionally" very loosely. However, for some reason, none of the footage from this concert made it into the movie. Perhaps the bands didn't give their permission and/or the film crew completely messed it up. I wonder if the footage still exists, and if so, will it ever be made public. (So far, there's no mention of the Bob Matthews collection containing video, only audio.)

Here's a good article about the entire Medicine Ball Caravan story:

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/medicine-ball-caravan/

And here's a fan site that has collected accounts about this concert by people who attended it:

https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/medicine-ball-caravan.html

From that, I learned only about 800 people attended the concert, despite the impressive line-up. In part, that was due to the fact that it took place on the same weekend as the 1970 Isle of Wight concert, which had many more big name music acts and was attended by about half a million people. But I don't think that disappointed the people who put on the concert very much, because they chose a venue that only held about 1,500 people anyway. I think their main intention was to get good film footage, not sell a lot of tickets.  

It's great that we have this previously unknown and unheard Faces recording, because there are very few concert recordings with this sound quality from this early in their career. They had only released one album so far, "First Step." Lead singer Rod Stewart wasn't a big star yet. In fact, they were so little known that they were still billed as the Small Faces for this concert, even though they'd changed their name and lead singers in 1969. 

Here's what one attendee said about this Faces performance: "The big surprise was The Faces. They stumbled on stage dressed in their purple velvet suits. I think Rod Stewart's suit was white velvet. Within ten minutes they tore the place apart with a truly brilliant set."

This recordings sounds fantastic, but it had one big problem: very little of the audience cheering could be heard. Luckily though, there was some there, just very quiet. I used the MVSEP program to split the songs into crowd noise and everything else, then I massively increased the volume of the crowd cheering at the ends of songs. It sounds like normal crowd responses now, although you can still tell they were playing to a pretty small crowd.

I'm going to keep posting all the good music from this festival as it comes out. The Mott the Hoople set is coming next. I don't know the order of the music acts, nor do I know just what still might come out. Perhaps when it's all made public I'll rename them a bit and put them in some chronological order. 

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 I Don't Want to Discuss It (Faces)
02 talk (Faces)
03 Maybe I'm Amazed (Faces)
04 talk (Faces)
05 Devotion (Faces)
06 talk (Faces)
07 Around the Plynth (Faces)
08 Gasoline Alley (Faces)
09 Around the Plynth [Reprise] (Faces)
10 talk (Faces)
11 It's All Over Now (Faces)
12 I Feel So Good (Faces)

 https://pixeldrain.com/u/25Gbqoib

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/il9Vw8oTy3M1p4C/file

The cover image is from an unknown concert in 1970. We can tell it's not this one though, since the clothes don't match the description of the eyewitness account mentioned above. The original was in black and white, but I used the Ask Gemini program to colorize it. From right to left: Rod Stewart (he's crouched way down in light blue pants), Ronnie Lane, and Ronnie Wood.

Al Stewart - Medicine Ball Caravan, Charlton Park, Bishopsbourn, Britain, 8-31-1970

This is an extraordinary concert recording if you're an Al Stewart fan. But even if you're not, you should read this write-up, because this hopefully is the start of something really big and great in the world of bootleg recordings. So let me explain that first, and then I'll talk about this specific recording.

Last week (as I write this in mid-September 2026), I posted a 1970 Jefferson Airplane concert, which had never been publicly available with that sound quality before. I mentioned that it sounded like that could be the start of a really big leak of hundreds of high quality bootlegs from long ago. Since then, I've learned a lot more about this. I want to share this with you, because it has the potential to be the best news when it comes to bootlegs in decades!

The key to all this is a person named Bob Matthews. He was a key member of the support staff for the Grateful Dead. He went to high school with band member Bob Weir, and because the band's first roadie, back in 1966. From all the way back then, he got involved with recording the band. He stayed associated with the Dead in various roles all the way through the mid-1980s. I guess around that time he drifted away and got involved with some telecommunications job. He died in 2021.

But he was not just involved with the Dead; he had musical links to many other bands. For instance, he was a sound engineer on various Dead albums from "Aoxomoxoa" in 1969 to "Go to Heaven" in 1980, but he also worked on albums by New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Stoneground, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Barry Melton, and others. He even was a bass player in New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1969. He also had a key role in a company called Alembic, which started in 1969 and made high-end electronic equipment and musical instruments for many famous musicians. In short, this is someone who was a very connected insider in the music industry.

Recently, another person with many long-time links to the Dead, Charlie Miller, was given custody of Matthews' bootleg recordings, which Miller says number about 1,000 concerts. A lot of those are of the Dead, but apparently a majority are not. Miller is working with some other people to release all of this material to the public for free. He started a few weeks ago, and so far he has released about 20 recordings. If you want to see these as they come out, he has a Facebook page where he is posting download links called "Charlie Miller's Google Drive Links." I've noticed not everything he releases comes out there, actually, but most do. Some others are getting posted at the Guitars101 bootleg sharing site.

So far, here are the musical acts that he has released bootlegs for: the Grateful Dead, the Joy of Cooking, Jefferson Airplane, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Mickey Hart, the Faces, Al Stewart (this recording), Stoneground, Mott the Hoople, and the Youngbloods. Most of them so far are from 1970, and a lot of them are from a small Bay Area concert venue called the Family Dog on the Great Highway, which was only in existence from 1969 to 1970. We don't know what else Miller has and plans on releasing. He's only dropped a few hints. But I've looked at the musical acts that played at the Family Dog on the Great Highway at that time, and it's an intriguing list that includes multiple shows by the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, the Steve Miller Band, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), It's a Beautiful Day, Elvin Bishop, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody, Albert Collins, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and many, many more. The idea of getting pristine, previously unknown soundboard concert recordings from the likes of these bands after all this time boggles my mind! 

And that's just one possible lead. Probably, most of the music is related to the Dead and the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. But a lot of bands from all over the world passed through there. One thing I found out is that Matthews was involved in the recording of the infamous Altamont festival in 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others. He is said to have had soundboard recordings of that entire festival, which he would sometimes play for visitors to his house. A few years ago, a soundboard of the Flying Burritos Bros. set from that festival somehow became available. Perhaps it was an early leak from the Matthews trove?

So if you like music from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the time Matthews was involved in the music industry, hold on to your hats. Hopefully, there will be a steady release of hundreds of recordings in the months and years to come. I'm going to try to select the ones that interest me the most, make further edits if need be, and post them here. Normally, previously unknown recordings of this sound quality from this era are made public once in a blue moon. But so far, Charlie Miller seems to be releasing something new every couple of days!

This Al Stewart concert was part of a 1970 rock festival in England called the "Medicine Ball Caravan." In fact, there was an entire tour by that name that year. There's a long, tangled story about the tour and this concert in it, so I'll save that for the write-up of the next album from it.

Since this write-up is getting too long already, let me finally focus on this recording. The sound quality is fantastic, which is mind-blowing for its era. I'm pretty sure this now becomes the earliest publicly available concert recording by Stewart period, unless you count short radio and TV performances. In 2022, Stewart released a massive box set called "The Admiralty Lights," which was over 50 CDs in size. I'm sure this would have been included had Stewart had access to it back in 2022. That indicates to me that Matthews sat on his trove of recordings until his death, so nobody really knows what other treasures may be hidden in there, other than maybe Charlie Miller and a few people working with him now to get them to the public.

But this recording had a noticeable flaw, which was that there was almost no audible crowd noise. As I've said in other write-ups, this is a common problem for soundboards when they record everything on stage very well, but at the expense of capturing cheering from the crowd. Luckily, there was a little crowd noise. So I used the MVSEP program on all the songs to bring it up to a reasonable level.

This album is 33 minutes long. 

01 Electric Los Angeles Sunset (Al Stewart)
02 talk (Al Stewart)
03 Old Compton Street Blues (Al Stewart)
04 talk (Al Stewart)
05 In Brooklyn (Al Stewart)
06 talk (Al Stewart)
07 Zero She Flies (Al Stewart)
08 talk (Al Stewart)
09 Small Fruit Song (Al Stewart)
10 talk (Al Stewart)
11 Maybe Someday She Will Come Along (Al Stewart)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5zmYzYi3

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/SUVxJqLqlXmjp1f/file

The cover image is from a concert at the Marquee club in London in June 1972. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the use of the Ask Gemini program. For the unusual font type, I got the text at the top from a poster of the movie made about the Medicine Ball Caravan. (That's a long story in and of itself.) I then had Ask Gemini make the rest of the tricky font in the same style.

Jefferson Airplane - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 9-14-1970

It's been many decades since what a consider a musical golden era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. You'd think that after all this time, all of the really excellent bootlegs would have either been leaked to the public or keep unaccessible in musician and/or record company vaults. But that's not so, and this recording is another good example. I found this on a bootleg site (Guitars101). It was made public there for the very first time as I write this in mid-September 2026. What's encouraging is the person who posted it said they'd recently gotten a bunch of recordings from a friend, and this is one of them. So hopefully there will be more like these. This is a really excellent previously unknown soundboard of Jefferson Airplane in 1970.

By the way, the people who posted this (David Minches and Charlie Miller) also posted a soundboard recording of Jefferson Airplane in the same venue the very next day, September 15, 1970. I decided to only post this one because they have very similar setlists. But you might want to download the other one at Guitars101. I picked this one because I had a slight preference for the few songs that were different. Most notably, this was the only one with a performance of "Starship."

In 1970, at the time of this concert, Jefferson Airplane was coming apart. They were using a lot of drugs, especially cocaine, and the band members were having increasing conflicts with each other. The drummer, Spencer Dryden, was fired from the band in February 1970, and was replaced by Joey Covington. More importantly, Marty Balin, a key singer and songwriter in the band, was increasingly estranged from the other band members. He would quit the band in early 1971.

The band didn't release a new album in 1970, the first time that happened since it got started in 1966. They only released a single, "Mexico" backed by "Have You Seen the Saucers," both of which were performed here. But their record company released a popular greatest hits album, "The Worst of Jefferson Airplane," so they were touring to support that.

However, the band had come up with a bunch of new songs that were unreleased at the time. Some of them were performed here: "Emergency," written by Balin, "Up or Down," sung by Balin but written by Peter Kaukonen, brother of lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, "You Wear Your Dress Too Short," a blues cover sung by Malin, "Whatever The Old Man Does (Is Always Right)" by Covington, and "The Man (The Bludgeon of the Bluecoat)," also by Covington. When the band finally released their next album, "Bark," in 1971, none of those songs were included. The Balin-sung songs weren't included because he had left the band by then. I don't know why the two Covington-sung ones weren't included. Maybe he wasn't important enough in the band, being merely the new drummer, or maybe they weren't deemed good enough. Either way, it's interesting to hear them here. 

Additionally, the song "Starship" performed here is from the album "Blows Against the Empire." It was released about a month after this concert. Technically, it was billed to "Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship." That the first use of the name "Jefferson Starship." The name would return into 1974, replacing "Jefferson Airplane." Although it was billed as a Kantner solo album, it also had lots of involvement from Grace Slick, who wrote or co-wrote some songs, and sang lead vocals on many of them. 

I noticed that there's a version of "Blows Against the Empire" with some bonus tracks. One of them is the exact version of "Starship." I think it's the only officially released song from this concert.

Also at this time, two band members, lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady, had formed their own spin-off group, "Hot Tuna." Since they were on friendly terms with other band members, Hot Tuna often served as the opening acts to Jefferson Airplane concerts, or there would be a Hot Tuna section in the middle. For this concert, the first four songs are effectively a mini Hot Tuna set.

As I mentioned above, this is an excellent sounding soundboard. However, I think I improved it still further. It had one problem that is common to excellent sounding soundboards: they record what happened on stage wonderfully, but don't get much of the crowd cheering. That was very much the case here. So I ran every single song through the MVSEP program, boosting the cheering dramatically at the end of each song. Now, it sounds like a normal concert, with the expected amount of audience reaction.

It sounds like the recording for about the first thirty seconds or so of "We Can Be Together" was wonky. I improved it a bit, but most of it was beyond my ability to fix.  

This album is two hours and 19 minutes long. 

01 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
02 Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning (Jefferson Airplane)
03 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
04 New Song [For the Morning] (Jefferson Airplane)
05 Been So Long (Jefferson Airplane)
06 Hesitation Blues (Jefferson Airplane)
07 We Can Be Together (Jefferson Airplane)
08 Mexico (Jefferson Airplane)
09 Crown of Creation (Jefferson Airplane)
10 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
11 Whatever the Old Man Does [Is Always Right] (Jefferson Airplane)
12 The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil (Jefferson Airplane)
13 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
14 Emergency (Jefferson Airplane)
15 Come Back Baby (Jefferson Airplane)
16 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
17 Somebody to Love (Jefferson Airplane)
18 Wooden Ships (Jefferson Airplane)
19 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
20 Up or Down (Jefferson Airplane)
21 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
22 Have You Seen the Saucers (Jefferson Airplane)
23 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
24 The Man [Bludgeon of a Bluecoat] (Jefferson Airplane)
25 The Other Side of This Life (Jefferson Airplane)
26 Volunteers (Jefferson Airplane)
27 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
28 Greasy Heart (Jefferson Airplane)
29 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
30 You Wear Your Dress Too Short (Jefferson Airplane)
31 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
32 Freight Train [Instrumental Version] (Jefferson Airplane)
33 Starship (Jefferson Airplane)
34 talk (Jefferson Airplane)
35 3-5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds (Jefferson Airplane) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/g3L7yzZm

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/iWjtOF0HNrB7dqw/file

The cover image shows a concert in Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan, on May 24, 1970. From left to right: Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Grace Slick, and Marty Balin.