Dan Fogelberg - Ebbets Field, Denver, CO, 8-17-1974

Just yesterday, I posted two Dan Fogelberg "best of" albums made by guest poster Mike Solof. While he was putting those together, he was raving to me about an early Fogelberg concert - this one. I discovered it has great sound quality, but it's very little known. So I figured, heck, while we're doing some Fogelberg stuff, let's post this one too.

At the time of this concert, Fogelberg's music career was just starting. He put out his first album in 1972, "Home Free." But it didn't make a mark at the time, not even reaching the Top 200 in the U.S. albums chart. His second album, "Souvenirs," would do better. But that wouldn't be released until October 1974, a couple of months after this concert. So at the time, Fogelberg was a virtual unknown, touring the U.S. for the very first time. This venue only held about 200 people.  

But already, it seems Fogelberg was showing star potential. I found an interesting quote about this very concert in a Denver Post newspaper article. It quotes Chuck Morris, who would go on to be a big music promoter. He went to the concert, and ran into Irving Azoff, who was Fogelberg's manager at the time and would go on to manage many other famous artists, such as the Eagles, Journey, and Christina Aguilera. "I'll never forget that night," Morris said. "It was a sold-out crowd, and Irving said, 'This guy's going to fill up arenas in two or three years.' And he was right." 

Now, I should mention that when this obscure bootleg is shared at all, it almost always has been mislabeled. The version that Mike Solof has is called "Live in Colorado 1973." But I looked it up, and Fogelberg didn't tour Colorado in 1973. (There's an official Fogelberg website that lists all the concert dates for his entire career.) I guessed this was probably from the Ebbets Field club in Denver, because they were often broadcasting concerts on the radio at the time. I looked into it, and Fogelberg played there twice in 1974, once on this date, and again in October, after his "Souvenirs" album came out. So I didn't know which concert it was, if indeed it was from that venue at all. But luckily, I had a way of finding out. 

There's a quasi-official webpage for the Ebbets Field venue, which you can find here:

Ebbets Field Rarities 1973-1977 | Colorado Music Experience 

That posts just one song from many great concerts that took place there. It had one song from Fogelberg on this date, the song "Stars." I compared the opening banter of that version with this version, and they are exactly the same, down to every last word and vocal nuance. So we know beyond any doubt the correct date and location for this concert. Hopefully, that "Live in Colorado 1973" inaccuracy will fade away.

Fogelberg was supported by a couple backing musicians, but this mostly has a solo acoustic vibe. 

This album is 57 minutes long. 

01 Now the Show Begins (Dan Fogelberg)
02 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
03 Stars (Dan Fogelberg)
04 Next Time (Dan Fogelberg)
05 Morning Sky (Dan Fogelberg)
06 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
07 Changing Horses (Dan Fogelberg)
08 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
09 Part of the Plan (Dan Fogelberg)
10 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
11 Anyway I Love You (Dan Fogelberg)
12 Long Way Home [Live in the Country] (Dan Fogelberg)
13 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
14 As the Raven Flies (Dan Fogelberg)
15 [Someone's Been] Telling You Stories (Dan Fogelberg)
16 To the Morning (Dan Fogelberg)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/EGZDpHEn

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/PMnBo72YKNIE0fC/file

The cover photo is from an appearance on the "In Concert" ABC TV show in December 1974.

Dan Fogelberg - Best of Live: 1974-1995 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

I just posted a "best of" album guest poster Mike Solof made of his favorite studio tracks by singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. He wanted to divide his music up into a studio best of and a live best of, so here's the companion live best of.

Mike is a really big fan of Fogelberg's music and is making these to help me, and others like you, better enjoy his music. As he usually does, Mike made a PDF with more information and pictures, which is included in the download zip. I encourage you to give that a look. It's the exact same one as for the studio best of.

For the studio best of, all the songs are officially released, and usually from his studio albums. For this one, most of the songs come from official live albums as well. But four of the songs here come from bootlegs. Specifically, tracks 10, 11, 13, and 16. But they're excellent sounding ones, just as good as the live albums.

By the way, Fogelberg's last concert was for the "PBS Soundstage" concert in 2003. (He died of cancer in 2007 at the age of 56.) I would really like to post that here, but I've only found a few songs from it on YouTube. If anyone has all of it, please let me know. Thanks. 

This album is an hour and 13 minutes long. 

01 Songbird (Dan Fogelberg)
02 The Power of Gold (Dan Fogelberg)
03 Blow Wind Blow (Dan Fogelberg)
04 Hard to Say (Dan Fogelberg)
05 Innocent Age (Dan Fogelberg)
06 Looking for a Lady (Dan Fogelberg)
07 Once upon a Time (Dan Fogelberg)
08 Make Love Stay (Dan Fogelberg)
09 The Chauvinist Song (Dan Fogelberg)
10 Morning Sky (Dan Fogelberg)
11 Someone's Been Telling You Stories (Dan Fogelberg)
12 Part of the Plan (Dan Fogelberg)
13 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
14 Song from Half Mountain (Dan Fogelberg)
15 Souvenir (Dan Fogelberg)
16 To the Morning (Dan Fogelberg)
17 Here Comes the Sun (Dan Fogelberg)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/9q7tK9se

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/QZQOzX6EPddIoQh/file

As with the cover to the studio album, Mike picked this one. I don't know exactly where or when it comes from. 

Dan Fogelberg - Best of Studio: 1974-1987 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

Recently, I mentioned to my musical friend Mike Solof that I wasn't very familiar with the music of the band Kansas, other than their big hits. He went and made me a "best of" album, which I've posted here. Then I happened to mention I wasn't familiar with the music of Dan Fogelberg either, again other than the big hits. So boom, once again he made me a "best of." I really need to be careful about what I say around Mike, it seems, or my music collection will keep growing too much! ;)

It turns out Mike is a very big fan of Fogelberg's music, just like he is of the music of Kansas. In fact, he likes Fogelberg's stuff so much that he made two albums. He made a studio album and a live one. As you can see from the title, this is the studio one. The live one will follow shortly.  

As is his habit, Mike has included a PDF to explain his thoughts, as well as provide some good pictures. So please check that out for more information. In this case, the PDF is the same for both the studio and live albums. 

This album is an hour and 12 minutes long. 

01 Nexus (Dan Fogelberg)
02 The Power of Gold (Dan Fogelberg with Tim Weisberg)
03 Lonely in Love (Dan Fogelberg)
04 In the Passage (Dan Fogelberg)
05 Better Change (Dan Fogelberg)
06 Beggar's Game (Dan Fogelberg)
07 Sweet Magnolia [And the Traveling Salesman] (Dan Fogelberg)
08 Tell Me to My Face (Dan Fogelberg with Tim Weisberg)
09 Times like These (Dan Fogelberg)
10 The Reach (Dan Fogelberg)
11 Empty Cages (Dan Fogelberg)
12 Tucson, Arizona [Gazette] (Dan Fogelberg)
13 As the Raven Flies [Alternate Version] (Dan Fogelberg)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/2MFP7NnJ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/ZhEqShKlvNQ1RV8/file

The cover image was selected by Mike. I don't know exactly where or when it's from.

Various Artists - Peace Sunday, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA, 6-6-1982, Part 4: Dan Fogelberg and Stevie Nicks

Here's the fourth out of five albums that make up the "Peace Sunday" concert in 1982. 

I'll just paste in a paragraph I wrote in my post for Part 2, since it still applies here:

If you want a full explanation of what the concert was about, please read my write-up for Part 1. In that, I also explained about the sound quality issue. In short, the only known source for the whole concert is an audience bootleg. It didn't sound very good, so this concert recording hasn't been shared that much. But I could tell there was potential there, if I could get rid of most of the much. As I explained in detail in my write-up, I think I did get rid of most of it. It still doesn't have excellent sound, but it's pretty good, and worthy of being posted at my blog, where I have pretty high sound quality standards. 

This part is split in two. The first half features Dan Fogelberg, and the second half features Stevie Nicks. Graham Nash helped Fogelberg with harmony vocals on one song.

Both Fogelberg and Nicks were at or near the peak of their popularity. His most recent album at the time, "The Innocent Age," was released in 1981. It sold over two million copies, and had three songs in the Top Ten of the U.S. singles chart. Meanwhile, Nicks was having both a very successful solo career while still remaining a member of Fleetwood Mac. A new Fleetwood Mac album, "Mirage," would be released a month after this concert. Nicks didn't perform any songs from it.

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

Note that, for all the parts, the track numbers continue from the numbers in the previous part. That way, you can put all the songs together and listen to the whole thing at once if you want.  

50 Part of the Plan (Dan Fogelberg)
51 Empty Cages (Dan Fogelberg)
52 Tell Me to My Face (Dan Fogelberg)
53 Face the Fire (Dan Fogelberg)
54 talk (Dan Fogelberg)
55 There's a Place in the World for a Gambler (Dan Fogelberg with Graham Nash)
56 Edge of Seventeen (Stevie Nicks)
57 talk (Stevie Nicks)
58 Sara (Stevie Nicks)
59 I Need to Know (Stevie Nicks)
60 Rhiannon (Stevie Nicks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/DGXo684q

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/0sOekxVb3WtKsKr/file

The cover photo of Stevie Nicks is from this exact concert.

Various Artists - PBS Soundstage, The Rocky Mountain Way, Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre, Greenwood Village, CO, 8-13-2017

Here's a rather strange episode of PBS Soundstage." Occasionally, that TV show would just broadcast highlights of concerts that were happening anyway. For instance, in 2003, one episode of the show consisted of highlights from that year's Farm Aid benefit concert, and in 2016 they broadcast highlights of a tribute concert for George Harrison, called GeorgeFest. 

This another case like that. Weirdly, the concert was for the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. That year, they were inducting Joe Walsh's early 1970s band, Barnstorm, and Dan Fogelberg, and a couple of others. But really, it was basically a tribute to Fogelberg, who died in 2007. Walsh did play a few songs with Barnstorm for the first time in ages, but even that was kind of a Fogelberg tribute, since he was friends with Fogelberg and produced one of his albums. 

What we have here consists only of the highlights that made it on the Soundstage TV show. Other songs were played, including by some other musical acts, but I couldn't find them. On this recording, Joe Walsh started out playing three of his songs from his early 1970s Barnstorm era. Then the rest of the concert consisted of different musical acts performing Fogelberg songs. Fool's Gold is the name of Fogelberg's long-time backing back. Johnnyswim is a rather obscure married vocal duo. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Richie Furay (formerly of Buffalo Springfield and Poco) apparently played one or more of their own songs earlier in the concert. But all we have is them performing together on a Fogelberg song. Then country star Vince Gill and Christian pop star Amy Grant sang a Fogelberg song together. They're connected due to being married since 2000. 

The biggest name of the evening was saved for last: Garth Brooks. Whether one likes it or not, he's one of the best selling musical acts of all time. It turns out he's also a huge fan of Dan Fogelberg's music. He was introduced by Fogelberg's widow and then sang one Fogelberg song, "Phoenix." The concert ended with one last Fogelberg song, in which all their earlier performers joined Brooks on stage for the song.

I read an article discussing some controversy about this concert, because some unscrupulous local promoter billed the concert soley as a Garth Brooks one, driving up ticket prices. Some fans were very disappointed when it turned out he only had a small role to play, despite there being other big names too, like Joe Walsh. But apparently that promoter had nothing to do with the people who actually arranged and put on the concert. 

I had a pretty difficult time editing this one. This was one of those occasional episodes where some editor thought it was a smart idea to have voiceovers over parts of the songs, especially over instrumental solos. I was able to cut out a bunch of stuff that wasn't from the actual concert between songs, like interview segments. As for the voiceovers during songs, luckily they kept enough of the music that I was able to erase the voices and keep the underlying music, using the UVR5 program. However, there was some damage to the music in those songs, the ones with "[Edit]" in their titles. 

Also, this is yet another episode of this show where the best sounding recording turned out to be a video file. So I converted that to audio and broke it into mp3s. (And by the way, this episode isn't listed in the Wikipedia page's list of all the Soundstage episodes, but I know it was such an episode because I watched the video of it, complete with Soundstage graphics. The episode title, "The Rocky Mountain Way," is the name Soundstage gave the concert, not the actual concert name used at the time.)

This unreleased album is 56 minutes long.

01 talk (Joe Walsh)
02 Here We Go (Joe Walsh)
03 Turn to Stone (Joe Walsh)
04 talk (Joe Walsh)
05 Rocky Mountain Way (Joe Walsh)
06 Part of the Plan [Edit] (Fool's Gold)
07 Nether Lands [Edit] (Johnnyswim)
08 Run for the Roses [Edit] (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band & Richie Furay)
09 talk (Vince Gill & Amy Grant)
10 Longer (Vince Gill & Amy Grant)
11 talk (Jean Fogelberg)
12 Phoenix (Garth Brooks)
13 talk (Chuck Morris)
14 There's a Place in the World for a Gambler (Garth Brooks & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/gqqHFvZQ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/WizLWpcA2Bkjqv7/file

 The cover image is a screenshot I took of a video of this concert, showing Joe Walsh performing a guitar solo.