Various Artists - Gershwin Prize for Popular Song Honoring Garth Brooks, D.A.R. Constitution Hall, Washington, DC, 3-4-2020

Up until now, I've posted eight "Gershwin Prize for Popular Song" award concerts. There's a bunch more out there; they're just currently very hard to find. Happily, yesterday, a person anonymously sent me this one, so now I can post the ninth. I still call on people to help me post the other ones I've missed. If you have them, please share! Anyway, this one is from 2020, a couple of weeks before the world shut down due to the Covid pandemic, and honors Garth Brooks.

This one is pretty different from the other Gershwin Prize concerts I've found so far. The first half proceeded more or less usually, though it was unique that Brooks himself started the concert by playing a song. But then, instead of playing a couple of songs at the end, or even a few, Brooks basically played a mini-concert. He played no fewer than 15 songs at the end! Admittedly, many of these were short versions, usually only a minute or two, often acoustic cover versions. But still, about half of this tribute concert was performed by Brooks. By comparison, when Joni Mitchell would accept her Gershwin Prize three years later, she would sing only two songs.

The music here is unreleased, and the sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and 45 minutes long. 

01 Ain't Goin' Down ['Til the Sun Comes Up] [Edit] (Garth Brooks with Keith Urban)
02 talk (Jay Leno)
03 Rodeo (Chris Stapleton)
04 talk (Chris Stapleton)
05 Shameless (Chris Stapleton)
06 talk (Keb Mo)
07 The River (Keb Mo)
08 talk (Jay Leno)
09 talk (Keith Urban)
10 We Shall Be Free (Keith Urban)
11 talk (Lee Brice)
12 More than a Memory (Lee Brice)
13 talk (Ricky Scaggs)
14 Callin' Baton Rouge (Ricky Scaggs & the Oak Ridge Boys)
15 talk (Margaret George)
16 For the Last Time (Trisha Yearwood)
17 talk (Trisha Yearwood)
18 The Change (Trisha Yearwood)
19 talk (David Rubenstein)
20 talk (Carla Hayden)
21 talk (Garth Brooks)
22 Vincent (Garth Brooks)
23 Operator [That's Not the Way It Feels] (Garth Brooks)
24 talk (Garth Brooks)
25 Unanswered Prayers (Garth Brooks)
26 talk (Garth Brooks)
27 Sing Me Back Home (Garth Brooks)
28 talk (Garth Brooks)
29 Make You Feel My Love (Garth Brooks)
30 talk (Garth Brooks)
31 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Garth Brooks)
32 Ain't No Sunshine (Garth Brooks)
33 talk (Garth Brooks)
34 Wild World (Garth Brooks)
35 talk (Garth Brooks)
36 Night Moves (Garth Brooks)
37 talk (Garth Brooks)
38 That Summer (Garth Brooks)
39 talk (Garth Brooks)
40 The Thunder Rolls (Garth Brooks)
41 talk (Garth Brooks)
42 Piano Man (Garth Brooks)
43 American Pie (Garth Brooks)
44 talk (Garth Brooks)
45 Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks)
46 talk (Garth Brooks)
47 The Dance [Edit] (Garth Brooks)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6BuegDKz

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/VAr9F5qWXeMBnC7/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. 

Various Artists - Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon, Hollywood Pantages Theater, Los Angeles, CA, 4-6-2022

I've recently discovered a bunch of tribute concerts. I find these really interesting, but they seem to often slip through the cracks in terms of being shared bootlegs. So I'm going to try to make posting these a higher priority. Here's a Grammy-related tribute to Paul Simon from 2022. It took place just three days after the annual Grammy Awards ceremony that year, and in the same city, so many of the stars who attended that could attend this one as well.

It goes without saying that Simon is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, so he deserves a tribute like this. In fact, I've found a MusiCares tribute concert from 2001 and a Gershwin Prize tribute concert from 2007 both celebrating his songs that I plan on posting too. Like those, this one features many big stars playing his most beloved songs.

It also features Simon performing a couple of songs of his own at the end of the concert. This is especially significant because he was 80 years old at the time of this concert, and his voice was noticeably weakening with age. He announced a farewell tour in 2018, so this seemed like one of his last public performances. Since then, though, he decided to have one more tour in 2025, with about 20 concerts. Be that as it may, one can hear the change in his voice in this performance. Thankfully, he realized his limitations and had another singer tackle the vocally challenging song "American Tune" while he just played guitar on it.

The music here remains officially unreleased. However, it was broadcast on television, so there are video files of it. I took a high quality version, converted it to audio format, and broke it into mp3s. The sound quality is excellent. I kept most everything, except I cut out some talk from the unnamed female emcee every time there was a commercial break, which happened every few songs. Hopefully this now sounds seamless, without any hints of those commercial breaks.

Some of the banter between songs were little speeches by famous non-musicians, such as Woody Harrelson, Dustin Hoffman, and Oprah Winfrey. Famous rock star Elton John also only talked. In his case, his talk was a video broadcast, so he probably didn't sing as well because he wasn't there in person.

This album is an hour and 24 minutes long.

01 talk (emcee)
02 Kodachrome (Brad Paisley)
03 talk (Woody Harrelson)
04 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Jonas Brothers)
05 talk (Garth Brooks)
06 The Boxer (Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood)
07 talk (Elton John)
08 talk (Susanna Hoffs)
09 A Hazy Shade of Winter (Susanna Hoffs)
10 talk (Herbie Hancock)
11 talk (Sting)
12 America (Sting)
13 talk (Billy Porter)
14 Loves Me like a Rock (Billy Porter)
15 talk (Dustin Hoffman)
16 talk (Stevie Wonder)
17 Mrs. Robinson (Stevie Wonder with Sheila E. & the Jonas Brothers)
18 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
19 Something So Right (Bonnie Raitt & Brad Paisley)
20 talk (Stevie Wonder)
21 Bridge Over Troubled Water (Stevie Wonder & Ledisi)
22 talk (Sofia Carson)
23 Mother and Child Reunion (Jimmy Cliff & Shaggy)
24 Take Me to the Mardi Gras (Trombone Shorty & Irma Thomas)
25 talk (Eric Church)
26 Homeward Bound (Eric Church)
27 Slip Slidin' Away (Little Big Town)
28 talk (Folake Olowofoyeku)
29 Homeless (Take 6)
30 Under African Skies (Angelique Kidjo with Dave Matthews)
31 You Can Call Me Al (Dave Matthews with Angelique Kidjo)
32 talk (Oprah Winfrey)
33 Graceland (Paul Simon)
34 talk (Paul Simon)
35 American Tune (Rhiannon Giddens with Paul Simon)
36 The Sound of Silence (Paul Simon)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5j4GUcC1

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Vz5ALstXCYeahHB/file 

The cover shows Paul Simon about to receive a hug from Oprah Winfrey. It's 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.

Garth Brooks - VH-1 Storytellers, New York City, 10-20-1996

I've previously said I'm not a Garth Brooks fan. But albums like this one are changing my mind. Brooks could have performed for the "VH-1 Storytellers" show with a full band, as most acts on the show did, but instead he decided to do it in a solo acoustic format. That completely gets rid of a slick country pop production that I don't like and that is all over his studio albums. What we're left with is a talented singer performing good songs, very much in a James Taylor mode that arguably sounds more folky than country. (Not surprisingly, he mentions in his banter here that Taylor is one of his biggest influences.) So if you don't like Brooks, or even country music in general, you may still like this.

It so happens I found an article from the Chicago Tribune reviewing the concert shortly after it happened. It includes a quote from Brooks about playing solo acoustic for it:

"It was definitely the first time since I got a deal in 1989 that I played this way. I was pretty much petrified. Oh man, I never get to play for 75 people. And you always have a band to hide behind. And you have lights and tricks to hide behind, so when your vocal is not there, I can laugh it off and say I was joking with somebody. But there wasn’t nobody but me and my guitar up there this time. ... Everybody should go through a show like this. I wasn’t too comfortable when it started, but by the end I was having a blast."

Keep in mind that Brooks was selling insane amounts of records at the time. For instance, his 1990 album "No Fences" sold 18 million copies, and his 1991 album "Ropin' the Wind" sold 14 million. So for him to perform for a mere 75 people was pretty wild. Kudos to him for doing this. Much later in his career, around 2010 to 2014, he did occasional solo acoustic shows in Las Vegas. But this may well be the only such show from the 1990s, when he was at the height of his fame. Even those later acoustic shows were for big audiences of many thousands, so this was quite a unique concert for him, I think.

By the way, I couldn't find the name of the exact venue this concert took place in, so if anyone knows, please let me know and I'll update this.

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 Papa Loved Mama [Incomplete] (Garth Brooks)
02 talk (Garth Brooks)
03 The River (Garth Brooks)
04 talk (Garth Brooks)
05 Sweet Baby James (Garth Brooks)
06 talk (Garth Brooks)
07 That Summer (Garth Brooks)
08 talk (Garth Brooks)
09 That Summer [Version 2] (Garth Brooks)
10 talk (Garth Brooks)
11 That Ol' Wind (Garth Brooks)
12 The Thunder Rolls (Garth Brooks)
13 talk (Garth Brooks)
14 Unanswered Prayers (Garth Brooks)
15 talk (Garth Brooks)
16 We Shall Be Free (Garth Brooks)
17 talk (Garth Brooks)
18 Much Too Young [To Feel This Damn Old] (Garth Brooks)
19 talk (Garth Brooks)
20 If Tomorrow Never Comes (Garth Brooks)
21 talk (Garth Brooks)
22 The Dance (Garth Brooks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17168935/GARTHBRKS1996StrytllrsNwYrkC__10-20-1996_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/dMQf9ska

The cover photo is from this exact concert. It was low-res at first, but I used the Krea AI program to upgrade it.

Garth Brooks - Willie's Saloon, Stillwater, OK, 1986 (A Mike Solof Guest Post)

This is another Mike Solof guest post, but I have some things to say. First off, I'm surprised to be posting a Garth Brooks album here, because I'm not a fan of his music at all. But Mike was raving about this concert, and when I found out it's a solo acoustic show almost entirely of cover versions, I decided to check it out. I figured this might not have the production issues and other issues that I don't like about his music, and sure enough, that's the case. 

This is an album for even people like me who don't like Garth Brooks. If you like acoustic versions of great, classic songs, this is chock-full of good stuff. Heck, you don't even have to be a country music fan. There are only two Brooks originals, and the vast majority of the covers are folk and rock - Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Bob Seger, etc...

And although it's a bootleg from three years before he even put out his first album, the sound quality is surprisingly good.

It's unclear if this comes from one concert or several. What we do know is that Brooks was playing at small clubs in the town where he was going to college, and he probably was the one who made this recording, in order to show others his musical skills and possibly to give away or sell at his gigs. It basically sounds like a soundboard bootleg, although whether it is or not is kind of a moot point, since it literally sounds like the audience consisted of about a dozen people who were totally quiet during his songs. There's also almost no banter between songs. I'm guessing that was cut out in order to fit more songs on the tape.

Speaking of that audience noise, this version I'm posting here is the first time you can hear the clapping at all. It was way quieter. But I detected faint strains, so I used the MVSEP audio editing program to split the recording into cheering and everything else. Then I boosted the cheering up, waaaay up. Even now, the clapping is still pretty quiet, but at least it can be heard after each song. 

I also made a major edit to one song, "You Never Even Called Me by My Name." Near the end of the song, Brooks had a guest join him on stage and take over singing. He was introduced mid-song as a sports star at the college, so that explains why anyone thought it was a good idea to have him sing. But it turns out he was really bad, really out of tune. I asked Mike if I could edit him out, and Mike responded "KILL, KILL, KILL!" So that's how bad it was. I cut out a minute or two at the end of the song, but still patched in the very end, so hopefully you won't notice there was any editing at all.

As is his usual style, Mike has written some notes which are included in a PDF file with the download. I suggest you check that out to learn more about this unique recording in Brooks' music career. Mike comes at this from a different perspective as a big Brooks fan, and it's thanks to his enthusiasm that I listened to this and liked it enough to suggest that we post it.

This album is an hour and 14 minutes long.

Here's a list of the original artists for each song. 

01 Tequila Sunrise - Eagles
02 Piano Man - Billy Joel
03 Much Too Young [To Feel This Damn Old] - Garth Brooks
05 Time in a Bottle - Jim Croce
06 Rocket Man [I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time] - Elton John
07 Steamroller Blues - James Taylor
08 Why Do Those Dreams Never Come True - Greg Jacobs
10 House at Pooh Corner - Loggins & Messina
11 Mrs. Robinson - Simon & Garfunkel
12 Cats in the Cradle - Harry Chapin
13 Come Monday - Jimmy Buffett
14 Please Come to Boston - Dave Loggins
15 Night Moves - Bob Seger
16 Mr. Bojangles - Jerry Jeff Walker / Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
17 The Boxer - Simon & Garfunkel
18 Sweet Baby James - James Taylor
19 Turn the Page - Bob Seger
20 Redneck Mother - Ray Wylie Hubbard
21 Only the Good Die Young - Billy Joel
22 Guitar Town - Steve Earle
23 Taxi - Harry Chapin
25 You Never Even Called Me by My Name - Steve Goodman / David Allan Coe
26 That’s the Way Love Goes - Lefty Frizzell / Merle Haggard
27 Which One of Them - Garth Brooks

Here's the usual song list:

01 Tequila Sunrise (Garth Brooks)
02 Piano Man (Garth Brooks)
03 Much Too Young [To Feel This Damn Old] (Garth Brooks)
04 talk (Garth Brooks)
05 Time in a Bottle (Garth Brooks)
06 Rocket Man [I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time] (Garth Brooks)
07 Steamroller Blues (Garth Brooks)
08 Why Do Those Dreams Never Come True (Garth Brooks)
09 talk (Garth Brooks)
10 House at Pooh Corner (Garth Brooks)
11 Mrs. Robinson (Garth Brooks)
12 Cats in the Cradle (Garth Brooks)
13 Come Monday (Garth Brooks)
14 Please Come to Boston (Garth Brooks)
15 Night Moves (Garth Brooks)
16 Mr. Bojangles (Garth Brooks)
17 The Boxer (Garth Brooks)
18 Sweet Baby James (Garth Brooks)
19 Turn the Page (Garth Brooks)
20 Redneck Mother (Garth Brooks)
21 Only the Good Die Young (Garth Brooks)
22 Guitar Town (Garth Brooks)
23 Taxi (Garth Brooks)
24 talk (Garth Brooks)
25 You Never Even Called Me by My Name [Edit] (Garth Brooks)
26 That’s the Way Love Goes (Garth Brooks)
27 Which One of Them (Garth Brooks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17187633/GARTBRKS1986WllisSlonStllwtrOK__1986_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4FeuY6H3

The cover photo is of Brooks playing at this very club, probably in 1986. If you look closely, you can even see that his cap has the name of the club on it.

UPDATE: On October 1, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.