The Steve Miller Band - Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, CA, 5-11-1968

Here is an excellent Steve Miller Band concert from 1968 that I have drastically improved through audio editing. The source is a great soundboard bootleg, but there was one major flaw: the vocals were way, way down in the mix for most of the songs. In fact, they were so far down in the mix that it was almost like an all instrumentals version. I used the MVSEP program to bring the vocals back to their proper levels. So now, in my opinion, this becomes of the best live recordings of this band in the 1960s, if not the very best.

At the time of this concert, the band had only released one album, "Children of the Future," in 1967. Later in 1968, they would have a minor hit with "Livin' in the U.S.A.," a song from their second album. This concert contains a version of that song. Also, Boz Scaggs was still part of the band. He would leave in September 1968, just prior to the release of the second album. He would go on to have a long, successful solo career.

The band played at the Carousel Ballroom a lot around May 1968. I didn't realize this until recently, but in July 1968, the management of the venue was taken over by promoter Bill Graham, and it was renamed the Fillmore West. (I had thought the Fillmore West was just the Fillmore renamed due to there being a Fillmore East started in New York City around that time. But the original Fillmore was about a mile away, and also changed ownership and names.) Anyway, for some reason, there are a bunch of soundboard bootleg recordings of Steve Miller Band concerts at the Carousel Ballroom around this time, for instance on April 26, 27, 28, and May 10, 11, and 12. A lot of the other ones are incomplete or have other problems. Now that the vocals problem has been solved, I think this is the best one.

Actually, I did a lot of work on this recording, in addition to the vocals problem mentioned above. Another issue was that the recording captured very little of the audience noise, so it seemed like there was an odd lack of audience reaction at the ends of songs. To fix this, I ran many songs through the MVSEP program again, separating the crowd noise out, and then greatly boosting the volume. I also copied and pasted some crowd noise from one song to another where there wasn't enough crowd noise to use the other method. I made some other fixes too. There was a lot of annoying buzzing coming from one of the instruments on some songs. I made more edits to get rid of that. I didn't get rid of that entirely. But now there's only a little bit of it on a few songs. I did still more edits. As one example, the harmonica on "Just a Little Bit" was buried in the mix, but I fixed that by using MVSEP yet again. 

In short, this is way better than the previous version. But the original version had a lot going for it. One nice thing is that the lead guitar work is very prominent and clear. 

This actually combines two sets. The song "Living in the U.S.A." was played in both sets. However, the second version was cut off before it finished. So I chose not to include that one. That was a lucky break, that the one song that got cut off was the only one that was played twice. Also, this began with the song "Can't You Hear My Daddy's Heartbeat." But I didn't include that, because it was only the last two minutes out of an eight minute long song. It was played the night before, and since there's a soundboard recording of that, I tried to combine them, but the two versions were too different for that to work well. 

The recording I found ended with two unnamed jams featuring Steve Miller Band playing with Jorma Kaukonen and Elvin Bishop on lead guitars and Jack Casady on bass. I'm pretty sure this was some sort of backstage, after hours kind of thing, because there was no audience noise whatsoever. And there was several minutes of tuning and doodling between the jams that also had no hint of any audience. So I've included those as bonus tracks, since they weren't part of the concert.   

This album is an hour and 17 minutes long. 

01 Goin' to Mexico (Steve Miller Band)
02 Living in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)
03 talk (Steve Miller Band)
04 Steppin' Stone (Steve Miller Band)
05 Blues with a Feeling (Steve Miller Band)
06 talk (Steve Miller Band)
07 Roll with It (Steve Miller Band)
08 Mercury Blues (Steve Miller Band)
09 talk (Steve Miller Band)
10 Sitting in Circles (Steve Miller Band)
11 talk (Steve Miller Band)
12 Junior Saw It Happen (Steve Miller Band)
13 talk (Steve Miller Band)
14 Me and My Woman (Steve Miller Band)
15 Feel So Good (Steve Miller Band)
16 Instrumental (Steve Miller Band)
17 I've Got My Eyes on You (Steve Miller Band)
18 Just a Little Bit (Steve Miller Band)
19 talk (Steve Miller Band)
20 Your Old Lady (Steve Miller Band)

Long Jam [Instrumental] (Steve Miller Band with Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady & Elvin Bishop)
Short Jam [Instrumental] (Steve Miller Band with Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady & Elvin Bishop)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Y7TAY7V5

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/mhiVCLS5WseEoKW/file 

The cover is the concert poster for this exact concert. However, I made some changes. One is that I had to do some reshaping to get things to fit into a square shape. I kept the image in the middle unstretched, but there are parts that got cropped. Also, I removed the names of the supporting bands, which were right below where "The Steve Miller Band" is mentioned in the striped area. The other bands were Kaleidoscope and the Youngbloods.

Northern California Folk-Rock Festival, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, San Jose, CA, 5-18-1968, Part 2 - The Steve Miller Band

This is the second album out of seven albums I'm posting from the 1968 Northern California Folk-Rock Festival. This set features the Steve Miller Band.

I said quite a lot in my write-up for the first album I posted from this festival, the Youngbloods set. I recommend you read that, because most of that applies to this set too. Most importantly, note that this is sourced from an audience bootleg, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. I had to do a lot of work to fix all sorts of flaws. The final results sounds pretty decent for a 1968 concert, in my opinion, but you need to be tolerant about the flaws that still remain.

In the write-up I did for the Youngbloods set, I extensively quoted a concert review that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. That review also had this to say: "The Steve Miller Band was astonishing on Saturday, playing the most involved guitar and bass lines I have ever heard outside a multitrack recording."

All the sound quality problems I mentioned in the write-up for the Youngbloods applies here too. In fact, this set probably sounds a bit worse than the other ones from the festival. As I mentioned there, I used the  MVSEP program to split the vocals from the instruments and then boost the vocals relative to the instruments. But for some of the songs that sounded the worst, like many in this set, the recording was too muddled for the program to be able to make that split. So in some cases I couldn't do all the fixes I wanted.

Two songs here had extra problems, meriting putting "[Edit]" in their titles. For "Steppin' Stone," there was a short section in the middle that was missing. I used a piece from another bootleg from this era to fill in about ten seconds. But there were some differences with that recording, so the edit is probably fairly obvious. Still, I felt that was better than having a gap there instead. A similar problem occurred with the song "Junior Saw It Happen." The last minute or so was missing. So I also filled that in from another bootleg. Once again, the edit wasn't ideal due to differences between the two versions, but again I'd rather have that than the song cutting out.

The bootleg version of this claimed it took place on the second day of the festival, not the first. But you can see in the newspaper review quote above that they played on the first day ("The Steve Miller Band was astonishing on Saturday"). That also jibes with the schedule posted before the festival started. According to that, the band was due to play after the Youngbloods and before the Grateful Dead. 

This album is 49 minutes long. 

01 talk (Steve Miller Band)
02 Living in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)
03 Steppin' Stone [Edit] (Steve Miller Band)
04 I Just Want a Little Bit (Steve Miller Band)
05 Fanny Mae (Steve Miller Band)
06 Junior Saw It Happen [Edit] (Steve Miller Band)
07 Blues with a Feeling (Steve Miller Band)
08 Your Old Lady (Steve Miller Band)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Gi3kpdK8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/GumjRendgOzt0Jd/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. It's from a time when Boz Scaggs was still in the band. That's Miller on the left in the yellow shirt, and Scaggs is on the right. Note the original version of this photo was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

The Steve Miller Band with the James Cotton Band - The Midnight Special, NBC Studios, Burbank, CA, 1-25-1974

Here's another episode of the "Midnight Special" TV show. This time, the Steve Miller Band was the host. The James Cotton Band is the guest I've chosen to include, helped by the fact that the two musical acts performed a song together.

At the time of this concert, Miller had just released his eighth studio album a few months earlier, "The Joker," in late 1973. He'd had a decent amount of commercial success so far, but his latest album contained the song "The Joker," which was his biggest success so far by a big amount. He'd never had a Top Forty hit before, but "The Joker" went all the way to Number One on the U.S. singles chart! 

Curiously, Miller had been playing the song "Fly like an Eagle" frequently in concert since mid-1973, and he performed it here too, but the studio version of it wouldn't be released until 1976. Once he did release it as a single, it would go to Number Two.

Miller's career is a curious one, because he had many massive hits with the pop songs he wrote, yet he had more passion for the blues, which is a much less commercially successful genre in comparison. One could see that here by his choice of the James Cotton Band as a guest, and then performing the song "Big Boss Man" with him. I'm sure Cotton would have never appeared on the show otherwise (and in fact he never appeared on any other episodes). So good for Miller for giving Cotton this prominent TV appearance.

In case you're curious, the other guests on the show were Brownsville Station, Tim Buckley, and Genesis. I hope I'll find a way to post some of those in the future, especially in the Buckley and Genesis, even though they don't make a good musical fit on this album.

The first track has "[Edit]" in the title because I removed the theme song in the background, and replaced that with the sound of audience applause. And the third track has the same because I stitched two different talking sections together. 

Unfortunately, even though Miller went on to much bigger commercial success later in the 1970s, he didn't appear on this show again.  

This album is 34 minutes long.

01 talk [Edit] (Wolfman Jack)
02 The Joker (Steve Miller Band)
03 talk [Edit] (Steve Miller Band)
04 Rocket 88 (James Cotton Band)
05 Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma (Steve Miller Band)
06 talk (Steve Miller Band)
07 Big Boss Man (Steve Miller Band & James Cotton Band)
08 Fly like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
09 talk (Steve Miller & Wolfman Jack)
10 Sugar Babe (Steve Miller Band)
11 talk (Steve Miller Band)
12 Living in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)

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

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/AVfXPZchMDZV2H1/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from a video of this exact concert.

All Our Colors Benefit, Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, 10-10-1992 - Part 6: Santana

Here's the sixth and final album from the "All Our Colors" benefit concert in 1992. For an overview of the concert as a whole, check out my write-up for Part 1. This is a set by Santana. 

It's a bit unusual in that about half of the set prominently features guest stars Ry Cooder and Steve Miller. No doubt, lead guitarist Carlos Santana took advantage of the fact that these two other talented guitarists were at the venue, since they had performed in earlier sets. Mostly, Cooder and Miller jammed on guitars with Santana, but Miller also did the lead vocals on the blues classic "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)."

I'm guessing that John Lee Hooker, who played a set earlier in the evening, went to sleep already, since he was well over 70 years old by this time. Had he been awake, he probably would have wanted to join in on "The Healer," because it's a song from Hooker's 1989 album of the same name. Santana co-wrote it and performed on it. 

This album is an hour and 15 minutes long. 

01 talk (Santana)
02 Peace on Earth... Mother Earth... Third Stone from the Sun (Santana)
03 Somewhere in Heaven (Santana)
04 Viva La Vida [Life Is for Living] (Santana)
05 Savor [Instrumental] (Santana)
06 talk (Santana)
07 The Healer [Instrumental] (Santana with Ry Cooder)
08 talk (Santana with Ry Cooder)
09 All Your Love [I Miss Loving] (Santana with Ry Cooder & Steve Miller)
10 Sacred Fire [Instrumental] (Santana with Ry Cooder & Steve Miller)
11 Why Can't We Live Together (Santana with Ry Cooder & Steve Miller)
12 Exodus (Santana with Ry Cooder & Steve Miller)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/W1VeBVud

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/tvlzB8CYRYgsZ6o/file

The cover photo of Carlos Santana is from this exact concert.

All Our Colors Benefit, Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, 10-10-1992 - Part 4: The Steve Miller Band

Here's the fourth album from the "All Our Colors" benefit concert in 1992. For an overview of the concert as a whole, check out my write-up for Part 1. This is a set by the Steve Miller Band. 

This set was a little different from most Steve Miller Band concerts in that Miller and his band mates played on acoustic instruments. While most of his set was devoted to his big hits from the 1960s and 70s, he also played some blues covers. None of the songs played came from recent albums. (He would have a comeback album of sorts the next year with "Wide River.")

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 talk (Steve Miller Band)
02 Fly like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
03 Seasons (Steve Miller Band)
04 Honey, Where You Going (Steve Miller Band)
05 talk (Steve Miller Band)
06 Mercury Blues (Steve Miller Band)
07 talk (Steve Miller Band)
08 I'm Tore Down (Steve Miller Band)
09 Gangster of Love (Steve Miller Band)
10 Living in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)
11 talk (Steve Miller Band)
12 Dance, Dance, Dance (Steve Miller Band)
13 talk (Steve Miller Band)
14 Rock'n Me (Steve Miller Band)
15 Take the Money and Run (Steve Miller Band)
16 talk (Steve Miller Band)
17 Jet Airliner (Steve Miller Band)
18 talk (Steve Miller Band)
19 The Joker (Steve Miller Band)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/F6iCiLoJ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/BSLcAPbow7uvuFq/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. 

All Our Colors Benefit, Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, 10-10-1992 - Part 1: Mickey Hart & Friends

Christopher Columbus reached the Americas on October 12, 1492, landing on an island in the Bahamas he named San Salvador. Almost exactly 500 years to the day after that, there was a series of concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area not celebrating Columbus, but instead celebrating Native American resistance to colonialism. This is the first set available from the first day of these concerts. I could only find the first day concert with high quality sound, so that's the only concert I'm posting.

This first day concert was called "All Our Colors: The Good Road Concert," held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. The main acts were Mickey Hart and Friends, John Trudell, John Lee Hooker with Ry Cooder, the Steve Miller Band, Jackson Browne, and Santana. I'll be posting all of that. White Boy and the Wagon Burners and Red Thunder also performed, but I don't have that music. There also were pow wow dance performances in the hours prior to the start of the formal music program.

The second day concert, which I won't be posting, was called "Healing the Sacred Loop: The Next 500 Years," and was also held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. The main acts were Cris Williamson, Todd Rundgren, Ry Cooder & David Lindley, Little Feat, Don Henley, and Bonnie Raitt. Then, on Monday October 12, 1992, a free concert was held at Crissy Field, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, with many of the same performers. I don't know why only the first day's concert is available with excellent sound quality, but it is what it is. If anyone has a worthy version of the other two concerts, please let me know.

These concerts were promoter Bill Graham's last big event that he was working on before he died in 1991. They were sponsored by the IITC Council (International Indian Treaty Conference), and the profits went to associated non-profits. 

Now, let me address this specific performance. Mickey Hart was one of two drummers for the Grateful Dead for decades. He also had a solo career that explored world music genres, especially through rhythm. Hart played drums during this set. But he was joined by many other musicians. Those included vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Bean, Tina, Candice  and Janelle of D'Cuckoo', Kitaro on keyboards, Michael Shrieve on drums, Marco Minnemann, Baba Olatunji of Planet Drum on percussion, and Steve Miller on guitar. As mentioned above, Miller would get his own set later in the concert. 

I have no idea what the actual names of these songs are, if they had specific names. If anyone knows, please let me know and I'll update the song list. 

Like all the other albums from this concert, the music is unreleased but the sound quality is excellent.  

This album is 52 minutes long. 

01 talk (Mickey Hart & Friends)
02 Pow Wow Jam 1 (Mickey Hart & Friends)
03 Pow Wow Jam 2 (Mickey Hart & Friends)
04 Pow Wow Jam 3 (Mickey Hart & Friends)
05 Pow Wow Jam 4 (Mickey Hart & Friends)
06 Pow Wow Jam 5 (Mickey Hart & Friends)

 https://pixeldrain.com/u/1fC88dHS

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/B0rUk056QnViOn3/file 

The cover photo of Mickey Hart is from this exact concert. For the art framing the central photo, I used a promotional poster for the concert, and edited it to fit the space. 

Boz Scaggs - Live at the Record Plant, Paramount Theater, Oakland, CA, 3-10-1974

Here's another episode of the "Live at the Record Plant" radio show, starring Boz Scaggs in 1974 (with a guest appearance on lead guitar by Steve Miller on the last song). But note this is an actual concert from a concert venue, not the usual show recorded in a recording studio before little to no audience.

I've done some digging about this radio show, and I found that, sometimes, it had a mobile recording unit that recorded concerts in Bay Area concert venues. Apparently, this became more common after 1975, when the host of the show, Tom Donahue, died of a heart attack. However, it's been very hard for me to figure out which concerts were broadcast as part of this show, versus other ones broadcast by the same radio station in that era, KSAN, that weren't part of the show. This is just about the only concert I've found so far where I found a mention that confirmed it was part of the "Record Plant" radio series. If anyone has any further information about this, please let me know. Then I could post more such concerts, and properly label them.

At the time of this concert, Scaggs was only moderately popular. His most recent studio album, "Slow Dancer" in 1974, was his first one to go Gold in the U.S. (meaning sales topping 500,000). But the next album he'd released in 1976, "Silk Degrees," would go to Number One in the U.S. and sell over 5 million copies, turning him into a big star. So this is a good long look at his concerts before "Silk Degrees."

The sound quality here is fantastic for a bootleg from this era, easily good enough for an official live album. One can tell this isn't just a soundboard, but a professionally recorded one. The lead vocals were low on a few songs, but I fixed that with the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is an hour and 41 minutes long. 

01 talk by emcee (Boz Scaggs)
02 Near You (Boz Scaggs)
03 Just Don't Want to Be Lonely (Boz Scaggs)
04 Runnin' Blue (Boz Scaggs)
05 Painted Bells (Boz Scaggs)
06 Moments (Boz Scaggs)
07 Monkey Time (Boz Scaggs)
08 Downright Women (Boz Scaggs)
09 Might Have to Cry (Boz Scaggs)
10 Dinah Flo (Boz Scaggs)
11 talk (Boz Scaggs)
12 You Make It So Hard [To Say No] (Boz Scaggs)
13 Sail On White Moon (Boz Scaggs)
14 Angel Lady [Come Just in Time] (Boz Scaggs)
15 There Is Someone Else (Boz Scaggs)
16 Pain of Love (Boz Scaggs)
17 Take It for Granted (Boz Scaggs)
18 Let It Happen (Boz Scaggs)
19 Hercules (Boz Scaggs)
20 Slow Dancer (Boz Scaggs)
21 talk (Boz Scaggs)
22 I'll Be Long Gone (Boz Scaggs)
23 talk (Boz Scaggs with Steve Miller)
24 I'm Easy (Boz Scaggs with Steve Miller)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1hgmqUCR

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/j4mxDpr57PxGGAz/file

The cover photo is from an appearance on the "Midnight Special" TV show in 1974. 

The Steve Miller Band - Live at the Record Plant, Record Plant, Sausalito, CA, 7-1-1973

Here's a concert by the Steve Miller Band in 1973, for the "Live at the Record Plant" radio show. 

One of my projects lately has been trying to post more concerts from this radio show. If you listen to this, hopefully you'll understand why. The sound quality is truly excellent, easily good enough for an official release. And there is no audience noise, which makes it even easier to hear everything being played. The performance is top notch too.

At the time of this concert, Steve Miller and his band had only been moderately successful. He had released seven studio albums. But there had been no hits, and none of the albums had reached Gold status (meaning sales of over half a million in the U.S.). 

That all would change just a couple of months later. In October 1973, he would release the album "The Joker." The title song from that album would go all the way to Number One in the U.S., turning Miller into a big star. Not only that, but it would eventually sell over six million copies, making it the biggest hit of his career. Its success would cause the album it came from to go Platinum, meaning sales of over a million copies.

In this concert, he did play "The Joker." But it's quite different from the hit version. It's a simple little acoustic version, lasting just two minutes, and many of the lyrics are different. He also played "Fly like an Eagle." That wouldn't be released until 1976, on the album of the same name. But when it was released it would be another massive hit, reaching Number Two in the U.S. singles chart.

By the way, I'm not sure about the title of track number six. On the bootleg I took this from, it was called "The Sky Is Crying." But while this is a slow blues in a similar style, the lyrics are totally different. My guess is "The Sun Is Going to Shine in Your Back Door Someday." There's other songs with very similar titles (usually "my back door" instead of "your"), but those seem to be quite different as well, so I'm a bit stumped. If anyone knows the correct title, please let us know. 

This album is an hour and two minutes long.

01 Fly like an Eagle - My Dark Hour (Steve Miller Band)
02 Just like a Woman (Steve Miller Band)
03 talk (Steve Miller Band)
04 Mary Lou (Steve Miller Band)
05 talk (Steve Miller Band)
06 The Sun Is Going to Shine in Your Back Door Someday (Steve Miller Band)
07 Living in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)
08 Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma (Steve Miller Band)
09 Look Over Yonders Wall (Steve Miller Band)
10 talk (Steve Miller Band)
11 Gangster of Love (Steve Miller Band)
12 Space Cowboy (Steve Miller Band)
13 Kow Kow Calqulator (Steve Miller Band)
14 The Joker (Steve Miller Band)
15 Seasons (Steve Miller Band)
16 Going to the Country (Steve Miller Band)
17 talk (Steve Miller Band)
18 Jackson-Kent Blues (Steve Miller Band)
19 talk (Steve Miller Band)
20 Rock Me Baby (Steve Miller Band) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/e5gvXw8e

alternate:

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

The cover photo is from a concert at the Winterland in San Francisco, in 1974. 

Various Artists - Monterey International Pop Festival, Monterey County Fairgrounds, Monterey, CA, 6-17-1967, Afternoon Show

Here's the second out of five albums I'm posting that make up the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. As I mentioned in the first album, the festival was broken up into five parts, and one had to buy tickets for each part. This part consisted of the afternoon show on June 17th, the second day of the festival.

Generally speaking, the different parts didn't really have musical themes, except for this one, because most of the musical acts in this part were heavily influenced by the blues.

As I mentioned in the write-up for the first part, I'm mostly just posting what a person named Simon put together in 2022, with some additions based on material made available since then. As with all the parts, I'm including a PDF Simon made that explains the different sourcing for each of the songs.

Also in my write-up for the first part, I mentioned a Wikipedia link that lists the known songs from the festival, including the ones where there's no publicly available recording. It's worth mentioning that link again:

Monterey Pop Festival set list - Wikipedia 

Let's review what's still missing. Canned Heat is known to have played the three songs included here, but also an unknown number of additional songs. The Big Brother and the Holding Company set is complete. This was the concert that turned that band's main lead singer, Janis Joplin, into a big star. In fact, they're the only band to play two sets in the festival. That's because their set here was one of the highlights, but a documentary film crew headed by D.A. Pennebaker failed to record any good footage of the band. So they were brought back to play a few songs on the third and final day.

Al Kooper had been a keyboardist for the Blues Project since 1965, but he quit that band shortly before this festival. The Blues Project got their own spot later in the festival, but Kooper got a solo spot too. (He would go on to form Blood, Sweat and Tears a year later.) According to the Wikipedia set list above, he only played two songs, and one of them is here. But according to a Newsweek article I linked to in the first part, Kooper's set lasted about half an hour, so he probably played more.

There are eight songs here performed by the Butterfield Blues Band, led by Paul Butterfield. Apparently there did more songs. But each act was allowed to up to 40 minutes, and their set already totaled 33 minutes, so there's probably just one or two missing songs. There are just two songs here by the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and they played five. One of the missing ones is a cover of "Who Do You Love," which they usually ended with a long jam.  There are two Steve Miller Band songs here, but they played at least one more, "Living in the U.S.A." 

The last act for this part of the festival was the Electric Flag. This band was formed in the spring of 1967 by guitarist Mike Bloomfield, and it was led by him, Barry Goldberg, and Buddy Miles. This actually was their very first concert. They would put out a studio album in early 1968 called "A Long Time Comin'," but by then the band's sound had already changed, with founder Bloomfield having less of a role. In fact, he left the band just a couple of months after the album was released. This concert is truer to the original vision he had for the band. There are six songs by them here, which actually is two more than the ones on the Wikipedia set list, so I don't know if there are still more missing ones.

I could say a lot more about all the different performances, but I think the music is all good and generally speaks for itself. The sound quality is excellent throughout, especially considering the time period. A lot of that quality is due to the unusually good sound system. Here's what the Wikipedia article on the festival has to say about that:

"Also notable was the festival's innovative sound system, designed and built by audio engineer Abe Jacob, who started his career doing live sound for San Francisco bands and went on to become a leading sound designer for the American theater. Jacob's groundbreaking Monterey sound system was the progenitor of all the large-scale PAs that followed. It was a key factor in the festival's success and it was greatly appreciated by the artists. For instance, in the 'Monterey Pop' film, David Crosby can clearly be seen saying 'Great sound system!' to band mate Chris Hillman at the start of the Byrds' soundcheck."

Note that that, like all the parts from this festival, this sounds even better than what Simon put together, because I boosted the vocals for the songs that needed that, using the UVR5 audio editing program. About half of the songs needed the boost, though there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. Some musical acts had low vocals across the board, or not, but often that was only the case for certain songs. Perhaps that's because this is a patchwork, put together from many different sources, both released and unreleased. 

By the way, here's a quote about the festival by Steve Miller: "I remember being really happy to be at Monterey, really excited. It was the first event I attended that was organized in such a really first-class way from top to bottom." 

And here are some quotes about the Big Brother and the Holding Company set, since that was the clear highlight of this part of the festival. Rock critic Keith Altham: "Janis Joplin was the staggering thing I saw on the whole show to me. Because I had never heard a woman sing like that. 'I told her afterwards, "you're the best female rock singer I've ever heard in my life.' She looked me up and down, smiled, and said, 'You get out much, honey?' I thought it was funny. She was very friendly. I liked her."

Record company executive Clive Davis: "When Janis (Joplin) took the stage, it was an unknown group to me totally, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and right from the outset it was something you could never forget. She took the stage, dominated, and was absolutely breathtaking, hypnotic, compelling, and soul shaking. You saw someone who was not only the goods but was doing something that no one else was doing. With that fervor, that intensity, and impact. So yes, that in effect, coupled with everything around me, the way people were dressing, what was going on in Haight Ashbury [the hippie district in San Francisco], the spirit in the air, and the feeling... I just said, 'You know, I am here at a very unique time. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it in my spine. I'm feeling it in my sense of excitement. I'm feeling it in the impact. It's not only musical changes, but in societal changes.'" 

Davis immediately had the record company he was working for, Columbia Records, sign the band to a record contract, even though they had to buy out the band's existing contract with another company to do so.  

This album is two hours and 27 minutes long. 

01 talk (John Phillips)
02 talk (Canned Heat)
03 Rollin' and Tumblin' (Canned Heat)
04 talk (Canned Heat)
05 Dust My Broom (Canned Heat)
06 talk (Canned Heat)
07 Bullfrog Blues (Canned Heat)
08 talk (Chet Helms)
09 Down on Me (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
10 Combination of the Two (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
11 Harry (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
12 Roadblock (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
13 Ball and Chain (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
14 talk (Country Joe & the Fish)
15 Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine (Country Joe & the Fish)
16 talk (Country Joe & the Fish)
17 I-Feel-like-I'm-Fixin'-to Die Rag (Country Joe & the Fish)
18 talk (Country Joe & the Fish)
19 The Bomb Song (Country Joe & the Fish)
20 Section 43 [Instrumental] (Country Joe & the Fish)
21 Wake Me, Shake Me (Al Kooper)
22 Look Over Yonders Wall (Butterfield Blues Band)
23 Mystery Train (Butterfield Blues Band)
24 Born in Chicago (Butterfield Blues Band)
25 Double Trouble (Butterfield Blues Band)
26 Mary Ann (Butterfield Blues Band)
27 Driftin' Blues (Butterfield Blues Band)
28 One More Heartache (Butterfield Blues Band)
29 Droppin' Out (Butterfield Blues Band)
30 Dino's Song [All I Ever Wanted to Do] (Quicksilver Messenger Service)
31 If You Live (Quicksilver Messenger Service)
32 Mercury Blues (Steve Miller Band)
33 Super Shuffle [Instrumental] (Steve Miller Band)
34 talk (David Crosby)
35 Groovin' Is Easy (Electric Flag)
36 I'm Sick Y'All (Electric Flag)
37 Texas (Electric Flag)
38 talk (Electric Flag)
39 Over-Lovin' You (Electric Flag)
40 Night Time Is the Right Time (Electric Flag)
41 Wine [Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee] (Electric Flag)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1mXxvn3Y

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/hpdZuZUHcB1hh9t/file

Like most of the cover art I've made for this festival, I had too many good options to choose from, so I broke the image into four smaller ones. From top left clockwise: Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, Mike Bloomfield of the Electric Flag, and Paul Butterfield of the Butterfield Blues Band.

The Steve Miller Band - BBC In Concert, Freilichtbuhne Loreley, St. Goarshausen, Germany, 8-20-1983

I just posted a Joe Cocker concert on the same date and location a few minutes ago. I thought it would be fun to post different sets from the same show. The Steve Miller Band was the headlining act.

As I explained with the Cocker post, there was kind of a mini-rock festival here. Five major music acts: U2, Dave Edmunds, the Stray Cats, Joe Cocker, and the Steve Miller Band, all performed from the same stage. Curiously, the entire show was broadcast not only on the German TV show "Rockpalast," but also on a special long edition of the BBC TV Show "In Concert." I hadn't thought the Steve Miller Band ever performed any concerts for the BBC, but we get at least this one through that unusual circumstance.

It makes sense Miller was the headlining act, because he was very popular at the time. After having lots of hit songs in the 1970s, he had the biggest hit of his career in 1982 with "Abracadabra." Not only did it reach Number One in the singles chart in the U.S. and many other countries, it was one of the top ten most popular singles that year. (Note that had this concert taken place a few years later, the order certainly would have been different. Miller never had another Top Forty hit, while U2 became superstars in 1987.)

This is a lucky time for a BBC concert, since it's at the end of his really popular years. He played most of the big hits from earlier albums that you'd expect, while also emphasizing the blues with virtually all the non-hit songs. "Abracadabra" was such a massive hit that he actually performed it twice, as the first song and the last song. Most versions of this bootleg don't have the second version, probably because someone along the way decided it was unnecessary. But I found a version that did have it. The sound quality of that song is a little worse than the rest.

This album is an hour and 30 minutes long.

01 Abracadabra (Steve Miller Band)
02 talk (Steve Miller Band)
03 The Joker (Steve Miller Band)
04 talk (Steve Miller Band)
05 You You You (Steve Miller Band)
06 talk (Steve Miller Band)
07 Out of the Night (Steve Miller Band)
08 Livin' in the U.S.A. (Steve Miller Band)
09 Hoodoo Hoodoo (Steve Miller Band)
10 Just a Little Bit (Steve Miller Band)
11 Buffalo's Serenade [Instrumental] (Steve Miller Band)
12 Fly like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
13 talk (Steve Miller Band)
14 Keeps Me Wondering Why (Steve Miller Band)
15 talk (Steve Miller Band)
16 Rock'n Me (Steve Miller Band)
17 talk (Steve Miller Band)
18 Jungle Love (Steve Miller Band)
19 Jet Airliner (Steve Miller Band)
20 Macho City (Steve Miller Band)
21 talk (Steve Miller Band)
22 Honey Hush (Steve Miller Band)
23 My Babe (Steve Miller Band)
24 You Know What I Mean (Steve Miller Band)
25 Look on Yonder Wall (Steve Miller Band)
26 Space Cowboy (Steve Miller Band)
27 Abracadabra (Steve Miller Band)
28 talk (Steve Miller Band)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/f1LsgtnH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/QmakR39GRsbCgDg/file

The cover image is from this exact concert. It's a screenshot taken from a YouTube video.

Steve Miller Band - Acoustic (1972-1974)

Yesterday, I was listening to "Welcome to the Vault," the new box set by the Steve Miller Band. It's a mixed bad, like most box set, but it has some nice stuff on it. Anyway, I was particularly struck by two solo acoustic versions of songs, "Kow Kow Calculator" and "Seasons," both recorded in 1973. If you've been closely following this blog, you've probably noticed that I have a particular love of acoustic guitar music. So hearing those songs made me wonder if there was more acoustic goodness where that came from.

It turns out there was. Miller has never done a fully "unplugged" album or concert, at least as far as I know. But he has flirted with the format from time to time, especially in the early 1970s. I got lucky and found two soundboard bootlegs of Miller concerts, one from 1972 and the other from 1974. Both of them had acoustic sections, and I've used those for the majority of this album.

The 1972 concert makes up the first six tracks. On some of the songs, Miller is accompanied by bass, bongo drums, and/or backing vocals, but thing definitely stay acoustic. The first song probably has the worst sound quality of all the songs here, due to some wobbling in the volume. I tried to fix it as best I could. But even the "worst" still sounds very good.

The seventh song, a medley of "Blues with a Feeling" and "Call It Stormy Monday," needs some special explanation. Miller was doing some concerts in the Netherlands at the time, and a reporter found him at the bar of a hotel. The bar was still under construction, and from the recording, it appears the only people there were a handful of hotel employees and construction workers. The reporter had a tape recorder and recorded Miller singing a few songs with his acoustic guitar. I only included the one medley, because the others were mostly Miller talking and joking with the few other people there, while occasionally stopping and starting songs. Even on this medley, you'll notice him changing the lyrics and making comments in the middle of the song as part of his interaction with the extremely tiny audience.

After that comes the two "Welcome to the Vault" songs I mentioned above. They are the only officially released songs on the album.

The last six songs are from the 1974 concert I also mentioned above. As with the songs from the 1972 show, I removed the audience noise as much as possible, so they'd fit in with the studio tracks.

Miller is best known for his many hits in the mid-1970s. But while those are deservedly popular, I actually prefer his albums from the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Those years seem to be a common theme at this blog!) If you give this album a listen, maybe you'll see how good he was before all those hits. That said, one clear highlight here is the solo acoustic version of his number one hit, "The Joker."

When I started looking for acoustic Miller songs yesterday, I didn't know how much I'd find. I ended up coming with 45 minutes of music, which makes for a nice album length.

01 Going to the Country (Steve Miller Band)
02 The Sun Is Going Down (Steve Miller Band)
03 Journey from Eden (Steve Miller Band)
04 Motherless Children (Steve Miller Band)
05 Nothing Lasts (Steve Miller Band)
06 High On You Mama (Steve Miller Band)
07 Blues with a Feeling - Call It Stormy Monday (Steve Miller Band)
08 Kow Kow Calculator [Acoustic Version] (Steve Miller Band)
09 Seasons [Acoustic Version] (Steve Miller Band)
10 Rock Love (Steve Miller Band)
11 Come On in My Kitchen (Steve Miller Band)
12 Going to Mexico (Steve Miller Band)
13 I Love You (Steve Miller Band)
14 Dear Mary (Steve Miller Band)
15 The Joker (Steve Miller Band)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15266566/SteveMB_1972-1974_Acoustc_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from a 1974 TV performance.