ZZ Top - Monsters of Rock, Donington Park, Castle Donington, London, Britain, 8-17-1985

Here's a full ZZ Top concert bootleg from 1985, when they were at the peak of their popularity.

There are surprisingly few excellent sounding live ZZ Top recordings from their prime 1970s and 80s time. There's a bunch from around 1980, including an officially released one, and a short one I've posted from 1983. But there's very little for many years before or after that with sound quality that I find acceptable. So I decided to take this one, the best 1980s audience boot I could find, and do some audio editing to improve it some more. The final result is close to sounding as good as a soundboard boot, but not quite there. Still, this is probably the best sounding recording from this time period (other than that short 1983 I've posted) that you're likely to find, until something new emerges.

ZZ Top were the headliners for the Monsters of Rock festival, which had been held in the same Castle Donington location since 1980. The festival mostly featured heavy metal acts, and it would peter out in the mid-1990s when the popularity of heavy metal declined due to the rise of grunge. The other acts at the festival in 1985 were Marillion, Bon Jovi, Metallica, Ratt, and Magnum. About 50,000 people attended. I wouldn't call ZZ Top heavy metal, but they'd become superstars with their 1983 album "Eliminator," which sold eleven million copies. It combined their bluesy hard rock sound with the synth-based sound popular at the time. Somehow, they managed to attract lots of new New Wave focused fans while still staying popular with the likes of heavy metal fans.

This audience bootleg sounded pretty good to begin with, so much so that it's sometimes claimed to be a soundboard or radio broadcast. But it clearly is an audience boot, based on the constant rumble of crowd noise through all the songs. So I ran the songs through the MVSEP program, separating the crowd noise, then removing it during the songs while keeping the cheering at the ends of songs. I also used MVSEP to boost the lead vocals relative to the instruments for some of the songs.

The final result is pretty good, though not great. The 1983 live album I've posted sounds better. But this is double the length of that one, containing a full concert. Note that the band was coming close to releasing their next album, "Afterburner." It would be released two months after this concert. They played just one songs from it, "Can't Stop Rockin'." The other songs are generally originals, other than the Elvis Presley classic "Jailhouse Rock."

This album is an hour and 23 minutes long.  

01 Got Me Under Pressure (ZZ Top)
02 talk (ZZ Top)
03 I Got the Six (ZZ Top)
04 Gimme All Your Lovin' (ZZ Top)
05 Waitin' for the Bus (ZZ Top)
06 Jesus Just Left Chicago (ZZ Top)
07 talk (ZZ Top)
08 Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top)
09 Ten Foot Pole (ZZ Top)
10 talk (ZZ Top)
11 TV Dinner (ZZ Top)
12 Manic Mechanic (ZZ Top)
13 I Heard It on the X (ZZ Top)
14 I Need You Tonight (ZZ Top)
15 talk (ZZ Top)
16 Pearl Necklace (ZZ Top)
17 talk (ZZ Top)
18 Cheap Sunglasses (ZZ Top)
19 talk (ZZ Top)
20 Arrested for Driving while Blind (ZZ Top)
21 Party on the Patio (ZZ Top)
22 Legs (ZZ Top)
23 Tube Snake Boogie (ZZ Top)
24 Can't Stop Rockin' (ZZ Top)
25 Jailhouse Rock (ZZ Top)
26 La Grange (ZZ Top)
27 Tush (ZZ Top)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Meb5KEaa

alternate: 

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

The cover image is taken from some promotional material for this exact concert. I used the Krea AI program to improve the colors and sharpen the details.

Various Artists - 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert, Madison Square Garden, New York City, 10-30-2009

I just posted the first day of the two-day long 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert, in 2009. Here's the second day.

This second day concert followed the same format as the one on the first day. Read my write-up for more details about this two-day concert in general. Suffice to say that for this day, four major musical acts were chosen: Aretha Franklin, Jeff Beck, Metallica, and U2. Each of them hosted one fourth of the concert, and each had special guests join them during their sections. 

I was a bit surprised by the choice of Jeff Beck, since his record sales weren't nearly as big as the others. It turns out that section was supposed to be for Eric Clapton, but he got sick at the last minute and had to back out. So Beck was another "guitar hero" to fill a similar role.

I detailed in my write-up for the first day of this concert how I put a longer concert out of material from a DVD, plus the HBO broadcast, plus an audience bootleg. That's the same case here, except I didn't find an audience boot for all the otherwise missing songs. I did find such a boot for some of the Metallica songs, but that didn't even have the entire Metallica set. But it did get me "You Really Got Me," with Ray Davies of the Kinks as the guest. 

The Wikipedia page for this concert lists all the songs that were performed, in their correct order. Here's that page:

25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concerts - Wikipedia 

Based on that, it looks like I'm missing five songs. Here are the songs that I couldn't find:

Drown in My Own Tears - Jeff Beck (or possibly Aretha Franklin, I'm not sure)
Cause We've Ended as Lovers - Jeff Beck
Rough Boy - Jeff Beck & Billy Gibbons
One - Metallica
Stone Cold Crazy - Metallica 

That's too bad, but at least the vast majority is here. If anyone has any of the missing songs, please let me know. The first day concert that I posted is a little over four hours long, whereas this one is two and a half hours long. If you add in the missing songs, this probably totals about three hours, not four. So I think the first day one is a little longer, and better. I'll bet some of that was due to Bruce Springsteen, as his section on the first day was extra long.

One interesting note about this concert is that the collaboration of Metallica with Lou Reed - a very unexpected pairing - eventually led to the recordings of the album "Lulu," a joint Metallica and Lou Reed release, in 2011. 

A couple of performers who appeared in the first day concert also appeared in this one. Jeff Beck played a song on the first day, and had his own section here. Sting sang duets on both days. And Bruce Springsteen had his own section on the first day, and sang two songs with U2 here. Jerry Lee Lewis also opened both days with a song.

The sound quality is generally excellent. The quality is actually higher here than on the first day, because I only have one song sourced from an audience boot this time ("You Really Got Me," as mentioned above). I ran into many of the same problems with the first day, such as having to smooth over the transitions between songs by adding extra cheering noises. Read my write-up about the other concert for more details on all that. 

This album is two hours and 33 minutes long.

01 talk (Tom Hanks)
02 Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
03 Baby, I Love You (Aretha Franklin)
04 Don't Play That Song [You Lied] (Aretha Franklin)
05 Make Them Hear You (Aretha Franklin)
06 talk (Aretha Franklin)
07 Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin & Annie Lennox)
08 Theme from New York, New York (Aretha Franklin)
09 Think (Aretha Franklin & Lenny Kravitz)
10 [I Never Loved a Man] The Way I Love You (Aretha Franklin)
11 Respect (Aretha Franklin)
12 People Get Ready (Sting & Jeff Beck)
13 Freeway Jam [Instrumental] (Jeff Beck)
14 talk (Jeff Beck)
15 Let Me Love You Baby (Buddy Guy & Jeff Beck)
16 Big Block [Instrumental] (Jeff Beck)
17 Rice Pudding [Instrumental] (Billy Gibbons & Jeff Beck)
18 Foxy Lady (Billy Gibbons & Jeff Beck)
19 A Day in the Life [Instrumental Version] (Jeff Beck)
20 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Metallica)
21 talk (Metallica)
22 Turn the Page (Metallica)
23 talk (Metallica)
24 Sweet Jane (Lou Reed & Metallica)
25 talk (Metallica)
26 White Light-White Heat (Lou Reed & Metallica)
27 talk (Metallica)
28 Iron Man (Ozzy Osbourne & Metallica)
29 Paranoid (Ozzy Osbourne & Metallica)
30 talk (Metallica)
31 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies & Metallica)
32 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies & Metallica)
33 Enter Sandman (Metallica)
34 Vertigo (U2)
35 Magnificent (U2)
36 talk (U2)
37 Because the Night (U2, Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith)
38 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (U2 & Bruce Springsteen)
39 Mysterious Ways (U2)
40 Where Is the Love - One (U2 & the Black Eyed Peas)
41 talk (U2)
42 Gimme Shelter (U2, Mick Jagger, Fergie & will.i.am)
43 talk (U2)
44 Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of (U2 & Mick Jagger)
45 Beautiful Day (U2)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UZjACSG5

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/mtktsXHvZPk8rgE/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. From left to right: Bono, The Edge, Fergie, and Mick Jagger.

ZZ Top - Toledo Speedway, Toledo, OH, 8-17-1980

It's sad to me that rock and roll is slowly declining in popularity. But at least we still have the old stuff, and ZZ Top could really rock. Here's an excellent concert from 1980.

Recently, I wanted to hear some live ZZ Top from the 1970s, since I'd never heard any of their concerts from early in the career. I quickly realized why there's this gap in my music collection: all the bootlegs from that time period have poor sound quality. The first year with good sound is 1980. There's an official album from that year, plus a couple of stellar soundboard boots. Then, again, many years go by with very few live recordings with worthy sound quality. Strange.

Thankfully, there's this one. It's pretty similar to the "Rockpalast" concert from 1980 that's been released. However, it's about fifteen minutes longer, and there are some different songs. One nice treat is the inclusion of their cover of "Barefootin'," which they never officially released and apparently only performed a few times in 1980.

The source of this recording is a great soundboard. However, there was one problem in that it was almost too good, because very little of the audience noise was captured. Each song ended with an almost eerie silence. But modern technology allows me to fix this. I ran all the songs through MVSEP, separating the crowd noise from everything else. Then I drastically boosted the crowd noise at the beginnings and ends of songs. Now, it sounds like normal crowd reactions.

There were a couple more audio problems, one that I could fix and another that I couldn't. The first minute or so of the first song was missing. I patched in the missing portion from another soundboard recorded at Pine Knob, Michigan, in 1980. The problem that I couldn't fix is that one of the channels was missing for about the first twenty minutes. So the recording is in mono for that portion of the concert. 

This recording first publicly emerged in March 2025. So let's hope more bootlegs of this quality show up, especially from earlier in the band's career. (Apparently the band itself is sitting on many great recordings, but they haven't released any of them yet.)

This album is an hour and 11 minutes long.

01 I Thank You [Edit] (ZZ Top)
02 Waitin' for the Bus (ZZ Top)
03 Jesus just Left Chicago (ZZ Top)
04 talk (ZZ Top)
05 Francine (ZZ Top)
06 I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide (ZZ Top)
07 Manic Mechanic (ZZ Top)
08 Lowdown in the Street (ZZ Top)
09 Heard It on the X (ZZ Top)
10 A Fool for Your Stockings (ZZ Top)
11 Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings (ZZ Top)
12 Barefootin' (ZZ Top)
13 Cheap Sunglasses (ZZ Top)
14 talk (ZZ Top)
15 Arrested for Driving while Blind (ZZ Top)
16 Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers (ZZ Top)
17 La Grange - Sloppy Drunk - Bar-B-Q (ZZ Top)
18 Dust My Broom (ZZ Top)
19 Tush (ZZ Top)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BR3T55dy

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/lT2GKQnAp01aHyC/file

The cover photo is from a concert at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, Illinois, on March 14, 1980.

ZZ Top - BBC In Concert, Donington Park, Castle Donington, Britain, 8-20-1983

ZZ Top is an American band that I imagine doesn't make it over to Europe that often. So it's not surprising that they've rarely performed for the BBC. As far as I know, there's just this concert in 1983 and a 2016 performance at the Glastonbury Festival. 2016 is way past their 1970s and 1980s prime, so I'm not really interested that. So that leaves us just this concert when it comes to ZZ Top meeting the BBC. It took place at the annual "Monsters of Rock" hard rock festival.

The good news is their BBC concert was well-timed. ZZ Top had boogied their way through the entire 1970s, but their best selling album had sold a million copies in the U.S. Then they put out "Eliminator" in 1983, unexpectedly mixing New Wave styled synthesizers with their usual blues rock. It was a massive success, selling eleven million copies in the U.S. alone. So it's not surprising that the BBC couldn't resist having them on the air.

The bad news is this is only a small portion of a long concert. Oftentimes, the BBC have edited concerts down from a typical hour and a half to an hour, but in this case, they edited a concert all the way down to a mere half-hour. The one lucky break is that when "Eliminator" got rereleased many years later, some bonus tracks were added, and three of them happened to be songs from this show that hadn't made it to the BBC broadcast. Those are the three songs at the start. With those added in, a 29 minute long recording extended to 41 minutes. 

Better, but still, I'm frustrated that we can't hear the whole thing. That's especially true because it seems that excellent sounding live recordings from ZZ Top after their 1983 commercial breakthrough seem surprisingly rare, at least until way after their prime. There's also surprisingly little officially released live music, with no live albums between 1980 and 2007. If any of you know of a worthy soundboard or FM bootleg in the 1983 to early 1990s range, let me know what it is and I'll post it here.

I'm also a bit frustrated, because while the sound quality is good, it's not excellent, like you'd normally expect from the BBC. That's even true for the first three songs, which I've mentioned have been officially released. But I've compared this with other bootlegs from 1983, and this at least beats all of them. That's probably why this show was chosen for those bonus tracks. 

One odd thing about the recording is that there is very little crowd noise at the ends of songs, even on the officially released ones. I considered adding in more applause, but I decided to just let it be.

There's a bonus track here that probably doesn't belong, but what the heck, I snuck it in anyway.It's a Freddie King blues song, "I Love the Woman," that the band never put on album and only rarely played in concert, so I figure it's worth at least bonus track status. It's from a concert in Dortmund, Germany, in 1982. A professional video was made of the concert, and I took the audio from that. Ironically, that means the bonus track arguably has the best sound quality of all the songs here.

01 I Got the Six (ZZ Top)
02 TV Dinners (ZZ Top)
03 Got Me Under Pressure (ZZ Top)
04 Gimme All Your Lovin' (ZZ Top)
05 Waitin' for the Bus (ZZ Top)
06 Jesus Just Left Chicago (ZZ Top)
07 Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top)
08 Party on the Patio (ZZ Top)
09 Tube Snake Boogie (ZZ Top)
10 La Grange (ZZ Top)
11 Tush (ZZ Top)

I Love the Woman (ZZ Top)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15943393/ZZTop_1983_BBInConcrtDonngtnParkCastlDonngtnBrtain__8-20-1983_atse.zip.html

Believe it or not, the cover photo comes from this exact concert... kind of. It was taken at this concert, but backstage, either before or after the show.

ZZ Top - VH-1 Storytellers, Congress Theatre, Chicago, IL, 3-31-2009

I just posted an album featuring Nanci Griffith, to mark her death today. That got me wondering why I hadn't posted something from ZZ Top to mark the death of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill a few days ago. To be honest, I thought about it, but there's a surprising lack of quality rare material from them. For instance, the only truly excellent sounding concert recordings (meaning radio broadcasts or soundboards) I've found from them come from their 1980 tour. There's not much point in posting that, because their one really good live album, "Live in Germany 1980," also comes from that tour, as the name suggests. (If anyone knows of any really excellent live recordings of them from other years, especially the 1970s or 1980s, please let me know.)

So I wasn't going to post anything from them. But then I remembered I do have one other interesting bootleg recording, which is the concert they recorded for the VH-1 Storytellers TV show. It was recorded in 2009, and I would prefer something from their more popular and creative earlier part of their career. Also, this show is frustratingly short, at only 44 minutes. But it has one thing that makes it stand out, and that's the copious amount of banter between songs. ZZ Top are not known to talk much at all during their concerts, so it's interesting to hear them open up a bit.

There was one very frustrating problem with the song "Jesus Just Left Chicago." The editors of the show apparently decided the guitar solo in the middle of the song was boring, so they spiced it up by turning the volume down low on it then overlaying it with another one of the stories the band members told at some other part in the show. Up until yesterday, I would have been helpless to do much about this. But, as you may have noticed in my George Harrison "All Things Must Pass - Acoustic" album comments from yesterday, I've recently discovered a great, free program called Spleeter that allows me to separate different instruments out of a recording. I tried using that program on "Jesus Just Left Chicago." I was able to isolate the banter vocals, and I moved those to track 7. But the music minus those vocals sounded weirdly distorted, probably because the music was turned down so low and was dominated by the sound of the banter. So I considered just cutting out that section of the song altogether. But then I had another idea. I found an excellent sounding live recording of the same song from just one year later, done at the 2010 Eric Clapton's Crossroads concert. I edited that it, and it fit in remarkably well. So that's why tracks 6 and 7 have "[Edit]" in their names.

01 talk (ZZ Top)
02 Just Got Paid (ZZ Top)
03 talk (ZZ Top)
04 La Grange (ZZ Top)
05 talk (ZZ Top)
06 Jesus Just Left Chicago [Edit] (ZZ Top)
07 talk [Edit] (ZZ Top)
08 talk (ZZ Top)
09 Gimme All Your Lovin' (ZZ Top)
10 talk (ZZ Top)
11 Tush (ZZ Top)
12 talk (ZZ Top)
13 Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17053523/ZZTP2009StrytllrsCngrssThetrChcgoIL__3-31-2009_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3edc9JFt

For the album cover art, I was lucky to find a high quality photo from the exact "Storytellers" concert featured here, so that's what I used.