John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green - The Marquee Club, London, Britain, 4-27-1967

As I've mentioned in this blog before, I'm not a big fan of John Mayall's singing. The reason I've posting this is 100% due to the lead guitar playing of Peter Green. His guitar was simply on fire here.

This was recorded while Peter Green was still part of John Mayall and the Bluebreakers. For a few months in early 1967, including when this was recorded, there were only four members of the Bluesbreakers: John Mayall, Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie. Green, Fleetwood, and McVie all left to form Fleetwood Mac. So this is basically early Fleetwood Mac, except with Mayall doing all the singing

All the songs come from two official live albums, "Live in 1967" and "Live in 1967, Volume 2." These came about being a big fan recorded a handful of the band's concerts in early 1967 using a reel-to-reel machine, while standing right in front of the stage. This was done with full knowledge of the band, and they listened to the playbacks after each concert was over. So even though it was only an audience bootleg originally, it has much better sound than typical recordings from that era.

Decades later, Mayall bought the rights to the bootlegs and released the highlights as the two official albums mentioned above. There's no between song banter or even audience reaction at the ends of songs. But other than that, it sounds very good, in my opinion, with no crowd noise to speak of while the songs are playing.

 One issue I have with the two live albums is that the songs are from five different concerts, but are not in any apparent order. I've selected the songs that are from just one of those shows, the Marquee Club, because the sound quality is slightly better for that show and there are more songs than for the other shows. This makes up a 45 minute long album. The emphasis is on Green's guitar soloing, with just a minimum amount of vocals and harmonica from Mayall.

I did enough research to get the song order correct. However, I'm missing some songs. I've found a few extra unreleased songs that were recorded by this fan and have been posted on YouTube, but none of them happen to be from the Marquee show. I've heard that the complete recordings for all five shows are out there. For this show, there are about 10 to 15 more minutes of music. If anyone has that extra stuff, please let me know! I could post more from the other concerts, but I'd rather wait first to see if more of the songs show up.

By the way, the version of "Double Trouble" here, from "Live in 1967, Volume 2," is exactly the same as the version from "Live in 1967," which was supposedly recorded at the Manor House a week later. Based on my limited research, I think this version was recorded here, at the Marquee Club.

Also note that some versions of the official live albums call the instrumental "Greeny" by the name "Four Million Knobs." I don't know why that is, but it's the exact same song, and "Greeny" is the name used on the studio album version. 

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 Tears in My Eyes (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
02 Streamline (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
03 The Stumble [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
04 So Many Roads (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
05 Ridin' on the L & N (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
06 Talk to Your Daughter (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
07 Greeny [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
08 Double Trouble (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/y9t9C6f4

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/WKWTGiHrv3m7kGL/file

The photo of Peter Green used for the cover art doesn't come from this exact show. However, it comes from a concert at the Manor House, also in London, just one week later. Due to my usual distaste for black and white photos, I colorized it.

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

The Beach Boys - The Beach Boys Love You - Alternate Version (1977)

A lot of people are of the opinion that the Beach Boys stopped being a creative force and turned into more of an oldies act after 1973. I disagree. I feel they continued to do a lot of interesting and creative things until about 1980. But the problem with their late 1970s music is that much of their good stuff didn't get on their records and some bad stuff did.

One bright spot in their late 1970s output is the 1977 album "The Beach Boys Love You." It essentially is a Brian Wilson solo album, with him writing or co-writing all the songs for the first time in ages. But the other Beach Boys played and sang on it, with a majority of the songs featuring someone other than Brian on lead vocals.

It was a weird album, which was fitting because Brian Wilson was going through some weird times. He'd suffered mental problems since the 1960s, but his therapist, Eugene Landy, was highly unethical and would eventually be disbarred and prohibited from approaching Wilson. Apparently, during this time period, Landy thought that it would be helpful for Wilson to work on his music, so he forced him to do so, denying him dinner if he didn't spend a certain number of hours with his music that day. That sort of treatment would get Landy in trouble later, but the short term effect was that Wilson was more musically productive than he'd been in years. He wrote and produced all the songs for "The Beach Boys Love You" by early 1977, and then completed a follow-up to be called "Adult/Child" by mid-1977.

"The Beach Boys Love You" was critically hailed as a comeback by critics at the time, though it didn't sell that well. Personally, I think it's a good album, though sometimes Wilson's quirky ways get to be too much. The biggest offender in my opinion is the song "Ding Dang." Wilson was obsessed with the main riff, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds said he once witnessed Wilson playing it on the piano for nearly 24 hours straight. I've removed that song, plus a couple others I don't like so much ("Mona" and "Love Is a Woman").

The album was only about 35 minutes long to begin with, and after removing the three songs, it was less than 30 minutes long. I've added about another 20 minutes at the end, using songs from "Adult/Child" plus other Brian Wilson-led songs from 1977 that were done in the same vein. The band's record company rejected "Adult/Child" as not being strong enough for release, and I think deservedly so. There were some good songs on it, but more duds, as well as some uninspired cover versions. Plus, two of the better songs actually dated to the early 1970s, and I've already used them elsewhere. So I've only used five songs from it ("Still I Dream of It" was a part of that album, but got officially released much later), plus three others that could have easily fit on it.

The end result is kind of "The Beach Boys Love You... Plus." It has most of the "Love You" album, plus eight more songs in the same vein that were done just a few months later. Had the band waited and put out a track list like this one, I think the album would have been much more acclaimed.

01 Let Us Go On This Way (Beach Boys)
02 Roller Skating Child (Beach Boys)
03 Johnny Carson (Beach Boys)
04 Good Time (Beach Boys)
05 Honkin' Down the Highway (Beach Boys)
06 Solar System (Beach Boys)
07 The Night Was So Young (Beach Boys)
08 I'll Bet He's Nice (Beach Boys)
09 Let's Put Our Hearts Together (Beach Boys with Marilyn Wilson)
10 I Wanna Pick You Up (Beach Boys)
11 Airplane (Beach Boys)
12 Marilyn Rovell (Beach Boys)
13 Our Team (Beach Boys)
14 Go and Get That Girl (Beach Boys)
15 Life Is for the Living (Beach Boys)
16 It's Over Now (Beach Boys)
17 Everybody Wants to Live (Beach Boys)
18 Lines (Beach Boys)
19 Still I Dream of It (Beach Boys)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700629/TBECHBYS1977_ThBechBysLoveYuAlternte_atse.zip.html

This album is different enough from the official "Beach Boys Love You" that I decided I shouldn't just use the exact same cover. I found a good publicity photo of the band in 1976. The text at the top comes from a 1977 ad for the album.

Van Morrison - Talk about Pop, RTE Television Studios, Dublin, Ireland, 11-2-1973

Here's something very interesting by Van Morrison. As far as I know, it's the one and only time he's given a solo acoustic performance, and it happened when he was young and in his musical prime. It was done for a short-lived Irish TV show called "Talk about Pop," in late 1973.

The good news is that a very good sounding bootleg recording of this performance exists. There was no audience, so that helps the sound quality. The song list is also interesting. He played some songs that didn't get released at the time, like "Drumshanbo Hustle" and the cover "The Wild Side of Life." Plus, he did some very rare songs, like "I Shall Sing," which he always did with a big band including horns.

The bad news is that there was considerable dialogue between Morrison and a TV host between songs, and there doesn't seem to be any audio of that. However, there's a transcript of most of it. Here it is:

https://www.oocities.org/tracybjazz/hayward/van-the-man.info/reviews/1973rte.html

The other bummer is the last two songs - "Snow in San Anselmo" and "Beside You" -  didn't make it to the bootleg either. They were the last two songs played, and perhaps the performance ran too long for the length of the TV show. By that still leaves 45 minutes of Morrison's only "unplugged" performance.

I've posted a bunch of early 1970s live music from him here already. I was careful not to include anything from this show though, because I knew I would want to post it here eventually.

01 Wild Children (Van Morrison)
02 Slim Slow Slider (Van Morrison)
03 Warm Love (Van Morrison)
04 Drumshanbo Hustle (Van Morrison)
05 Autumn Song (Van Morrison)
06 St. Dominic's Preview (Van Morrison)
07 Purple Heather [Wild Mountain Thyme] (Van Morrison)
08 Madame George (Van Morrison)
09 The Wild Side of Life (Van Morrison)
10 I Shall Sing (Van Morrison)
11 And It Stoned Me (Van Morrison)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701212/VANMRRSN1973g_TlkabutPpRTETlevisonStdios__11-2-1973_atse.zip.html

Although this comes from a TV show, I haven't been able to find any video or photos from it. So I used a photo of Van Morrison in concert in Amsterdam in April 1974. At least it shows him by himself playing the acoustic guitar.

The Rolling Stones - Honolulu International Center, Honolulu, HI, 7-28-1966

Here's a concert bootleg that you'll either think is great or awful, depending on your feelings about the sound quality.

The reason you might think it's great is because it's a document of the Rolling Stones playing live in 1966, and this is the best sound quality of any concert recording of the band prior to 1969. (The one  exception is the live BBC recordings I posted recently, but that is from 1964, and the band changed a lot by 1966.) There's an official live album released in late 1966 called "Got Live If You Want It," but this sounds much better than that. It's an actual soundboard, broadcast by a radio station in Hawaii at the time. You can actually clearly hear the band playing, and not mainly just girls screaming, which is the case on the official live album and all other bootlegs from that era.

That's the good news. The bad news is, if you compare this recording to typical live albums in the decades since the 1960s, the sound quality is pretty bad. You have to bend your ears and take into account that recording standards were very different in 1966, and we're lucky to get this decent recording at all. The Stones actually were recorded several times by other radio stations in that era. For instance, French radio broadcast their concerts when they passed through Paris in 1965, 1966, and again in 1967. But even those recordings sound way worse than this. The Stones at the time were much like the Beatles, where they couldn't even hear themselves on stage for all the screaming.

So it's all relative. It's much like the Beatles, actually, in that it's hard to find good live recordings of them from this time as well, due to all the screaming. I think this is actually better than most Beatles live recordings since the screaming is way down in the mix. But still, the sound can be rough at times.

Another downside to this recording is that it's so short. It's only 27 minutes long. That's because the concert was that short. Again, just like the Beatles at the time, the Stones played on a bill with lots of opening acts, and only did about a half an hour set. So this really is the whole thing. I considered adding some bonus tracks from other concerts around that time to give it a more decent length, but the sound quality was so much worse that I decided against it. There are some decent recordings of TV appearances that weren't lip-synced, but I plan on posting those separately at a later date.

Oh, by the way, this was the last concert of the band's 1966 world tour, which is why Mick Jagger says it's their last concert ever in his between song banter. So it's Brian Jones' last live appearance as an effective musician. He did play live on some later occasions, with the last being at the "Rock and Roll Circus" in 1968, but after 1966 he pretty much stopped playing guitar and dabbled with exotic musical instruments, if he played anything at all. He slid downhill so much that the rest of the band often just disconnected his amplifier. So this, plus the BBC stuff I posted earlier, are the only good examples of what Jones sounded like in concert back when he still had his shit together.

01 talk (Rolling Stones)
02 Not Fade Away (Rolling Stones)
03 talk (Rolling Stones)
04 The Last Time (Rolling Stones)
05 Paint It, Black (Rolling Stones)
06 talk (Rolling Stones)
07 Lady Jane (Rolling Stones)
08 Mother's Little Helper (Rolling Stones)
09 Get Off of My Cloud (Rolling Stones)
10 19th Nervous Breakdown (Rolling Stones)
11 talk (Rolling Stones)
12 [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701043/TROLLNGSTNES1966_HnluluInterntionlCnter__7-28-1966_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I wanted to use a color photo. But I had a surprisingly difficult time finding any good ones of the band in concert in 1966. The best ones I could come up with were all from TV appearances, where the band was looking sedate in a very clean and orderly situation, almost like photos of them relaxing in the studio.

So instead I went with this black and white photo to better show the utter craziness of their concerts at the time. This one comes from a concert in Wellington, New Zealand, in February 1966. Some frenzied fan is grabbing Mick Jagger while a police officer tries to pull her away. I believe that's Bill Wyman's back to the camera, while Brian Jones can be seen off in the distance, just past Jagger's head. This concert was so nuts that one girl fell from a balcony and was so hurt that she later had to have her legs amputated.

Over a year after first posting this album, I colorized the photo.

Also, the band name text and the framing at the top comes from a tour guide give out during their 1966 world tour. I squished the framing vertically, and added the text about Honolulu.

Liz Phair - Girly-Sound - The Best of What's Left (1991)

Liz Phair is mainly known for her 1993 album "Exile in Guyville." But she put out some dodgy albums in the 2000s, and then hardly put out any new music in the 2010s, so her popularity has gone down a lot. She has a new single out which is supposed to lead the way for a new album in 2020. I hope that sparks a career revival for her. Personally, I think she's done much more than just that 1993 album, and I plan on posting a few different things from her to make that case.

Starting with this. Before "Exile in Guyville," there were the 1991 "Girly-Sound" tapes. Basically, she made three self-produced cassette tapes of solo acoustic demos of her songs and shared them with friends. They were so good that they got spread around far and wide, and their success led to her getting the record contract for "Exile in Guyville." Allmusic.com has called them "one of the most popular and sought-after alternative rock bootlegs of all time."

For many, many years, the "Girly-Sound" tapes remained officially unreleased. But Phair used songs from them for later albums: "I go in there and rip stuff off - it's like a library." That's especially the case for "Exile in Guyville," which redoes 11 of the songs using a full band. There's a Wikipedia page on "Girly-Sound," and it has a handy chart showing which songs were later redone for which albums, which you can see here:

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

A lot of people want to listen to all of the "Girly-Sound" songs in their original versions. If that's the case for you, the whole thing was finally officially released in 2018, so you can just get that. But I've done something different for those who aren't such die-hard fans: I've removed all the songs that were redone later. On top of that, I've only selected the remaining songs that I liked. The "Girly-Sound" tapes were just a collection of all the songs Phair had at the time, and she has admitted that some of them weren't ready for prime time.

Here are the songs that weren't redone later which I felt weren't strong enough to include:

Glory
Canary
Don't Hold Your Breath
Miss Lucy
Elvis Song
One Less Thing
Easy Target
Love Song
Open Season

Maybe you're familiar with some of those and feel like they shouldn't have been left out. If you make a strong case, I might put some back in. But what I have here is strictly my own personal selection.

So that's what's left out. But I've also added a song, "Fuck or Die," that was part of the original "Girly-Sound" tapes but was left off the 2018 official release. I assume the reason it was left off is because parts of the song borrow heavily from Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line," and there were difficulties in getting the legal rights. (She liberally borrows snippets of melodies from other people's songs for some of the other songs on the album.)

With a ton of songs removed and one song added, the end result is an album that's 49 minutes long, which is a good length for an album. The first song is with a full band, but the rest are acoustic. I've kept the song order the same as on the original tapes.

Again, this isn't for everyone. But if you want the "best of what's left" version, this makes for a pretty strong album.

01 White Babies (Liz Phair)
02 Dead Shark (Liz Phair)
03 In Love W Yself (Liz Phair)
04 Fuck or Die (Liz Phair)
05 Hello Sailor (Liz Phair)
06 Miss Mary Mack (Liz Phair)
07 Valentine (Liz Phair)
08 Batmobile (Liz Phair)
09 Slave (Liz Phair)
10 Suckerfish [Speed Racer] (Liz Phair)
11 California (Liz Phair)
12 South Dakota (Liz Phair)
13 Easy (Liz Phair)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16695506/LIZPHAR1991_GrlySundTheBstWhtsLeft_atse.zip.html

The "Girly-Sound" recordings were originally divided into three cassettes, as mentioned above, and each cassette had its own cover art, designed by Phair. Instead of using a photo of herself, she went in a weird artistic direction. I picked the cover I liked the best out of the three. I only made one change. She had the words "Girly-Sound" on it twice and her name not at all. So I pasted over one of the "Girly-Sound" mentions with her name. The bit I pasted in comes from another one of her early cassettes.

Fleetwood Mac - The Paramount, Seattle, WA, 3-10-1972

Recently, I've been working on getting more stuff from the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac ready to be posted here. I'll be posting that soon, but while I was looking around for that stuff, I stumbled across this bootleg concert, from 1972.

Basically, Fleetwood Mac is best known for two eras: the blues era from 1967 to 1971, dominated by Peter Green, and the pop era from 1975 onward dominated by Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and Christine McVie. But there are those in-between years, the largely forgotten years, 1972 to 1974. Commercially, the band was at a low point during those years. Yet, in hindsight, we can see that the band kept putting out lots of good music, even though there was a lot of personnel turnover.

I've posted one concert from 1974 here that has excellent sound quality. But I didn't think there were any well recorded concerts from 1972 or 1973. It turns out there is, this one here. By luck, this concert happened to be recorded and broadcast by a Seattle radio station, so it sounds much better than the audience bootlegs of the time.

The performance is also excellent, with lots of songs from the "forgotten years" that otherwise were never played in concert. Three songs are played from "Bare Trees," which was released just a few weeks after this concert. Christine McVie and Bob Welch sing most of the songs. Guitarist Danny Kirwan was still in the band, but he wouldn't be for long.

Here's some information from a text file about the concert, slightly edited:

"Danny Kirwan was by all accounts falling-down drunk. At this point in his career he had taken to excessive consumption of alcohol and was on his way to being sacked one month later. He can be heard tripping over equipment and causing feedback during this performance, shocking his bandmates enough for them to remark about it. During this show, Kirwan managed to finish the vocals on "Child of Mine", but the band struggled to keep up with the uneven pace he set for them. Bob Welch took over lead guitar from him during the song. Then Kirwan tried to sing "Black Magic Woman", but was unable to and Welch had to finish it for him. Even with all of that going on, the band still managed a fine performance."

I have to agree with that last comment. Based on that text, it sounds like the concert was a disaster. But you'd never know the problem just by listening, because the other band members ably covered for Kirwan's failures. In particular, Welch did a really fine job playing lead guitar.

I had to make a few sound edits for the concert. The problem was that the radio station cut in sometimes to announce their call letters. A couple of times, this happened between songs, so it was easy to edit them out. But one time, it was done right in the middle of "Black Magic Woman." Luckily, the DJ only spoke for a few seconds, and it was during an instrumental section, so I was able to remove it by patching in some music from elsewhere in the song.

Although I haven't found any good concert recordings of the band from 1973, I did find two songs they played live on the Midnight Special TV show in 1973. Luckily, neither of them are songs played in this concert. So I've added those to the end as quasi-bonus tracks. Including those two songs, this album is slightly over an hour long.

01 Tell Me All the Things You Do (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Future Games (Fleetwood Mac)
03 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Get like You Used to Be (Fleetwood Mac)
05 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Child of Mine (Fleetwood Mac)
07 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Spare Me a Little (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Homeward Bound (Fleetwood Mac)
10 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
12 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Miles Away (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Believe Me (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291544/FleetwodMc_1972a_ThePramountSeattleWA__3-10-1972_atse.zip.html

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good color photos of the band playing in concert in 1972. That's a sign of their lack of popularity at that time. But I did find a publicity photo of the band from that time, with the same five band members who played in this show, so I used that. To frame it, I used some artwork I found from a concert poster for the band dating to the late 1970s.

Wilson Pickett - Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 2-10-1969

I'm a big fan of the soul music of the 1960s and 70s, and I wish there was more of that to post here. But I haven't found so many "albums that should exist" in that genre. But here's one. For some strange reason, there's only been one official release of a live Wilson Pickett album, and he's one of the all-time soul greats. That one album dates to 1974, and it's generally disliked. Pickett's career went on a sharp decline after 1971 for various reasons.

Happily, I've found this bootleg recording, from his peak years. (One might argue there has been a release of it, but it's one of the legal grey area releases that just package and profit from somebody else's bootleg recordings. Even that "release" is very obscure.) The reason we have this is because a lot of musical acts that played in Stockholm, Sweden, in the late 1960s had their concerts broadcast on the radio, and this is one of them. (I posted a Traffic concert from 1967 that's another example of this.) The sound quality is excellent, what you'd expect of an official life album from the era.

The concert is rather short, at 48 minutes total. But he played two concerts that night (this is the second one), and this is almost certainly all that he did. The last song fades out. I didn't do that, but I read that's because a radio DJ talks over the very end of the concert, so nothing important is lost.

I must admit that I didn't include two songs at the start. That's because they were generic soul instrumentals to get the crowd in a lively, dancing mood before Wilson Pickett came on stage. I did keep one instrumental that at least is a known instrumental hit ("Soulful Strut"). Then there's one minute of some emcee talking over the chord changes to "Light My Fire" before Pickett finally hits the stage.

There's one other quality bootleg I know of, of a concert in Germany in 1968. Other than that, there's pretty much nothing from his peak years of the 1960s and early 1970s, other than a couple of official live tracks. I consider that strange, since Pickett was such a charismatic guy who seemed at home on the stage.

01 Soulful Strut [Instrumental] (Wilson Pickett)
02 Light My Fire [Instrumental] - talk (Wilson Pickett)
03 634-5789 [Soulsville, USA] (Wilson Pickett)
04 People Make the World [What It Is] (Wilson Pickett)
05 I'm a Midnight Mover (Wilson Pickett)
06 Hey Jude (Wilson Pickett)
07 Mustang Sally (Wilson Pickett)
08 I'm in Love (Wilson Pickett)
09 Funky Broadway (Wilson Pickett)
10 In the Midnight Hour (Wilson Pickett)
11 Sweet Soul Music (Wilson Pickett)
12 Land of a 1000 Dances (Wilson Pickett)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701234/WILSNPCKTT1969_LivKnserthustStckholmSwedn__2-10-1969_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find a good color photo of Pickett in concert in 1969. But I did find one of him singing in Minneapolis in 1968, so I used that. For his name at the top, I took the font and colors from a 1960s concert poster. I also got the "Live!" part from that.

Neil Young - After Berlin - Non-Album Tracks (1982)

A few weeks ago, I posted the album I call "Winter Winds," which compiles what I feel are the best songs Neil Young did in 1980 and 1981. I said then that would be the first of a reconfiguration of his musical works from 1980 to 1988. He was in the musical wilderness for those years, and it's hard to deny that his albums were spotty. So, for this series of albums, I'm making albums out of everything I can get my hands on, both songs on his officially released albums and non-album songs.

The one album Young officially released in 1982 was "Trans." Boy, was that a controversial album! For about half of the songs on it, he used a vocoder, which is a device that makes his voice sound robotic. The songs he did that for had a fitting computerized and "futuristic" sound that was totally unlike anything he'd done before.

Personally, I'm not a fan of his vocoder style. That said, I think it works well on two songs that I've included here, "Sample and Hold" and "Transformer Man." It helps that they're solid songs that probably would sound good with a variety of arrangements. (On a later Neil Young album, I'll post versions of them he did without the vocoder.) There's another songs with the vocoder effect, "Computer Age," that I considered including. Instead, I found one instance in the late 1980s when he played it without the vocoder, and I'll put that on a later album in this series.

By the way, to better appreciate the vocoder songs, it helps to understand what was happening to Young at the time. As I've mentioned previously, he had a son, Ben, born with cerebral palsy in the late 1970s, and taking care of this special needs child took up the vast majority of his time. Ben couldn't talk, but communicated simple things through pressing a button. The vocoder songs, and other songs he wrote around this time, speak to the communication difficulty Neil was feeling. For instance, Ben is the subject of "Transformer Man."

Young later said, "At that time, [Ben] was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That's what Trans is all about. And that's why, on that record, you know I'm saying something but you can't understand what it is. Well, that's exactly the same feeling I was getting from my son." So the way the vocoder makes the song's lyrics nearly unintelligible was deliberate.

Also at this time, the music world was changing. Young's singer-songwriter folky style had gone out of fashion, and new wave music with synthesizers and drum machines were all the rage. Young was particularly influenced by the new wave band Devo, and worked with them a bit. So "Trans" was also his attempt to experiment with these current trends.

Anyway, "Trans" is known for the vocoder songs, but that actually only made up half of the album. The other half was more or less typical Neil. That half was dominated by one song, "Like an Inca." I like the song, but I felt it went on too long. I've edited it some, mostly by removing a repeat of the first verse plus chorus. That cut the song to seven minutes, when it had been almost ten minutes long. By the way, the ten-minute long version is for the CD release. The vinyl version is eight minutes long, so that edit isn't much different from mine.

Frankly, I suspect the song was so long because he was padding the album some. He was so busy taking care of Ben that he didn't have much time to work on music. He's said that at times in the early 1980s, simply taking care of Ben took 15 to 18 hours a day. (Apparently that eased up a lot by the end of 1982, allowing Young to go on tour.)

Yet, strangely, even though "Trans" feels like a padded album, with some obviously weak songs on it, it turns out Young had some better songs that he left unreleased. In mid-1982, he presented his record company with a finished album called "Island in the Sun," which didn't have any of the vocoder songs on it. The record company considered it too weak and rejected it. So he gave them "Trans" instead by the end of the year. I'll bet the company rued the day they rejected it, and the weirdness of "Trans" may also partly be a middle finger to them.

We don't have some of the songs intended for "Island in the Sun," and I don't think it's even known which songs exactly were meant for it. But a couple of the studio tracks have somehow leaked onto bootlegs - "Rainin' in Paradise" and "If You Got Love." I've included three more songs that were played live in concert for the first time in 1982, and may or may not have been meant for that album: "Soul of a Woman," "Love Hotel," and "After Berlin." "After Berlin" was only played once in concert, in Berlin, but it was recorded for a concert video called "Neil Young in Berlin," so at least it's been released in that format. He returned to "Soul of a Woman" later, but the other unreleased songs were forgotten by him.

Clearly, 1982 was not a good time for Neil Young, musically. He had personal struggles relating to his son and he was struggling to make sense of changing musical trends. "Trans" is one of his least liked albums. But had he put out an album like this one, which is only four songs from "Trans" plus five songs that went unreleased at the time, the album would have had a much better reception. This is a theme that I'll return to a lot for this series of 1980s albums: he actually wrote a lot of good songs in that time period, but what actually got on his albums didn't always show that.

By the way, there's another unreleased song from this time that has appeared on bootleg, called "Johnny." But the recording of it isn't that good, and I don't think it's much of a song, so I haven't included it.

01 Little Thing Called Love (Neil Young)
02 Sample and Hold (Neil Young)
03 Transformer Man (Neil Young)
04 Like an Inca [Edit] (Neil Young)
05 Rainin' in Paradise (Neil Young)
06 Soul of a Woman (Neil Young)
07 Love Hotel (Neil Young)
08 If You Got Love (Neil Young)
09 After Berlin (Neil Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696719/NELYNG1982_AftrBrlin_atse.zip.html

It's hard to find a good photo of Neil Young in 1982. He cut his hair short for maybe the only time in his adult life, and wore a tie in concert. In some photos, he looks like a nerdy office worker! But when he played the vocoder songs, he put on weird glasses meant to make him look alien. I tried to avoid both those looks by choosing a photo of him wailing on his guitar. This photo was taken in Wembley Arena in London in September 1982.

Robyn Hitchcock - Dragonfly Me - Non-Album Tracks (2010-2011)

Here's yet another in my long series of Robyn Hitchcock albums. This is a stray tracks album, as opposed to an all-acoustic album or covers album, since I sometimes post those for him.

In 2013, Hitchcock released an album titled "There Goes the Ice." It's a collection of digital singles from 2010 to 2013. Since the songs on it actually came out in 2010 and each year after that, I decided to break it up and include the songs based on the years they were first released. Five of the songs here are from that.

Three more songs, "Pink Moon" (a cover of the Nick Drake song), "Copper Kettle," and "Thank You, Time Girl," are unreleased studio outtakes that somehow were made public.

The rest of the songs are from concert bootlegs. Some of them were made up on the spot. Hitchcock used to do that a lot, but he hasn't done it much since this time. What's interesting is that some of them, like "Magnesium" and "Lorenzo and His Mother," are actually played with a band. That's pretty impressive when the song is being spontaneously created in the moment. Those two songs were performed at the Largo club in Los Angeles. A talented musician, Jon Brion, hosts many concerts there, and is well known for being able to roll with the punches and play along to songs he doesn't know.

01 Halo Mary (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Bellyfull of Arms and Legs (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 To Be Human (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 Comme Toujours (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 Wang Dang Doodle (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 Dragonfly Me (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 Copper Kettle [The Pale Moonlight] (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Pink Moon (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 Thank You, Time Girl [Demo] (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 Violet Rain (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 Magnesium (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 A War Against Time (Robyn Hitchcock)
13 Lorenzo and His Mother (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15122326/RobynH_2010-2011_DragnflyMe_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I decided to go for the literal meaning route. Hitchcock's album covers are always interesting in an artistic and different way, so I figure this fits his style. I went Googling for dragonfly-themed art, and came up with this. I don't know who the name of the artist is. All I know is the title is "Dragonfly Art Nouveau Print Home Decor Paper."

The Rolling Stones - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: Live 1964 Sessions

This is the third and last of my albums showcasing the Rolling Stones playing for the BBC. The other two albums contain all the known recordings of the band playing unique versions of their songs in the BBC studios. Those are studio versions that sound as good as the songs on their studio albums. This album contains all the performances the band did for the BBC in front of live audiences. I've given this album a different title than the other two to highlight the fact this was really live, in front of cheering fans.

As I mentioned in a previous post, live recordings of the Stones in the 1960s are generally bad, up until the end of the decade. (The 1969 live album "Get Yet Ya Ya's Out" is great.) Even the 1966 official live album "Got Live If You Want It" sounds bad, and suffers from all sort of problems, including songs that actually were done in the studio and then slathered with canned audience screaming. A couple live bootlegs from the era sound decent, but none of them have outstanding sound quality.

However, by grouping all the live BBC performances together, one essentially has a "lost" live album. The songs here actually come from four different recording sessions. By chance, all the sessions date to 1964. Each session sounds slightly different. The first four songs were recorded in front of a small and polite audience, as one can tell by the smattering of applause at the end of each song. This is very unusual for the band at that time, when they were faced by screaming fans wherever they went. These four songs sound almost as good as studio recordings.

The rest of the album is different from that sessions. All the other songs were played in front of larger and more enthusiastic audiences. However, their cheering is much less intrusive than any other live recordings of the band from this time. Check out any random bootleg or TV appearance of the Stones from the 1960s, and you'll typically hear feverish screaming through the entire song, just as was the case with the Beatles then. Some of these sessions are a bit rougher than others, but all of them sound way better than any other live recordings of the band from around 1964.

In terms of song selection, I got lucky in that only one song is duplicated: Bo Diddley's "Mona (I Need You Baby)." Also luckily, it was played in the first session and the last one. I dislike having more than one version of the same song on an album, but in this case we have nearly an entire album of songs in between, so I figure it's okay.

For some of these sessions, there was a BBC DJ talking between songs, apparently live, in real time. I've cut all of that out, because I want to hear the Rolling Stones, not some random DJ. But I've kept the couple of cases where band members talked between songs.

I do know of one non-BBC instance of the band playing live in the mid-1960s that's sounds decent (Honolulu, in 1966). I plan on posting that at another time. If you know of other cases with good sound quality, please let me know.

UPDATE: On June 12, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I didn't actually add or remove any songs, but I made some important changes. First off, I changed the name of the album, because this was the second of a series of BBC albums for the band, and I hadn't put it in that series. That meant changing the cover art and mp3 tags. But I also upgraded the sound quality for the first four songs, using a source that actually is said to be better than the official album versions of them.

01 [Get Your Kicks On] Route 66 (Rolling Stones)
02 Mona [I Need You Baby] (Rolling Stones)
03 Cops and Robbers (Rolling Stones)
04 You Better Move On (Rolling Stones)
05 Roll Over Beethoven (Rolling Stones)
06 Beautiful Delilah (Rolling Stones)
07 Hi-Heeled Sneakers (Rolling Stones)
08 Little by Little (Rolling Stones)
09 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Rolling Stones)
10 I'm Moving On (Rolling Stones)
11 Not Fade Away (Rolling Stones)
12 It's All Over Now (Rolling Stones)
13 talk (Rolling Stones)
14 If You Need Me (Rolling Stones)
15 Confessin' the Blues (Rolling Stones)
16 talk (Rolling Stones)
17 Carol (Rolling Stones)
18 Mona [I Need You Baby] (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701020/TROLLNGSTNES1964_BBSessonsVolum2Live_atse.zip.html

For the album cover art, I found a photo of the band playing at something called the "Mod Ball" in London in 1964. I like how the band is closely surrounded on all sides by fans. In case you can't see, there are more stands of fans off in the distance.

The Rolling Stones - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1964-1965

I just posted Volume 1 of the Rolling Stones' "BBC Sessions." Most of my comments I'd want to make here have already been made with that post, so please refer to that.

As I said in that post, I've divided up the band's performances at the BBC into three albums. This is the second and last of two albums in which the band played in the BBC studios without any audience. I have another album, Volume 2, for all their BBC performances played in front of a live audience.

I wish there was material for more 1960s volumes beyond these ones, but unfortunately the band stopped their BBC performances in 1965. That's the same time the Beatles stopped doing the same. I guess both bands figured they had become so famous that they didn't need the hassle of recording special performances just for the BBC anymore.

Unfortunately, I looked into this, and I couldn't find any examples of the Stones playing in the studio for any other TV or radio stations in the 1960s. They did play many songs for Radio Luxembourg in 1964, but none of those recordings have survived. (Some BBC performances are lost as well.) In every case I could find of the band playing on TV, there was lots of cheering from adoring audiences, so the sound quality takes a big hit. These BBC performances are unique for the era.

I mentioned in the last post that I had to edit some songs to get rid of the BBC DJs talking over the music. That's the case again here. I made a number of minor edits, for instance when the opening second or two of the song was missing due to the talking DJ problem. In two cases, I made significant enough edits to put "Edit" in the song title. For "Mercy, Mercy" I was able to patch in the intro music from elsewhere in the same song. For "It's All Over Now," the intro was unique. So I had to use the intro from the studio album version.

UPDATE: On June 12, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I didn't actually add or remove any songs, but I did make some important changes. For one thing, I changed the title of the album, because the album of live 1964 BBC sessions rightfully needed to be considered "Volume 2" of this series. That also meant changing the cover art and mp3 tags. But on top of that, I upgraded the sound quality of many of the songs. Many serious Rolling Stones fans believe that the sound quality of the band's official BBC album, "On Air," isn't that good. I've been keeping an eye on the music blog of Prof. Stoned. He found bootleg versions that sounded better than the "On Air" versions. So I've used those versions in the same cases he did.

01 Walking the Dog (Rolling Stones)
02 Around and Around (Rolling Stones)
03 If You Need Me (Rolling Stones)
04 I Can't Be Satisfied (Rolling Stones)
05 Crackin' Up (Rolling Stones)
06 Ain't That Lovin' You Baby (Rolling Stones)
07 It's All Over Now [Edit] (Rolling Stones)
08 2120 South Michigan Avenue [Instrumental] (Rolling Stones)
09 Everybody Needs Somebody to Love (Rolling Stones)
10 The Last Time (Rolling Stones)
11 Down the Road a Piece (Rolling Stones)
12 Cry to Me (Rolling Stones)
13 Fanny Mae (Rolling Stones)
14 Mercy, Mercy [Edit] (Rolling Stones)
15 [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Rolling Stones)
16 The Spider and the Fly (Rolling Stones)
17 Oh Baby [We Got a Good Thing Goin'] (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701040/TROLLNGSTNES1964-1965_BBSessonsVolum3_atse.zip.html

The situation with the cover art is pretty much the same as it was for Volume 1. I resorted to using a black and white photo because it actually is a photo of the band at the BBC at the right time. In this case, the band was photographed at the Playhouse Theatre in London in 1965. I colorized it because I really dislike keeping the cover black and white. Brian Jones is standing in back. I lowered him a bit relative to the others so I wouldn't have to have the rest of the band lower in the frame.

The Rolling Stones - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1963-1964

Here's something that's a "must have" for any serious Rolling Stones fan. One problem listening to the early music of the Rolling Stones is that their studio output is just fine, but there's very little that sounds good. Bootlegs from the 1960s typically sound terrible, with lots of screaming fans drowning out the music. Even the sole official live album from the 1960s sounds bad.

Luckily, there's the BBC. They're pretty much the only place that recorded the Stones in high fidelity performing in the studio versions of their songs. Unfortunately, the band only recorded for the BBC from 1963 to 1965, but that's better than nothing. (Of course, the band appeared on TV a lot, but they either lip-synced to their records, or they were bedeviled by the screaming fans problem.)

In 2017, "On Air," a collection of the band's performances at the BBC, was officially released. It's better than nothing, but there are a number of problems with it. For one, there are two versions, but even the deluxe version is woefully incomplete. There are 32 songs on that version. I'm breaking up their BBC performances into three albums which together total 54 songs. Secondly, the songs are presented out of chronological order, and don't seem to be in any logical order at all. Third, many of the songs are in fake stereo, which doesn't sound good. Fourth, BBC DJs talk over the starts and ends of some songs. Fifth, there are many cases of two performances of the same song.

I've done by best to fix all of these problems. I broke the BBC recordings into two groups: live and studio. There's about one album's worth of songs where the band were recorded for the BBC playing in front of an audience. These are excellent recordings, far better than any other live recordings of the band from the early or mid-1960s. But still, they're not as pristine as the studio recordings. So I've put all the live ones together, on an album I'll be posting here later. There were enough remaining studio versions to make two albums of about 45 minutes each. This is the first one.

I'm presenting the songs in chronological order. I even have them in order for each different session.

I've solved the fake stereo problem by using versions of the songs from a bootleg that keeps those in mono, which is how they were intended to be. Although it's a bootleg, the sound quality is as good or better than the official release. I've marked some songs in mp3 tags as coming from the "On Air" album, but that's just to let you know which ones are on that album.

I've talked about the problem of BBC DJs talking over songs with other albums by other bands I've posted here. It's a pet peeve of mine. Luckily, it can often be fixed with some sound editing. I've fixed a bunch of songs. I've marked the more significant edits by including "Edit" in the file name. There are two of those on this album. In those cases, I patched in a section of music from elsewhere in the song. In the case of "Carol," I had to use the studio album version, because the opening riff wasn't repeated later in the song. It's not a great fit, but I figure it's acceptable. There are other songs, such as "Beautiful Delilah," where even that sort of fix isn't possible, because the intro riff doesn't appear later, and there's no other version to turn to.

But in addition to big fixes like that, I made a lot of minor fixes too. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, a lot of the songs were missing the first second or two. I'm guessing it's because BBC DJs liked to talk right up to the second the vocals began, or the song began, and sometimes they overlapped a little bit. These are were easy fixes to make. I'm surprised they didn't fix them for the official release.

I got lucky with the problem of two performances of the same song. It turns out that, in nearly every case, when there were multiple versions, one was a studio version and the other was a live version. So since I've created different albums for the studio stuff and the live stuff, that takes case of that. There are only two cases of studio performances of the same song, "Down the Road a Piece" and "Walkin' the Dog." I bent the normal chronological order, but only by a bit, so that there's one version of each on the two studio albums.

Also, speaking of duplicates, I've included some of these BBC performances on my stray tracks albums for the band, because the BBC versions are the only known versions. Specifically, there are six of them: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Memphis, Tennessee," "I'm Moving On," "Beautiful Delilah," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby" and "Crackin' Up." I considered not including those six in these BBC Sessions albums also, but I ultimately decided to have them in both places.

Note that not all of the songs here sound fantastic. Some performances were saved by the BBC (usually by blind luck), and others were recorded by people off the radio. Some in that later category have slightly worse sound quality, especially some of the ones that remain officially unreleased. But that's only true in a relative sense. Compared to your typical Stones bootlegs and TV appearances from this era, they're much better.

UPDATE: On June 12, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I didn't actually add or remove any songs. However, I upgraded the sound quality of many songs. Many serious Rolling Stones fans believe that the sound quality of the band's official BBC album, "On Air," isn't that good. I've been keeping an eye on the music blog of Prof. Stoned. He found bootleg versions that sounded better than the "On Air" versions. So I've used those versions in the same cases he did.

01 Come On (Rolling Stones)
02 Memphis, Tennessee (Rolling Stones)
03 Roll Over Beethoven (Rolling Stones)
04 Don't Lie to Me (Rolling Stones)
05 Mona [I Need You Baby] (Rolling Stones)
06 Walking the Dog (Rolling Stones)
07 Bye Bye Johnny (Rolling Stones)
08 You Better Move On (Rolling Stones)
09 I Wanna Be Your Man (Rolling Stones)
10 Not Fade Away (Rolling Stones)
11 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Rolling Stones)
12 Beautiful Delilah (Rolling Stones)
13 Hi-Heeled Sneakers (Rolling Stones)
14 Carol [Edit] (Rolling Stones)
15 Down in the Bottom (Rolling Stones)
16 You Can Make It If You Try (Rolling Stones)
17 [Get Your Kicks On] Route 66 (Rolling Stones)
18 Confessin' the Blues (Rolling Stones)
19 Down the Road a Piece [Edit] (Rolling Stones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701021/TROLLNGSTNES1963-1964_BBSessonsVolum1_atse.zip.html

Normally, I'm dead against using a black and white photo for the cover art. The Stones are so famous that there's no problem finding color photos of them from any given year. But I've made an exception in this case, because I found an actual photo of the band playing for the BBC! This photo was taken at the Playhouse Theatre in London, where many of the songs on this album were recorded, some time in 1964. I tinted it purple because I still hate black and white. ;)

NOTE: Many months after posting this album, I figured out a way to colorize the pic, so I did so.  I've left in a tinted version for those who might prefer that.

The Rolling Stones - El Mocambo Tavern, Toronto, Canada, 3-5-1977

It occurred to me that it's been a long time since I've posted any music from the Rolling Stones. I'm going to try to make up for that by posting a bunch of things in the near future. This is a "must have" live concert from them, in my opinion.

This was a highly unusual concert, to say the least. By 1977, the Rolling Stones were playing huge stadiums. But they wanted to release a live album (which would eventually come out under the name "Love You Live"), and they decided to include some unusual song choices from an appearance at a small club. They chose the obscure El Mocambo Tavern in Toronto, Canada, for some reason. It only held 300 people.

They had a local radio station run a contest for people to show what die-hard fans they were. The winners would get to see the popular Canadian band April Wine for free. The 300 winners all met in a certain spot, and then were secretly brought by bus to the club. When they got there, they were astounded to find that April Wine was the opening act for the Rolling Stones! Somehow, even though they did this two nights in a row, the secret was kept out of the media until after the shows were over. Then there was a big controversy in Canada, because Margaret Trudeau, the estranged wife of Canadian Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau, went to the shows and apparently was having a fling with one of the band members. If you listen carefully, Mick Jagger mentions Margaret's name at one point in his banter between songs.

The first show apparently went pretty badly. Keith Richards found out just before going on stage that his two-month old baby had died of natural causes. He also had been arrested in Canada a few days earlier for drug possession, and it looked like he could serve a long prison sentence. (He eventually wiggled out of it.) Also, there were lots of problems with the recording of the show for the live album.

Only some of the songs recorded for the second night have made it to this bootleg. (Four songs were included on the "Love You Live" album, but they're all heavily overdubbed.) This show is great because not only is it a professionally recorded soundboard, with the ambience of a small club, but the band played a very interesting bunch of songs that were quite different from their usual set lists in the late 1970s. While they did play some big hits, they made a point of playing some songs from their early years that they hadn't played since the 1960s. They also played "Worried about You," a song that wouldn't get officially released until the 1981 album "Tattoo You."

This recording is an hour an five minutes long. As great as it is, it would be even better except for the fact that many of the songs played that night didn't make it to the bootleg. It's believed the band also played "Crazy Mama," "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," "Hot Stuff," "Worried Life Blues," "It's Only Rock and Roll," "Rip This Joint," and "Luxury." Let's hope that the full concert gets officially released someday. (A recording of "Crazy Mama" exists, but it's incomplete and with poor sound quality, so I didn't include it.)

There were a number of problems with the recording. For one, the songs were out of order compared to the set list that die-hard fans of the band have confirmed. So I rearranged the songs to put them in proper order. Also, many of the songs lacked an audience reaction at the end, with the recording coming to an end as soon as the song ended. About half of the songs were like that. I fixed that by finding some generic sounding audience cheering from other songs and patching those in. It sounds better now, but some of the transitions still aren't totally smooth.

The song "Fool to Cry" got cut off before it ended. Luckily, it was near the end. I used a section from earlier in the song for about the last ten seconds, and then added in crowd noise. I don't know if the song would have gone on for more verses or solos, but at least it sounds complete now.

A few of the songs don't sound quite as good as the others. For instance, "Star Star" doesn't sound as good to my ears. But that's just in a relative sense. Overall, this sounds really good, because it was recorded by the band for possible use for their live album.

Unfortunately, the last song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," sounds terrible. It starts fine, but after about a minute and a half, it suddenly turns to total crap. Obviously the source material must have switched at that point. It sounds so bad that I'd just as soon scrap that one. But for those who want to have it anyway, I've included it as a bonus track.

UPDATE: On June 3, 2022, I deleted the link because this show has been officially released as the album "Live at the Mocambo." Furthermore, the album is better than this, with better sound quality and more songs. However, I think my cover is superior. so you might want to use that one.

01 Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones)
02 talk (Rolling Stones)
03 All Down the Line (Rolling Stones)
04 talk (Rolling Stones)
05 Hand of Fate (Rolling Stones)
06 [Get Your Kicks On] Route 66 (Rolling Stones)
07 Fool to Cry [Edit] (Rolling Stones)
08 talk (Rolling Stones)
09 Mannish Boy (Rolling Stones)
10 talk (Rolling Stones)
11 Crackin' Up (Rolling Stones)
12 talk (Rolling Stones)
13 Dance Little Sister (Rolling Stones)
14 Around and Around (Rolling Stones)
15 Star Star (Rolling Stones)
16 Worried about You (Rolling Stones)
17 talk (Rolling Stones)
18 Let's Spend the Night Together (Rolling Stones)
19 talk (Rolling Stones)
20 Little Red Rooster (Rolling Stones)
21 Brown Sugar (Rolling Stones)

Jumpin' Jack Flash (Rolling Stones)

The cover art photo comes from the concert in question. (Well, at least it's from that night or the previous night.) For the text at the top, I used the actual sign of the club out front, which is written on an artificial palm tree. I had to rotate some of the letters 90 degrees in the word "Mocambo" so they'd be easier to read.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: 1972

This continues my series of BBC recordings for David Bowie. This album deals with 1972, which was his big breakthrough "Ziggy Stardust" year.

This is a very straight forward album. For all the other albums in this series, I've had a mixture of songs from the official release "Bowie at the Beeb" and other sources. But this one is all from "Bowie at the Beeb." He played so many songs for the BBC in 1972 that a bunch of them will go into the next album in this series. That one only has three songs from "Bowie at the Beeb," and continues his BBC performances into 1973.

There's not much else to say here except this is prime Bowie. The songs were all recorded in various BBC studios, so there's no crowd noise, and the sound is excellent. There also aren't any instances of annoying BBC DJs talking over the starts and ends of songs.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Hang on to Yourself (David Bowie)
02 Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
03 Queen Bitch (David Bowie)
04 I'm Waiting for the Man (David Bowie)
05 Five Years (David Bowie)
06 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie)
07 Moonage Daydream (David Bowie)
08 Suffragette City (David Bowie)
09 Starman (David Bowie)
10 Space Oddity (David Bowie)
11 Changes (David Bowie)
12 Oh, You Pretty Things (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16687942/DAVDBWE1972b_BBSessonsVolum4_atse.zip.html

The photo for the cover art comes from a concert in Santa Monica in October 1972. I like how the lightning makes Bowie look like he's glowing red.

Norah Jones - Dear Darling - Non-Album Tracks (2010-2011)

By this point, I should have some boilerplate text to add to the start of each of my Norah Jones. If I did, it would basically be this: don't write her off because of the songs from her albums. She has a much more interesting second career with her stray tracks, which are more diverse and involve collaborations with many other talented artists.

This album is a case in point. By this point in her career, she had so many stray tracks that I can pretty much make one full album for each calendar year. That's more music per year than what she puts on her studio albums, which only come out once every three or so years. A majority of the songs here are collaborations, as you can see from the song credits.

Six out of the 13 songs here are officially unreleased. They all come from concert bootlegs. But the sound quality of those four are just fine.

There's nothing wrong with the two bonus tracks, except their sound quality isn't as good as the rest.

This album is 41 minutes long.

01 Black (Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi with Norah Jones)
02 Maybe I'm Amazed (Dave Grohl & Norah Jones)
03 Heartache (Norah Jones)
04 The Losing End [When You're On] (Norah Jones)
05 How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart (Norah Jones & Gillian Welch)
06 Season's Trees (Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi with Norah Jones)
07 Problem Queen (Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi with Norah Jones)
08 Pennies on the Floor (Little Willies featuring Norah Jones)
09 Simply Beautiful (Norah Jones)
10 Dear Darling (Norah Jones)
11 Ain't No Grave (Norah Jones)
12 Forever Young (Norah Jones)
13 America the Beautiful (Norah Jones)

Don't Rob Another Man's Castle (Puss N Boots featuring Norah Jones)
Golden Earrings (Norah Jones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696750/NORHJNS2010-2011_DearDrling_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is of Jones at the 2011 version of the Bridge School benefit concert.

Lucinda Williams - Bone of Contention - Non-Album Tracks (2007-2009)

Someone posted a comment complimenting my Lucinda Williams stray tracks albums. I'm glad to hear at least one person is enjoying them. So here's the next one in my chronological series.

All but three of the songs here were officially released, from the usual various artists compilations and appearances on other people's albums. The other three come from concert bootlegs, but they sound just fine.

The centerpiece of this album is probably the four songs from an official 2008 EP, called "Lu in '08." All three are covers of anti-war songs. I suspect that theme has something to do with her opposition to the war in Iraq raging at the time, as well as having a mind to the US presidential elections later that year. (The EP was released about a week before the election.)

I think all the songs on this album are covers, except for "Bone of Contention," and most of them are of famous songs. I like the chutzpah of a country-sounding singer-songwriter who does a version of "Riders on the Storm." She also seemed to have been in a Bob Dylan mood, because two of the covers were written by Dylan: "Queen Jane Approximately" and "Masters of War."

01 Honey Chile (Lucinda Williams)
02 Riders on the Storm (Lucinda Williams)
03 I Live My Life (Lucinda Williams)
04 Queen Jane Approximately (Lucinda Williams)
05 Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys (Lucinda Williams)
06 The Ghost of Phil Sinclair (Chip Taylor & Lucinda Williams)
07 For What It's Worth (Lucinda Williams)
08 Bone of Contention (Lucinda Williams)
09 Masters of War (Lucinda Williams)
10 Marching the Hate Machines [Into the Sun] (Lucinda Williams)
11 Oh Lonesome Me (M. Ward & Lucinda Williams)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15191376/LucndaWllms_2007-2009_BneContntion_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from a concert in Boston in 2007.

Neil Young - Royal Festival Hall, London, Britain, 2-27-1971

Here's another early thing from Neil Young before I resume posting more of his 1980s stuff. I consider this another "must have" concert if you're a fan of his music.

Young has released a very nice solo acoustic concert, "Live at the Cellar Door." That was recorded over several days at the start of December 1970. This is a solo acoustic concert recorded just three months later. The sound quality of "Cellar Door" is fantastic. It sounds better than this, which is a mere audience bootleg. But this is one of the rare audience bootlegs that sound about as good as a soundboard.

But there are a couple of problems with "Cellar Door," in my opinion, that makes this a better listen overall. For one, "Cellar Door" is only 45 minutes long, whereas this is an hour and 15 minutes long. So this is nearly double the length. Plus, "Cellar Door" is taken from four different concerts. If it were a case of picking the best guitar solos and such, that would make sense. But these are simple solo acoustic renditions, so each performance of any given song is essentially the same. In such a case, I prefer hearing a full concert, warts and all, so you can better tell what attending one of his concerts back then was like.

One reason this is longer recording is because Young was quite chatty in concert back in those days, and he talked before nearly every song. But for "Cellar Door," nearly all the between-song banter was removed. In live recordings in general, hearing the talking often gets boring fast, but I like Young's banter a lot, and I think having it adds a lot of character to the overall performance.

The final reason I like recording this better than "Cellar Door" is the song selection. Even though this concert took place only three months later, in the time between he wrote most of the songs from his album "Harvest." Although that album didn't come out until early 1972, it actually could have come out in early 1971, since most of the songs were written and even recorded by then. He only played one "Harvest" song on "Cellar Door" ("Old Man"), whereas he played six in this concert. Plus, he played some other new songs only here, like "Journey through the Past," "The Bridge," and "Love in Mind."

I don't know why Young kept "Cellar Door" down to just 45 minutes. Since it comes from four different concerts, all with different set lists, he could have made it a definitive look at his solo acoustic concerts from that era. Instead, it's more like a small sampler.

Anyway, getting back to the sound quality issue, this one is very good, as I said, despite being an audience bootleg. The crowd is quiet and respectful, so there's virtually no talking or cheering during the songs. The main reason why I knew it was audience-sourced is that the clapping after each song was louder than the music, whereas with a good soundboard it usually is a lot quieter. I lowered the volume of the audience reaction to better match the volume of the songs.

There was only one major audio issue, and that's with the first song, "On the Way Home." Unfortunately, the recording started about 30 seconds into the song. So I took the start of the version of that song from "Cellar Door" and matched the speed and pitch to fill in that missing music. You'll probably notice the transition point. This recording sounds a bit more boomy. But you quickly get used to it.

One final point I want to make here is that the number of really excellent sounding Neil Young concerts from his early years is very small. Aside from the official releases, the only ones I really like are this one and the one I posted a few days ago, from the Music Hall in Cincinnati in 1970. He played for the BBC in early 1971, and the sound on that one is fantastic, but it's a very short recording, only 32 minutes long, and the songs are all the usual suspects that you can find in nearly identical versions on "Cellar Door" and elsewhere. Plus, every single song he played there he also played here. So that's why any serious Neil Young fan should have this concert and the Music Hall in Cincinnati one.

01 On the Way Home [Edit] (Neil Young)
02 Tell Me Why (Neil Young)
03 talk (Neil Young)
04 Old Man (Neil Young)
05 talk (Neil Young)
06 Journey through the Past (Neil Young)
07 talk (Neil Young)
08 Cowgirl in the Sand (Neil Young)
09 talk (Neil Young)
10 The Bridge (Neil Young)
11 talk (Neil Young)
12 The Loner (Neil Young)
13 talk (Neil Young)
14 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young)
15 See the Sky about to Rain (Neil Young)
16 Out on the Weekend (Neil Young)
17 I Am a Child (Neil Young)
18 Ohio (Neil Young)
19 Love in Mind (Neil Young)
20 talk (Neil Young)
21 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Neil Young)
22 talk (Neil Young)
23 Heart of Gold (Neil Young)
24 talk (Neil Young)
25 A Man Needs a Maid (Neil Young)
26 talk (Neil Young)
27 Harvest (Neil Young)
28 The Needle and the Damage Done (Neil Young)
29 talk (Neil Young)
30 Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Neil Young)
31 talk (Neil Young)
32 Dance, Dance, Dance (Neil Young)
33 Expecting to Fly (Neil Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15848454/NeilY_1971d_RoylFestivlHallLondnBrtain__2-27-1971_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used two sources. The top part is a photo of a concert ticket from the very concert documented here. I cropped out the bottom half that gave the exact seating for the ticket holder and other less important details, and I also squished it vertically somewhat, to make room for the picture below it. That picture comes from the BBC performance I mentioned above, which took place just four days earlier, also in London.

Johnny Cash - Sin and Redemption: Live Acoustic American Recordings (1994)

This is kind of a follow up to the Johnny Cash concert in Austin, Texas, in 1994 that I posted here a couple of days ago. 1994 was a special time for Cash's concert performances. He was supporting his 1994 solo acoustic album "American Recordings." So, as far as I know, it was the first and only time he played a significant number of songs in solo acoustic format in concert.

There was a whole solo acoustic section in the 1994 concert I recently posted. But it turns out he changed his set list from night to night, and he played many more songs in that format in other shows. So I've made this album to gather together all the other solo acoustic performances I could find from 1994 that either have great sound quality, or are different songs than the ones in the Austin, Texas show I posted, or both.

This album is possible mainly due to two sources. An hour-long 1994 concert recorded in Manhattan was played on TV, and has excellent sound quality. Another 1994 concert of similar length recorded in Montreux, Switzerland, was released as the DVD "Live in Montreux," but never released as an album. That has excellent sound quality too. The first 30 minutes of this album come from those two sources.

The last ten minutes come from two other sources that are mere audience bootlegs. The sound quality for these are noticeably worse, but still fairly good. The songs are more interesting though. Generally speaking, Cash only played songs from the "American Recordings" in solo acoustic format. But here he dipped back to play two songs he first did in the 1970s, "The Ballad of Barbara" and "Flesh and Blood," in that format. Plus there's "Like a Soldier," an "American Recordings" song I couldn't find live in that format from any better source.

One nice thing about all these songs is that Cash talks before the vast majority of them, and his between song banter is entertaining. It's also different than the banter before the same songs from the Austin, Texas show.

Speaking of that show, here are the songs on this album that aren't on that one: "Let the Train Blow the Whistle," "Redemption," "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," and "Thirteen," plus the three I mentioned above, "The Ballad of Barbara," "Flesh and Blood," and "Like a Soldier." There also are a few solo acoustic performances at the Austin, Texas, show that aren't here: "A Cowboy's Prayer," "Oh, Bury Me Not," "Down There by the Train," and "Death and Hell." I thought about including those exact same performances on this album, but I figured that was redundant, because anyone interested enough to get this would almost certainly have that concert too.

By the way, in Cash's between song banter, both here and in the Austin, Texas, show, he mentioned multiple times how "sin and redemption" was the theme to the "American Recordings" album. So that's why I named this "Sin and Redemption."

01 talk (Johnny Cash)
02 Delia's Gone (Johnny Cash)
03 Tennessee Stud (Johnny Cash)
04 Bird on a Wire (Johnny Cash)
05 talk (Johnny Cash)
06 Let the Train Blow the Whistle (Johnny Cash)
07 talk (Johnny Cash)
08 The Beast in Me (Johnny Cash)
09 talk (Johnny Cash)
10 Redemption (Johnny Cash)
11 talk (Johnny Cash)
12 Drive On (Johnny Cash)
13 The Man Who Couldn't Cry (Johnny Cash)
14 talk (Johnny Cash)
15 Thirteen (Johnny Cash)
16 talk (Johnny Cash)
17 Like a Soldier (Johnny Cash)
18 The Ballad of Barbara (Johnny Cash)
19 talk (Johnny Cash)
20 Flesh and Blood (Johnny Cash)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602959/JohnnyC_1994_SinandRdemptionLiveAcoustic_atse.zip.html

The cover art shows Cash playing at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994. By the way, there's a bootleg of that concert with excellent soundboard sound quality too, but he played a short set, and none of the solo acoustic songs are different than the ones here.

Joni Mitchell - Born to Take the Highway - On TV and Radio (1965-1968)

In the past couple of months, I've posted a bunch of bootleg concerts of Joni Mitchell from her early years. Those concerts are all great, for their many unreleased songs, her commentary before nearly every song, their excellent sound quality, and more. But I also have other quality performances here and there from that era, mostly from various TV and radio shows. I'd already put together a series of albums for Dusty Springfield called "On TV and Radio," so I've decided to do the same for Mitchell. Here's the first of four such albums.

Note that I've also collected many of Mitchell's still unreleased early songs on three stray tracks collections. I avoided putting any of those exact performances on these albums as well. I also maintained high standards when it comes to sound quality, so I rejected some performances due to that. Furthermore, I generally dislike having two versions of the same song on one album, unless there's a special reason for it. In her early years, she often played the same songs for her limited mass media appearances, such as "The Circle Game" and "Both Sides Now." I don't have any duplicates on this album.

All the songs are originals, except for "Prithee, Pretty Maiden." I didn't include that one on the stray tracks albums because I felt it wasn't strong enough. It's a duet with someone I'd never heard of, named "Bob Jason."

01 Born to Take the Highway (Joni Mitchell)
02 Play Little David (Joni Mitchell)
03 Night in the City (Joni Mitchell)
04 Prithee, Pretty Maiden (Joni Mitchell & Bob Jason)
05 Just like Me (Joni Mitchell)
06 Urge for Going (Joni Mitchell)
07 Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
08 Blue on Blue (Joni Mitchell)
09 Eastern Rain (Joni Mitchell)
10 The Dawntreader (Joni Mitchell)
11 The Circle Game (Joni Mitchell)
12 Sisotowbell Lane [Edit] (Joni Mitchell)
13 The Gallery (Joni Mitchell)
14 Nathan La Franeer (Joni Mitchell)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/rYzRj2Ge

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/FM4BOKEhIVPybAs/file

Around 1967, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) filmed Mitchell playing some of her songs in various beautiful locales around Canada. They tried to use settings that matched the songs. The cover art comes from a screenshot of one such video, for the song "Born to Take the Highway." Naturally, they went with the idea of her walking down a highway.

At the same time I updated the mp3 download (February 2021), I updated the cover art photo. Starting from a slightly different screenshot taken from the same video, I used some tricks to make it look less blurry than before.

Richard Thompson - Black Crow - Non-Album Tracks (1996-2002)

Here's another Richard Thompson stray tracks album. Because he plays in solo acoustic format so much, I've divided his stray tracks into acoustic and full band albums. This is a full band album. It covers a lot of years because he doesn't have many full band rarities in this era. I have many more acoustic rarities from that time, as you'll see with future posts.

The songs come from a wide variety of sources. All but one has been officially released, and that one ("Put It There Pal") sounds just as good as the rest. By the way, I included "Put It There Pal" even though it appeared on Thompson's "You? Me? Us?" album, because he goes off with his guitar soloing on this version, almost doubling the length of the song.

Two songs, "Black Crow" and "Woodstock" are covers of Joni Mitchell songs from a Joni Mitchell tribute concert in 2000 that she attended. "Black Crow" is with a full band and "Woodstock" is acoustic, but I included "Woodstock" because I felt the two songs belong together.

"Dear Mary" is a very, very rare reunion of Richard and Linda Thompson since they divorced and broke up their musical partnership in 1982. Apparently they grew to be friends again after lots of bad blood, but they've hardly ever played music together since the break up. This song comes from a Linda Thompson album.

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 From Galway to Graceland (Richard Thompson & Fairport Convention)
02 Put It There, Pal [Extended Solo Version] (Richard Thompson)
03 Le Forze d'Hercole - Lo Ballo Dell'Intorcia [Instrumental] (Philip Pickett & Richard Thompson)
04 Fully Qualified to Be Your Man (Richard Thompson)
05 Mr. Rebound (Richard Thompson)
06 Black Crow (Richard Thompson)
07 Woodstock (Richard Thompson)
08 Dear Mary (Linda Thompson with Richard Thompson)
09 Rockin' in Rhythm [Instrumental] (Richard Thompson)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15270890/RichrdT_1996-2002_BlackCrw_atse.zip.html

The cover art comes from a concert poster. I don't know the year. I also don't know why it has an Asian art look, but I like it, so I used a matching font for the album title. I had to do some editing to get the rectangular poster to fit in a square space.

Neil Young - Music Hall, Cincinnati, OH, 2-25-1970

I recently started to post some albums gathering the best of Neil Young's 1980s lean years. I plan to keep doing that, but there's also some stuff from the 1970s that I've been meaning to post as well. Here's one.

I'm very glad that Young has released his "Archives Volume 1" box sets and some other archival albums. That's filled in some important gaps in his musical career. But I feel one time when he blew it was with the archival release of "Live at the Fillmore East." That's a 43-minute-long album of highlights from four concerts on March 6th and 7th at the Fillmore East in New York City. But Young played half solo acoustic and half with his rocking band Crazy Horse at each of those shows. Absolutely none of the acoustic material was included, even though the set lists differed with each show. And while the set list for the electric shows were generally the same from show to show, no version of "Cinnamon Girl" was included.

Luckily, there is one soundboard bootleg from that same tour, recorded in Cincinnati a couple of weeks earlier, which I'm presenting here. I think it's a much better representation of what he was like in concert at the time. One gets an hour and a half of Young, acoustic and electric, instead of just 43 minutes of him playing electric. The performance and sound quality are similar (though admittedly the Fillmore East sound is a tad better).

This is a popular bootleg, because there are only a handful of his shows from 1971 or earlier with really good sound. But I've made some changes to make this even better than the usual bootleg version. First, I separated all the talking onto their own tracks (and he talks before most songs). Then I boosted the volume for those talking tracks, because they usually were a lot quieter than the songs. I also deleted the prolonged dead air and aimless guitar tuning between songs. I probably cut about five minutes in total that way, without losing anything worth hearing.

Another problem with the bootleg has to do with the audience noise. Because this is a genuine soundboard, you hear what's on stage very well, but there wasn't much of the audience response to the songs. So I've carefully boosted the volume of the cheering. This was especially difficult to do during the electric portion of the show. Some songs got cut off right as the audience reaction began. In others, one couldn't hear much of the audience over some guitar noodling. But I brought in audience noise from the ends of other songs so that each song ends with a proper audience response.

One minor disappointment is that the electric set didn't happen to include "Cowgirl in the Sand" that night, one of his prolonged guitar workouts. I found a version from the same tour, in Boston, and I've added it as the last song as sort of a bonus track. The sound quality of this isn't as good, because it comes from a mere audience bootleg. But most of the poorer sound is apparent on the vocal sections of the song, while the guitar soloing sounds just as good as a soundboard. And since this song is like 80 percent guitar soloing, the overall sound isn't that different.

In short, if you want one good Neil Young concert from 1971 or earlier that isn't just solo acoustic, this is the one to get. Personally, I prefer it to "Live at the Fillmore East" because there's just a lot more music, including more of the electric set. (With the bonus song added, you get an hour and two minutes of the electric set compared to 43 minutes in "Fillmore East.")

By the way, one reason this electric set is longer here (even though it's basically the same bunch of songs) is because it seems most of the between-song banter was stripped out for the "Fillmore East" album. There's only a minute of talking on that album, and most of that is band introductions. But this has seven minutes of talking for the electric set alone. I like Young's banter; I think it adds to the character of the concert.

01 On the Way Home (Neil Young)
02 talk (Neil Young)
03 Broken Arrow (Neil Young)
04 talk (Neil Young)
05 I Am a Child (Neil Young)
06 talk (Neil Young)
07 Helpless (Neil Young)
08 talk (Neil Young)
09 Dance, Dance, Dance (Neil Young)
10 talk (Neil Young)
11 Sugar Mountain (Neil Young)
12 talk (Neil Young)
13 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young)
14 The Old Laughing Lady (Neil Young)
15 The Loner (Neil Young)
16 talk (Neil Young)
17 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Neil Young)
18 talk (Neil Young)
19 Winterlong (Neil Young)
20 talk (Neil Young)
21 Come On Baby, Let's Go Downtown (Neil Young)
22 talk (Neil Young)
23 Wonderin' (Neil Young)
24 talk (Neil Young)
25 It Might Have Been (Neil Young)
26 talk (Neil Young)
27 Down by the River (Neil Young)
28 talk (Neil Young)
29 Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young)
30 Cowgirl in the Sand (Neil Young)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/MdPmEPC2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/UY1G50DMXlaBzzK/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/gXwbR

I was surprised that I couldn't find any good color photos of Neil Young in concert in 1970, given how famous he is, even back then. The one I've used here is decent, but I think the colors are slightly off, and I'm pretty sure it dates to 1971 instead of 1970. If anyone has a good one from 1970, please let me know and I'll redo the cover.