Traffic - Live 1968 - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 3-14-1968

In my last post, I used up all the studio tracks of Traffic's "Last Exit" compilation, and I said I'd have a better place to put the two live tracks, so you'd have no use for "Last Exit" anymore. Here's where the two live tracks go.

Traffic was together as a foursome - including Dave Mason - just two years, 1967 and 1968. The band got back together for a longer run of 1970 to 1974 without Mason. I like both versions of Traffic a lot, but I slightly prefer the first version, because I think Mason added another valuable dimension. Unfortunately, live recordings (all bootlegs) of early Traffic are very rare, and most have unacceptably bad sound. Virtually the only exception to this is a short concert I've posted already, of Traffic playing in Sweden in 1967, which has excellent sound. You can get that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/05/traffic-konserthuset-stockholm-sweden-9.html

The good news is I've found another Traffic concert with excellent sound, this time from the Fillmore on March 14, 1968, and I'm posting it here now. But there are issues with it, most of which I've fixed. The biggest problem is that it's short, only about 32 minutes long. Eighteen minutes of those are the two live tracks from "Last Exit," namely "Blind Man" and "Feelin' Good." The song "No Face, No Name, No Number" from that show also sounds excellent.

Unfortunately, the rest of this surprisingly short bootleg of this concert comes from another source that also sounds very good, except the vocals can hardly be heard. That's not a problem for the instrumental jam that starts the recording. But it is a problem for "Coloured Rain." So I've attempted a rather drastic edit. I took the vocal sections of a different performance of the song, from the Sweden show mentioned above, and matched the tempo and pitch with the Fillmore performance. Then I patched those in, keeping the longer instrumental sections from the Fillmore version. I think this works pretty well. But in case you don't agree, I'm including the unedited Fillmore version with very quiet vocals as a bonus track.

Note also that there's an occasional crackling sound on some of the recording, especially the instrumental jam. This actually was a problem of the sound system at the show itself. We know this because at one point, Traffic member Jim Capaldi made reference to it, complaining about the "eggs and bacon" sound he was hearing. Luckily, it's not very loud and it's mostly a problem just on that first song.

Since the concert is so short, I've managed to find a few more live performances with high sound quality. Two of them ("You Can All Join In" and "Feelin' Alright") prominently feature Dave Mason from later in 1968. (Note that Mason isn't on the above-mentioned Fillmore tracks, since they were recorded during the first time he left the band, in early 1968.)

The last song comes from a concert at the Fillmore East also later in 1968 (when Mason was still back in the band) where the instruments were all recorded very well, but the vocals were recorded horribly. As a result, the only song I've taken from this concert is an interesting and rare all-instrumental version of "Pearly Queen," so the problem of the vocals isn't an issue.

If you add up all the songs here, you get 44 minutes of music. That still isn't very long, but Traffic concerts in 1967 and 1968 were typically less than an hour long anyway, especially since they often weren't the headlining act. (The 1967 Sweden show is complete and that's only 40 minutes long.)

Aside from the songs here and the 1967 Sweden concert, the only other quality sounding live recordings from early Traffic that I've found are their BBC performances. I'll be posting those here soon.

01 Jam [Instrumental] (Traffic)
02 Coloured Rain [Edit] (Traffic)
03 talk (Traffic)
04 No Face, No Name, No Number (Traffic)
05 Blind Man (Traffic)
06 Feelin' Good (Traffic)
07 You Can All Join In (Traffic)
08 Feelin' Alright (Traffic)
09 Pearly Queen [Instrumental Version] (Traffic)

Coloured Rain [Almost Instrumental Version] (Traffic)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15259246/Trffc_1968b_Live1968FillmreWestSnFranciscoCA__3-14-1968_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I wanted to use a color photo of Traffic playing in concert in 1968. But those are extremely rare, and I didn't find a single good one. So instead I decided to use a concert poster. This is part of a larger poster by Frank Bettlencourt of a concert in the Earl Warren Showground, Santa Barbara, CA, with Electric Flag, Traffic, and Steppenwolf. I removed Electric Flag and Steppenwolf from the poster and replaced that with some other text.