Derek & the Dominos - Fillmore East, New York City, 10-23-1970, Late Show

I just posted an album of Derek and the Dominos playing the early show at the Fillmore East in New York City, on October 23rd, 1970. You might not want to download that, because it only contains half of the set and only half of that is recorded in soundboard quality. However, if you like this band at all, you really need to get this one, the late show from that same night, as well as the late show from October 24th, which I will be posting next.

These two late shows are considered the "crown jewels" of all Derek and the Dominos live recordings, and for good reason. In terms of performance, the band had a very good night, but not one of their very best nights. (Surprisingly, they had no idea they were being recorded.) However, what makes the Fillmore shows so outstanding is the sound quality. Not only are they pristine soundboards that sound about as good as you could ever hope for, but ALL other live recordings from the band are audience bootlegs that sound markedly worse.

The band's Fillmore recordings sound so good that two official live albums have been made out of them. In 1973, the album "In Concert" was released, featuring a double albums' worth of songs for those concerts. In 1994, the album "Live at the Fillmore" was released, featuring even more from those same two concerts.

So, you may ask, why not just get one or both of the official albums instead of this? There are several reasons, but the main one is that some performances can only be found on one of the live albums, other performances are only on the other one, and still more aren't on either of them. Furthermore, the running orders for both official albums are a mess. What I'm presenting here are the complete late shows, in the correct track order, at the highest sound quality.

To be more specific, there are 17 officially released performed songs from both late shows in all (including one from the recently released soundtrack "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bar"). I've discovered an additional seven performed songs from bootlegs of the late shows that are in the same excellent soundboard quality as the officially released stuff. (This doesn't include the October 23rd early show that I just posted, which contains three more songs at soundboard quality and three songs at audience quality.)

I did some research on what die-hard Eric Clapton fan think of the sound qualities of various official and unofficial versions of these shows, so I could use only the best quality sources. Many fans (though not all) thought that the MFSL version of the "In Concert" tracks were superior to the "Live at the Fillmore" versions, so I used those whenever possible. In 2011, the super deluxe 40th anniversary edition of the "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" album included a remaster of the "In Concert" tracks, but the general opinion is that this remastering is inferior, so I've avoided that.

At first glance, bootleg versions of the late shows essentially sound as good as the official recordings, because they draw from the same source, a mix that was made in 1972 in preparation for the "in Concert" album. However, the bootlegged versions have a lot of hiss for the October 24th late show, and have generally combated that by using a lot of noise reduction. So the official versions are better, since they had more expert means to get rid of the hiss. Thus, I've used the official versions whenever possible.

To make matters more complicated, all the officially released versions have put those songs out of order, and even most bootlegs have the songs out of order. I researched this on the Internet until I got the song order right.

Keep in mind I'm not a total musical purist. I want music that I'll enjoy listening to, and if that means making some edits to fix what I consider flaws, so be it. With these late shows, I didn't make any edits to the music itself, but I did make some edits to the crowd noise before and after songs. One thing I generally do with live recordings is cut out the boring bits between songs, such as long stretches of guitar tuning or relative silence. I did some of that. (By the way, Clapton and the other band members almost never talked between songs, and I didn't cut any of what little talking that exists.)

But I had to do a surprising amount of work of the cheering after the songs ended. Typically, the officially released versions have just a few seconds of crowd noise, which slowly fades out. This isn't good, in my opinion, because it sounds obvious that edits were made. I discovered that the bootleg versions generally kept all the clapping until the audience got quiet again. So, in most cases, I used the official versions for the songs themselves and then pasted in the clapping from the bootlegs instead.

Note that there is no clapping at all after "Blues Power." This is because the band came to a complete stop at the end of the song, but only waited a couple of seconds before starting the next tune, giving the audience no time to react. I was able to confirm this by checking with some inferior sounding audience recordings of the late shows, that have it that exact way.

Also note that the first track, which consists of an MC introducing the band, is an audience recording. No soundboard version of this appears to exist. But if the recordings of the early show are any indication, the audience recording sounds better anyway, since the MC's microphone wasn't picked up by the soundboard.

01 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
02 Got to Get Better in a Little While (Derek & the Dominos)
03 Key to the Highway (Derek & the Dominos)
04 Tell the Truth (Derek & the Dominos)
05 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominos)
06 Blues Power (Derek & the Dominos)
07 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Derek & the Dominos)
08 Bottle of Red Wine (Derek & the Dominos)
09 Presence of the Lord (Derek & the Dominos)
10 Little Wing (Derek & the Dominos)
11 Let It Rain - Drum Solo - Let It Rain (Derek & the Dominos)
12 Crossroads (Derek & the Dominos)

https://www.imagenetz.de/bVphr

Regarding the cover art photo, see my comments for the cover of the October 23rd early show. I know the photo comes from a different concert, but I'm using it anyway because I don't have a better one from the actual photo and this one is so good. Actually, I like this photo so much that I made a painting of it when I was a teenager! I think the contrast of blues and reds looks really cool.