Pink Floyd - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 4-29-1970

For a band like Pink Floyd that's known for the pristine sound on their albums, you'd think there would be lots of pristine recordings of their concerts. But that's surprisingly not the case. There are very few multitrack concert recordings from them (which usually sound the best), and not many more soundboard recordings, at least in terms of what has been made publicly available, officially or through bootlegs.

So this concert of Pink Floyd playing the Fillmore West in San Francisco in April 1970 needs to be treasured, due to be an excellent performance and excellent sound quality. Furthermore, none of it was used for the box set "The Early Years." That's probably because just one day earlier, the band played about an hour of music at the Fillmore when it was empty for a local PBS station, PBS. The video footage of that is included in the box set, and they probably didn't include this because the set list is very similar. But the KQED performance was slightly less than one hour, whereas this is over two hours.

By the way, I'm pretty sure the reason this sounds so good is because KQED recorded it as well. I just did a little Googling, and found that KQED brought a mobile recording unit to the Fillmore to record their show without an audience, for maximum sound clarity. They probably just kept the unit there and recorded the show with the audience too. This guess is strengthened by the fact that the KQED producers even went to a Pink Floyd concert the next week in Los Angeles and recorded that in hopes of getting more footage to use.

So there are definitely no complaints from me about the sound, except for one thing: the audience noise at the end of most songs. For whatever reason, it turned out that a lot of those were messed up. Some were simply cut off in the middle of the audience reaction. Others were extremely quiet. So I did some editing to make sure there's a proper audience response after each song (except when the band went straight into the next song). In some cases, I patched in clapping from the end of a different song, such as when the audience noise got abruptly cut off.

I made another major kind of edit as well, and that was to get rid of some of the "dead air" between songs. It turns out there was a lot of noodling and/or tuning between some songs. I probably cut about five minutes of that. But, as always, I was careful not to cut any of the actual speaking between songs. (By the way, I believe all the talking is done by Roger Waters.) I also sometimes adjusted the volume of the talking, as the speaker might be too close or too far from the microphone.

Anyway, the songs are great, and while there was some issues between the songs, I believe I've fixed all that, so it should sound great all the way through. If you want just one pre-"Dark Side of the Moon" concert from them, you should make it this one.

01 Granchester Meadows (Pink Floyd)
02 Astronomy Domine (Pink Floyd)
03 talk (Pink Floyd)
04 Cymbaline (Pink Floyd)
05 talk (Pink Floyd)
06 Atom Heart Mother (Pink Floyd)
07 Embryo (Pink Floyd)
08 talk (Pink Floyd)
09 Green Is the Colour (Pink Floyd)
10 Careful with that Axe, Eugene (Pink Floyd)
11 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd)
12 talk (Pink Floyd)
13 A Saucerful of Secrets [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
14 talk (Pink Floyd)
15 Interstellar Overdrive [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)

https://www.imagenetz.de/jHq3r

For the album cover art, I found a concert poster of the band playing at the Fillmore in late 1967. (Apparently, the concert got cancelled.) I liked the art, so I decided to use it. But I had to make a lot of changes and additions to the text, including changing "Fillmore" to "Fillmore West."