Rolling Stones - Madison Square Garden, New York City, 11-27-1969

There is a very strange story behind this album. On the last day of 2019, ABKCO, the record company in charge of the Rolling Stones' 1969 music catalog, released a bunch of Rolling Stones songs from 1969 on YouTube for about a day. This was due to a European copyright law, that states a legal entity has to make recordings publicly available within 50 years to maintain the copyright rights. They waited until almost literally the last minute of the last day to do so.

Lots of other big artists have had similar copyright extension releases, such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Beach Boys. But ABKCO went several steps further than other artists to be jerks about it: they only released the songs with a low bit rate, meaning poor quality sound, and then they added an annoying loud tone through all the songs that made them virtually unlistenable!

Here's an article about this strange situation:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/03/mystery-of-rolling-stones-tracks-posted-briefly-on-youtube

The problem is the Rolling Stones and ABKCO have been fighting each other since about 1969, because the band felt they'd signed a contract that ripped them off. There have been a few exceptions, but they generally have preferred not to release any previously unreleased 1960s material just to make sure ABKCO doesn't profit. So, aside from this one weird, brief release, these performances are likely to stay unreleased for a long time, or maybe forever.

Some of the performances were live, and others were from the studio. I'll deal with the studio material in a later post. Of the live material, most of it, frankly, sounds bad. ABKCO pretty much just posted versions of a few 1969 concerts already made popular by bootlegs, but with worse sound quality. And that's even taking into account that people figured out how to remove the constant buzzing noise without reducing the sound of the rest too badly.

One exception are a couple of concerts from Madison Square Garden, on November 27th and November 28th, 1969. These are previously unavailable soundboard versions (with the buzzing noise removed). The set lists are the same on both nights, but the November 27th show sounds slightly better. Also, the 28th show has some cuts and flaws in it, and the 27th doesn't. So I've directed my attention to the 27th show only. Also, it comes from the end of the band's 1969 tour, and they felt they got better and better as the tour went along, so both the sound quality and performance are the best.

But this concert is very similar to the officially released live album "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out." In fact, most of the songs on that album come from those two nights at the Madison Square Garden. But the band did two shows each night, and I think the only performance on the live album from this, the late show on the 27th, is the first song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Furthermore, the set list is exactly the same between this and "Ya-Ya's," since the band didn't vary their set list much at the time.

So, you may ask: why listen to this at all, when "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" is professionally done and sounds better? That's true, but that album has been criticized for being overdubbed in the studio after the fact to fix or improve performances. For instance, it's known the lead vocals were redone for at least six of the songs, and there was more overdubbing of guitar parts, backing vocals, and so on. Furthermore, this has the songs in the order they were actually played, and "Ya-Ya's" has them all mixed up. If you want to hear what the Stones sounded like in "the raw," from just one concert, exactly as they did at the time, then this album is for you.

But the story gets more complicated, because although this is a professionally recorded soundboard, it's completely unmixed, and it had some serious flaws. When I heard it, what most disappointed me was that the lead vocals sounded a bit distant. Fixing that sort of thing goes beyond my limited sound editing skills. Luckily though, lately I've been getting sound editing help from someone named MZ. I sent him the files and asked if he could take a whack at them, and he did. He tells me that the main thing he did was reduce the bass and increase the tremble - which is where the lead vocals are. He also removed some clicks and other minor flaws. I think it sounds much better now.

On top of that, I did what limited sound editing I could do to help. I separated all the talking between songs onto their own tracks, as I usually do for concert recordings. Then I boosted the vocals of Mick Jagger's between song banter, because that was usually too low in the mix.

That left only one glaring problem, which was the start of the song "Under My Thumb." There was some weird flaw for about ten seconds of the opening riff, where they bass got way too loud and distorted. I got rid of that bit by patching in a repetition of the riff from a few seconds later. So it should sound good now, although it is odd that the intro riff is repeated three times before more instruments join in. I'm guessing it probably was repeated once more, but that part sounded so bad that it got edited out. But I'm not sure, so I've left it as it is.

Brian Jones was fired from the band before the start of their 1969 tour (and died shortly thereafter). He was replaced by Mick Taylor. So this features the Mick Taylor version of the band, which lasted until 1974. Personally, that's my favorite line-up.

By the way, Peter, who runs the "Albums I Wish Existed" blog, posted the studio portion of this copyright extension release last week. That's how I found it, and got inspired to track down the best of the live portion. You can get that at his blog here:

https://albumsiwishexisted.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-rolling-stones-1969-preservation.html

Also, I plan on posting my own version of that studio material here soon. I'm going to mix it in with other studio outtakes from the time, as well as stuff from the band's 1968 copyright extension release, which came out at the end of 2018.

01 talk (Rolling Stones)
02 Jumpin' Jack Flash (Rolling Stones)
03 talk (Rolling Stones)
04 Carol (Rolling Stones)
05 Sympathy for the Devil (Rolling Stones)
06 talk (Rolling Stones)
07 Stray Cat Blues (Rolling Stones)
08 talk (Rolling Stones)
09 Love in Vain (Rolling Stones)
10 talk (Rolling Stones)
11 Prodigal Son (Rolling Stones)
12 talk (Rolling Stones)
13 You Gotta Move (Rolling Stones)
14 Under My Thumb [Edit] - I'm Free (Rolling Stones)
15 Midnight Rambler (Rolling Stones)
16 talk (Rolling Stones)
17 Live with Me (Rolling Stones)
18 talk (Rolling Stones)
19 Little Queenie (Rolling Stones)
20 [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Rolling Stones)
21 talk (Rolling Stones)
22 Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones)
23 Street Fighting Man (Rolling Stones)

https://www.imagenetz.de/fNtdx

The copyright extension release has already started to be bootlegged, even though it's only a couple of months old as I write this. I used the cover of one such bootleg as my starting point. But I decided to replace most of the text, even though I kept the font. I also changed the photo. Luckily, there are a bunch of very good photos of the Madison Square Garden concerts on November 28th (though not the 27th, as far as I know). The bootleg cover used one, but it showed Mick Jagger only, and it was black and white. I found a better one that's in color and shows both Jagger and Keith Richards. (I didn't find any ones showing the whole band.) I manipulated it a bit to close a gap between the two of them, so I could make them larger. The two of them played a few acoustic songs in the middle of the concert ("Love in Vain," "Prodigal Son," and "You Gotta Move"), and the photo comes from that.