To be honest, this is more of a Gladys Knight and the Pips concert: it's an hour long, and 37 minutes pass before Ray Charles shows up. But it's quite good just as a Knight concert, because there's only one of those from her prime 1960s and 1970s years, and it's not that good and is long out of print. In my opinion, it's a lucky thing that this concert took place in 1977 and not more recently, because 1977 was the tail end of soul music's golden era. Already in that year, disco was taking over, and disco destroyed or compromised the music of nearly every major soul figure. (I'm not against all disco, but there was a time when basically everyone "went disco" when they shouldn't have, including the likes of Ethel Merman!) Luckily, there are no traces of disco here. Had this been recorded a year or two later, I'll bet a lot of the songs would have been "disco-fied."
Anyway, we have an album of a very solid Gladys Knight and the Pips concert, where she played most of her biggest hits. Then Ray Charles joined in and played two songs on his own. For the last three songs, Knight and Charles sang together. As far as I know, this is the only time the two of them collaborated like this on stage, although they did a couple of duets in the studio towards the end of Charles' life.
The reason we have a recording of this concert, and in very good sound quality, is because it was professionally filmed and then shown on HBO a year later. Many years after that, that film was released on video, and then on DVD in 2008. I was able to find a version of that on YouTube and convert it to mp3 format. The sound quality isn't awesome, like you'd expect of a music DVD from decades later, but it's akin to a soundboard bootleg, which is still really good.
Unfortunately, we only get what was included on the DVD. Newspaper reports from the time indicate that more songs were played. For instance, we know Charles also played "Mack the Knife," Knight played "Daddy Could Swear, I Declare" (with Charles on piano), and the concert ended with "What I'd Say" as a finale. So that's a bummer, but we do get the vast majority of the concert, and hopefully someday the rest will be released.
01 How Can You Say That Ain't Love (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
02 talk (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
03 Every Beat of My Heart (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
04 talk (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
05 So Sad the Song (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
06 talk (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
07 On and On (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
08 talk (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
09 Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
10 Midnight Train to Georgia (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
11 Evergreen - The Way We Were (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
12 I've Got to Use My Imagination (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
13 I Heard It through the Grapevine (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
14 talk (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
15 I Can See Clearly Now (Ray Charles)
16 America the Beautiful (Ray Charles)
17 talk (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
18 Georgia on My Mind (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
19 talk (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
20 Neither One of Us [Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye] (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
21 talk (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
22 Hit the Road, Jack (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight & the Pips)
https://www.upload.ee/files/15835950/GladysKn_1977_TogethrattheGreekTheatre__9-22-1977_atse.zip.html
For the cover art photo, I used a screenshot from the exact concert in question, thanks to the DVD of it (which has been posted on YouTube). Unfortunately, the picture quality isn't that great. If anyone has a better one, please let me know.
No comments:
Post a Comment