Fleetwood Mac - Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, CA, 6-9-1968

Here's a really killer album. If you're into the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac whatsoever, this is a must have! It's a great performance with jaw-droppingly great sound for an unreleased 1968 concert.

Technically, this has been released. Just last year, an album came out called "Before the Beginning." But as I complained in another blog post, it's one of the worst official releases from a major band in decades. The biggest problem is they added fake crowd noise all the way through every song! But there are so many other things wrong with it. For instance, although they included most of this concert, they claimed not to know the date or the location, and acted like they were newly recovered mystery recordings. Even the title of the album is offensive, with "Before the Beginning" implying that the entire Peter Green era was just a warm-up before the "real" "Rumours" band line-up became big stars in the 1970s.

So let's just pretend that abomination of an album doesn't exist. Needless to say, I'm not using the botched recording from that album. This is a much better version.

I'm not sure how or why this recording exists. It's so good that I presume it had to have been professionally recorded. But there are some flaws. At a few points, the recording started or stopped in the middle of a song. Some times, I was able to fix that. For instance, the first few seconds of the first song was missing, but I was able to patch that up. It could be there were more songs from before that that were lost though. The rest of the first set is intact, with "Lazy Poker Blues" announced as the last song of that set. The second set begins with special guest Paul Butterfield sitting in and playing harmonica. But only about one minutes of the first song with him, "Stop Messin' Round," exists, so I didn't include that.

Later, "Ready Teddy," probably the last song of the second set, gets cut off, so I didn't include that either. Then the last few songs are actually from probably two nights earlier at the same location. That appears to be the very end of the second set in that concert. Luckily, the "Ready Teddy" finale for that show is complete, and included here. This other night's recording begins with only about a minute of "I Need Your Love So Bad," so I didn't include that. It also has a full version of "I Believe My Time Ain't Long," but I didn't include that either, since there's a good full version of that earlier in the recording. Thus, when it comes to that other show, I've only included "Shake Your Moneymaker" and "Ready Teddy," plus some between song banter. But that little bit is very helpful, because it's the end of a concert, and the end to the other concert is cut off.

Anyway, I know that sounds confusing, but the bottom line is that after I've trimmed out some partial songs and one duplicate, what's left is a remarkable concert that's an hour and forty minutes long. It has to be the best live recording of the band in their first couple of years, officially released or not.

Now, I need to discuss the edits made to this recording, because I did some things to make this sound even better than the usual bootleg versions floating around the Internet. It so happens that the recording has an extreme stereo mix. For instance, nearly all of the vocals are in one channel and nearly all of the lead guitar is in the other channel. To my ears, the vocals were often too low and the guitar was too loud. So I carefully went through each song and raised or lowered the volume of the channels to get a better mix.

Then, once I was done with that, I sent the whole recording to my musical associate MZ. I asked him if he could reduce the extreme nature of the stereo separation, and he did. No music was lost, but he essentially moved the stereo mix towards the center by about 30 percent. That means most of the vocals are still on one side and most of the guitars are still on the other, but it's not quite as extreme as before. That makes for a better listening experience, in my opinion (and MZ's as well).

As a minor note, the eighth song here is normally just listed as "Instrumental," including on that terrible "Before the Beginning" album. But when I heard the song, I recognized the main riff as the one from "I Wish You Would," a blues song originally by Billy Boy Arnold. I knew it because it was covered by the Yardbirds. But it would be more accurate to say it's an instrumental jam loosely based on the "I Wish You Would" riff.

01 Madison Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
02 My Baby's Gone (Fleetwood Mac)
03 The Woman I Love [My Baby's Skinny] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Worried Dream (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Dust My Broom (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Got to Move (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Trying So Hard to Forget (Fleetwood Mac)
08 I Wish You Would [Instrumental Version] (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
11 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Lazy Poker Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
13 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
14 I Loved Another Woman (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
15 talk (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
16 I Believe My Time Ain't Long (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
17 The Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
18 talk (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
19 Long Tall Sally (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
20 Willie and the Hand Jive (Fleetwood Mac)
21 Tutti Frutti (Fleetwood Mac)
22 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
23 Shake Your Moneymaker (Fleetwood Mac)
24 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
25 Ready Teddy (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.imagenetz.de/eR7ZY

For the album cover, I wanted a photo of Fleetwood Mac in concert in 1968. It turns out there are very few good ones like that. After some digging, I did find a good one, from a concert in Copenhagen, Denmark, in November 1968. From left to right, it shows Jeremy Spencer, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Peter Green. But there were two problems with Green. For one, he was way off to the side, far from the other band members. So, using Photoshop, I moved him (and his shadow) back towards the others, so I could have a more concise photo. The second problem was that, due to the lighting, his body looked good, but his head was essentially missing, because it was hidden in the darkness. So I found another photo of Green in 1968 with his head at the correct angle, and pasted it in. Hopefully I've adjusted the lighting on his head enough so the addition blends in correctly.

EDIT: Since someone commented on it, I've added it a portion of the original photo, so you can see the "headless" Peter Green, as well as how far he actually was from the rest of the band.