Fleetwood Mac - The Warehouse, New Orleans, LA, 1-30-1970

Last week, I posted a Fleetwood Mac concert at the Carousel Ballroom in 1968. I thought that was the last posting of a full concert from the Peter Green era of the band that I was going to do. I'm keen to move on to posting more from the "Rumours" era of the band.

But then bk left a comment in the comments section, stating that the band's January 30, 1970 concert at the Warehouse in New Orleans was their most inspired of the Peter Green era. I'd heard that before, but I gave it another listen. I have to respectfully disagree, I don't think it's their best. In fact, I like the concert from a night later, also at the Warehouse, even better. But I was struck by the remarkable sound quality of that show and the next one, on January 31st. I also realized I could improve the sound even more with some sound editing. So I'm posting them here.

Furthermore, I want to post this as part of my continued beef against the abomination that is the 2019 officially released album "Before the Beginning." A big chunk of that consists of the Carousel Ballroom concert from 1968. The other main chunk comes from these Warehouse concerts in 1970. But, as I've mentioned before, fake crowd noise was slathered over the entire thing for no apparent reason, degrading the sound. The release also inexplicably claimed it was a mystery which concerts these recordings were from, even though bootlegs of the shows have widely circulated for decades.  Furthermore, it only included some of the Warehouse concerts when all of them are worth releasing. Even the title of the album, "Before the Beginning," is an insult, implying the entire Peter Green era of the band was just a warm-up before they really got going with the "Rumours" era line-up. Sadly, the fact that came out last year strongly implies that a correct official release of these shows isn't going to happen, at least not any time soon.

These concerts came at a historically interesting musical moment. Fleetwood Mac opened for the Grateful Dead on both nights, so their concerts are shorter than when they were the main act.  Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood later recounted what happened on the night of January 30th:

"That Dead song with the line 'busted down on Bourbon Street' ["Truckin'," from the "American Beauty" album], that was the night that Fleetwood Mac played with them at The Warehouse in New Orleans. [Grateful Dead sound engineer and LSD enthusiast Owsley Stanley] had spiked the water fountains [with LSD] and after our set, [our bassist] John McVie was out of it, and couldn't handle the fact that the Dead were going to get up and play! So he stood in the audience while the rest of us jammed with the Dead. The audience loved it - a massive freak-out."

"That was what caused Owsley eventually to go to jail. We were nearly there [where the arrest happened]. We were following their car back to the hotel, absolutely out of it on acid.  I drove the car from the back seat with my feet while somebody else worked the pedals from the side - nobody was in the driver's seat. We got lost, and by the time we arrived, they'd been busted."

So when you listen to this show, keep in mind that the band and most of the audience was tripping on LSD!

Anyway, getting to the sound quality issue, the Grateful Dead often recorded their concerts in those days, and Owsley was an excellent sound engineer for the era. Sometimes, the opening act got recorded using the same equipment, and this happens to be one of those times. But the recording for January 30th has unusually extreme stereo separation, with nearly all the vocals and guitar on one side, and mostly the drums and bass on the other side. The vocals also were rather low in the mix, especially Peter Green's. So this allowed me to improve the recording, by boosting the vocals. For some songs, I increased the volume of one entire channel relative to the other one. For other songs, I selectively boosted just the bits of the song where Green was singing, adjusting it line by line.

So that improved things considerably, I think. But I also got my musical associate MZ to help out again. As he did with the Carousel Ballroom recording, once I had made the adjustments to the stereo channels, MZ reduced the amount of stereo separation by about 30 percent, just as he did for the Carousel Ballroom show. That allows for a more normal listening experience, since extreme stereo separation has long been out of favor, after some experimentation with it in the late 1960s, when stereo first became widely popular.

I also did what I usually do to concert recordings, which is putting the between song banter on their own tracks and increasing the volume to make those parts easier to hear. I also got rid of some dead air and guitar tuning between songs. Someone named "M" did extensive work on these concerts already, fixing minor drop outs and other problems. This builds on that version, so hopefully it sounds better than ever before.

The concert is only 54 minutes long. That may be entirely due to the fact that they were only an opening act that night. But I also strongly suspect that the recording is incomplete. In this era, the band pretty much always closed with covers of lively and famous rock songs, like "Twist and Shout" or "Tiger." They did that the next two nights in the same run of Warehouse shows. But still, what is here is pretty great, and deserves a worthy, non-butchered official release.

01 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Before the Beginning (Fleetwood Mac)
03 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
04 It Takes Time (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Like It This Way (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Only You (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Madison Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Oh Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
11 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
12 The Green Manalishi [With the Two-Prong Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
13 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15211913/FleetwodMc_1970a_ThWrehouseNwOrleansLA__1-30-1970_atse.zip.html

I put some extra effort into making the album cover art. I couldn't find any photos from the Warehouse concerts, or even any good color photos of the band in concert in 1970, period. But I found a concert poster for the band playing at the Fillmore East in November 1969 that I liked a lot. I made some major edits to it in order to get it to fit into a square shape. I had to remove the central artwork, because it wouldn't fit into the square space, nice though it was. I put a photo of Peter Green from late 1969 in there instead. The band name up top was kept from the original poster. I added some text at the bottom using the same font and color.