Pink Floyd - Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, CA, 5-9-1977

Slowly but surely, I've been posting what I consider to be the best and most important Pink Floyd live performances. Most of those were performed at or for the BBC, but this one is not. I consider it just as much of a "must have" as the BBC ones.

In 1977, Pink Floyd toured to promote the album they put out that year, "Animals." It wasn't as popular as some of their other albums, since it didn't have any obvious hit singles (or even songs short enough to be easily played on the radio), but I consider it one of their very best. So it's key to have a good concert from 1977, both for the "Animals" songs, since they played that entire album, but also for the "Wish You Were Here" songs, since they played that entire 1975 album too. And they played three more songs at the end on top of that. (Note that the 1974 BBC concert I posted has most of the "Animals" songs, but they were early versions with different titles and different lyrics.)

There aren't many songs in this concert, but most of the songs are long, with lots of great soloing. The album is two hours and 20 minutes (or 147 minutes) long. I added up the lengths of all the studio versions of the songs, and that totaled 107 minutes. So you basically get 40 extra minutes of solos. There's virtually no between song banter, except for the occasional sentence here and there.

The one snag with 1977 Pink Floyd concert bootlegs is that there are no decent soundboards that have leaked to the public. But the Oakland show here is widely considered the best of the audience bootlegs. In my opinion the sound is excellent, just as good as many soundboards I've heard from other bands. If anyone knows of a better sounding 1977 Pink Floyd show, please let me know.

My interest in live Pink Floyd pretty much comes to an end after this. They only did a small number of concerts to promote their 1979 album "The Wall," and the best of those have been released as an official life album. After that, the band didn't play live again until after band leader Roger Waters left, and my interest in the David Gilmour-led version of the band is much lower. But I'll still post more of the "classic" (1960s to early 1980s) version of the band by and by.

01 Sheep (Pink Floyd)
02 Pigs on the Wing, Part 1 (Pink Floyd)
03 Dogs (Pink Floyd)
04 Pigs on the Wing, Part 2 (Pink Floyd)
05 Pigs [Three Different Ones] (Pink Floyd)
06 Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 1-5 (Pink Floyd)
07 Welcome to the Machine (Pink Floyd)
08 Have a Cigar (Pink Floyd)
09 Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
10 Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 6-9 (Pink Floyd)
11 Money (Pink Floyd)
12 Us and Them (Pink Floyd)
13 Careful with that Axe, Eugene (Pink Floyd)

https://www.imagenetz.de/fNXgr

The album cover art is made out of two main pieces. The photograph is of the band actually playing at Oakland in the very concert posted here, I'm happy to say. Unfortunately, David Gilmour was way off to the side, and I had to crop him out of the photo. I've added the band name in huge lettering. This comes from a photo I found of an official concert T-shirt from the 1977 tour. I liked the flying pig inside the band's name, so I added that to the cover.