Stevie Wonder - Rainbow Theatre, London, Britain, 2-2-1974

There are very, very few great live recordings of Stevie Wonder from his peak years in the 1970s. Most of those are from 1972 and 1973, including a couple I've posted here already. He only toured a bit in 1975, then not at all in 1976 (despite releasing his magnum opus "Songs in the Key of Life" that year) , and continued to stay off the stage for the rest of the 1970s except for a short tour in 1979.

But that still leaves 1974, and arguably this is his greatest live recording, from a concert early that year. This is a soundboard bootleg, and the sound quality is fantastic. The only problem is that the audience applause often quickly faded out at the ends of the songs. I suspect there's some missing banter from between the songs as well, although he does a fair amount of talking during the songs. I think I managed to fix the applause problem by patching in applause from the few song endings that had it to the ones that didn't. 

The concert begins with twenty minutes of instrumentals, including a drum solo. But the musical interplay is sharp from those instrumentals onwards. Many of the songs are stretched well beyond their album version lengths, allowing for lots of improvisation. For instance, "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" is 3 minutes on album, but 11 minutes here.

There's a lot of controversy about which date this concert took place. The date most commonly used is January 29, 1974. But it has been determined that the Doobie Brothers headlined the same venue that night. Other dates given include January 20, January 24, and February 24! However, a website on the history of the venue (the Rainbow Theatre) makes clear he only played there on January 24th and February 2nd. And at one point in the concert, he thanked the audience for coming back so soon after him playing there recently, which logically means it most likely is from February 2nd.

I've added five songs to the end of the show. The first four come from two short shows he did in France and Germany in the two weeks prior to the main show. They also are have excellent sound quality since they were recorded for TV broadcast. I've only included the songs that weren't also played in the main show.

The last song comes from about a year later, at the yearly Grammy Awards ceremony. This is the only truly excellent sounding performance I've found from him from 1975. There are two popular 1975 bootlegs, one from Toronto, Canada, and one from Kingston, Jamaica (with Bob Marley guesting on two songs!), but the sound quality from both of those aren't good enough for me to want to share them.

The main show from the Rainbow Theatre is an hour and a half long. If you add in the extra songs, it's an hour and 51 minutes of Stevie Wonder at his musical peak.

01 Instrumental No. 1 - Drum Solo (Stevie Wonder)
02 Contusion [Instrumental] (Stevie Wonder)
03 Instrumental No. 2 (Stevie Wonder)
04 talk (Stevie Wonder)
05 Higher Ground (Stevie Wonder)
06 Superwoman (Stevie Wonder)
07 To Know You Is to Love You (Stevie Wonder)
08 Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours (Stevie Wonder)
09 Visions (Stevie Wonder)
10 Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing (Stevie Wonder)
11 Living for the City (Stevie Wonder)
12 You Are the Sunshine of My Life (Stevie Wonder)
13 Superstition (Stevie Wonder)
14 [You've Been Better to Me Than] A Lot of My Dreams (Stevie Wonder)
15 All in Love Is Fair (Stevie Wonder)
16 Danka Shoen - Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours (Stevie Wonder)
17 I Can See the Sun in Late December (Stevie Wonder)
18 He's Misstra Know-It-All (Stevie Wonder)
19 You Haven't Done Nothin' (Stevie Wonder)

https://www.imagenetz.de/etXpm

The cover art photo is of Wonder playing at the Rainbow Theatre around this time. But I'm not sure if it's from the exactly show, since he played there at least twice in early 1974.