David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne & Bonnie Raitt - Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Bombing, Santa Cruz City Park, Santa Cruz, CA, 8-5-1995

Here's an interesting concert bootleg: David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt performing in different combinations. They were the headliners for a benefit concert that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. It goes without staying those behind the concert were anti-war activists trying to make sure that event wouldn't be forgotten, so mistakes wouldn't be repeated.

This concert is relatively short, 49 minutes. But it stands out in three respects. One, although the four musicians here didn't do much at all with all four of them together, they did guest a lot of each other's songs. Two, due to the concert's theme, pretty much all the songs are anti-war in nature. (The one exception seems to be "Carry Me," but I think that was done because it was spiritual in nature, coming just after a silent prayer.) 

And three, the sound quality is absolutely fantastic, as good as it gets. The concert was broadcast live over the Internet, and it may have been the first major concert to be broadcast like that. (Recall the Internet didn't really explode in popularity until about 1996 or 1997.) It was professionally recorded for that reason, and someone must have kept an excellent copy.

However, I haven't seen this concert in the usual places one goes on the Internet to find bootleg recordings, so I hope this will help make it better known. It appears it was released on album in 2020, but it's one of those "grey market" releases where dodgy companies that don't actually have the legal rights nevertheless sell the albums at Amazon and places like that.

I've made some significant changes to differ from that version, though. One problem with it was that it included all the DJ talking between songs. And there was a lot. A couple of Santa Cruz DJs couldn't help talking most any time songs weren't being played or people weren't talking on stage. They sometimes talked over the musician banter between songs too, so I had to cut those bits when multiple voices were talking at once. Also, thanks to that DJ talking, and the resulting edits, there wasn't much audience applause after each song. So I made up for the lost bits by adding in more applause, using copy and paste from the few spots with a decent amount of applause. I think the end result is that it sounds like a normal concert, with the typical expected amount of applause after each song. 

I did some more editing on Jackson Browne's song "World in Motion," which is why "[Edit]" appears in the title. At one point in the song, he forgot some of the lyrics, and floundered around a bit before he remembered the next line and finished the song. I removed his flub. Also, further in the song, there was some kind of sonic glitch that resulted in lots of static, marring the music. Luckily, this was in a short section between singing. I was able to patch it up using another section of the song, so there's only a little bit of static remaining, hopefully not enough for you to notice.

Oh, and since I'm in a big fan of acoustic music, I also like the fact that this concert was totally acoustic in nature, just vocals and acoustic guitars.

I tried to keep in all the banter between songs as I could. Note that Bonnie Raitt actually is a very politically progressive person who has taken part in many benefit concerts for liberal causes, like this one. However, she pretty much has never included political songs on her albums. But she sang a couple of anti-war songs here, and also gave a min-speech about two and a half minutes long, which I gather is pretty rare from her. I've included the whole thing. 

David Crosby also made some anti-war remarks almost two minutes long. That led up to a silent prayer for the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. However, the recording I found had that prayer edited out. Probably a long silent prayer didn't make for good radio. So I cut out some of Crosby's comments near the end of his banter, since they didn't make sense referring to a silent prayer that isn't there.

There were some other musicians who played at this concert, but they weren't nearly as well known - Mary McCaslin, Homefire, RST, Blue Prairie, etc... - so I'm guessing they didn't get played on the radio. My source material started with the Jackson Browne song "How Long" without any intro, so that's how I've had to start it too.

01 How Long (Jackson Browne)
02 talk (Jackson Browne)
03 Crow on the Cradle (Jackson Browne with Graham Nash)
04 talk (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
05 Lives in the Balance (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
06 talk (Jackson Browne)
07 World in Motion [Edit] (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
08 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
09 El Salvador (Bonnie Raitt)
10 talk (Bonnie Raitt with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
11 For What It's Worth (Bonnie Raitt with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
12 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
13 Military Madness (Crosby & Nash)
14 talk (Crosby & Nash)
15 Carry Me (Crosby & Nash)
16 Long Time Gone (Crosby & Nash)
17 talk (David Crosby)
18 Teach Your Children (David Crosby, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt & Jackson Browne)
19 talk (David Crosby)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15281775/CrosbNBR_1995_HirshimaBombingCityParkSntaCruzCA__8-5-1995_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is a bit of a fake. I found some photos of the actual concert in question. Unfortunately, the best I could find was three of the four big names together, not all four. The one missing was Bonnie Raitt. I did find a photo of her with Graham Nash, and another with Jackson Browne, and some by herself (all from this concert). So I used Photoshop to edit her into the picture I chose. That's the only change, putting her in behind Nash, the rest of the photo is exactly what you see here. And by the way they were all together on stage for the last song ("Teach Your Children").