Gladys Knight & the Pips - SOUL!, WNET Studios, New York City, 2-9-1972

Here's something I recently stumbled across, so it's gone to the top of the pile of stuff to get posted. 

Gladys Knight and the Pips were an excellent soul act. In my opinion, their peak years were the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there's almost no live music available from them from that time. There is one official archival live album called "The Lost Live Album." But that features a concert from 1974. Although that was only two years after this concert, the band changed record companies and had a bunch of new hits, so the song list was almost entirely different.

As far as I could tell, there aren't even any concert bootlegs from before 1974, not even this one (until now). The reason this exists is because it comes from the public TV show "Soul!" I found a video of that and converted it to audio. Thanks to this unique TV show that exclusively highlighted black entertainers at a time when most of them didn't get much extensive TV exposure, we have great concert recordings of artists that otherwise didn't get bootlegged at all. I've already posted "Soul!" concerts from Al Green, Stevie Wonder, and Merry Clayton. I hope more will follow, although unfortunately many of the TV show's episodes have been lost.

The "Soul!" show was an hour long, without commercials (since it was on PBS stations). This episode focused on Gladys Knight and the Pips, but there was a short interview with Knight and an unrelated section featuring some poets. So I have 40 minutes of music from the show. 

The recording sounds very good, as you'd expect from a professionally recorded TV show in front of a small studio audience. (If you look at the video, which is available on YouTube, there are only a few dozen people there.) However, some of the audience responses to songs were cut off, probably due to quickly cutting to an emcee or station identification or something like that. In those cases, I took applause from the ends of other portions of the video and patched them in. Plus, at the very end of the last song, the emcee loudly said the word "soul" right over the final chord. I used the audio editing program X-Minus to erase his voice but keep the underlying music. 

In addition to the songs from "Soul!," I've added two songs at the end. The first, "Every Beat of My Heart," comes from the band's appearance on the British TV show "The Old Grey Whistle Test" later in 1972. The second one, "You're All I Need to Get By," is from a Canadian TV show called "Rollin' On the River." This show was hosted by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. Knight sang a duet with Kin Vassy, who was a member of the First Edition at the time. The two of them sang live (and there's official recording of them doing this song anywhere), but there was no sign of any backing band on stage, so I'm guessing they sang to a backing track.

I added applause at the end of "Every Beat of My Heart." But I didn't do so with "You're All I Need to Get By," since the song faded out so quickly that I would have had to overlap the applause with more of the music to make it sound natural. 

With the two extra songs at the end included, this album is 45 minutes long.

01 Intro (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
02 The Nitty Gritty (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
03 talk (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
04 Make Me the Woman You Go Home To (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
05 Friendship Train (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
06 If I Were Your Woman (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
07 I Heard It through the Grapevine (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
08 Intro to Help Me Make It through the Night (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
09 Help Me Make It through the Night (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
10 Intro to I Don't Want to Do Wrong (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
11 I Don't Want to Do Wrong (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
12 Every Beat of My Heart (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
13 You're All I Need to Get By (Kin Vassy & Gladys Knight)

https://www.imagenetz.de/jXWjV

For the cover art, I took a screenshot of Knight singing "Help Me Make It through the Night" on a TV show in 1972. But it was a different performance than the one included here.