Thursday, January 13, 2022

Jellyfish - Music Hall, Frankfurt, Germany, 5-6-1991

Jellyfish are one of my favorite 1990s bands. Their songwriting in particular was excellent, but their style was the opposite of the gloomy grunge trend of the time, so they never got as much success as they deserve. I have some stray tracks compilations and other things to post soon, but I only came across this a few days ago, so it's going to the top of my pile of things to post.

Jellyfish only put out two studio albums, one in 1990 and one in 1993. This is a concert from when they were promoting their 1990 album "Bellybutton." This is an archival live album called "Live at Bogart's" that's from three months earlier in the same tour. The sound quality of that is probably a bit better than this one. But I'm posting it for a couple of reasons. For one, this doesn't seem to have existed as an audio bootleg until now. I found a high quality video file of the concert, and converted it to mp3. Even this remarkable Jellfish fan website while has every bootleg that exists doesn't have it:

AUDIO-ARCHIVE | Jellyfish (jellyfish-archive.de)

So hopefully I can get this circulating around. It definitely is one of the very best concerts in terms of sound quality. But also, this concert is longer that "Live at Bogart's" and they played some different songs, including covers of "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac and "Jet" by Paul McCartney.

There were some audio problems, but luckily of the fixable kind. In a couple of spots, there were brief dropouts. For instance, there was about five seconds missing from a middle section of "Go Your Own Way." But again luckily, all those problems occurred in fixable spots. For instance, that problem with "Go Your Own Way" was during one of the choruses, so I patched it up with a bit from another chorus. The songs with such drop outs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

There also were a few other songs where only one of the stereo channels dropped out, often just for a few seconds. Those were even more fixable, by copying the other stereo channel over, so the song didn't lose half of its volume during those spots. 

I sent the whole concert to my musical associate MZ to see if he could improve the sound quality. It's a good thing that he said no, the balance and such was good and there was nothing to fix. However, he helped me find some of the drop out spots.

01 Hold Your Head Up - Hello (Jellyfish)
02 Calling Sarah (Jellyfish)
03 The King Is Half Undressed (Jellyfish)
04 I Wanna Stay Home [Edit] (Jellyfish)
05 talk (Jellyfish)
06 Mr. Late (Jellyfish)
07 Bye Bye Bye (Jellyfish)
08 She Still Loves Him (Jellyfish)
09 talk (Jellyfish)
10 Will You Marry Me (Jellyfish)
11 talk (Jellyfish)
12 Now She Knows She's Wrong (Jellyfish)
13 talk (Jellyfish)
14 Baby's Coming Back (Jellyfish)
15 talk (Jellyfish)
16 Jet (Jellyfish)
17 No Matter What (Jellyfish)
18 All I Want Is Everything (Jellyfish)
19 talk (Jellyfish)
20 The Man I Used to Be (Jellyfish)
21 Let 'Em In - This Is Why (Jellyfish)
22 talk (Jellyfish)
23 Go Your Own Way [Edit] (Jellyfish)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15908778/Jellyfh_1991_MsicHallFrankfurtGermany__5-6-1991_atse.zip.html

I didn't find many high quality cover photos of the band in concert from around 1991 to choose from. This one is from 1990. It shows only the main lead singer Andy Sturmer. As you can see from the photo (with part of the drum kit in the foreground), he had the tricky task of singing lead while playing drums.

9 comments:

  1. Singing drummers have always fascinated people (see Collins, Phil or Henley, Don) because it seems like two very different if complementing skills being done at the same time.

    Will check this out, as I have never heard Jellyfish in my life.

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  2. What a shame these guys never got the acclaim they should have.

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  3. One of my favorite bands from the 90's. Thanks for an exceptionally rare share.

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  4. Yeah, there's definitely a shortage of live Jellyfish material. Looking forward to this--thanks!

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  5. Now I want a wav file of your edit, and redo the audio in the video! Thank you for this!

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    1. You know that Jellyfish fan website I linked to in my post? Check out their video section. It has the video there:

      https://www.jellyfish-archive.de/video-archive-1

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    2. Definitely a better version than what is on YT. Thanks!

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  6. Hi. I am the creator of the jellyfish-archive website. Sadly your download-link is broken. Can you send me those files somehow? Maybe i can combine them with the HD video of the concert ;)

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    1. And by the way, thanks for your work on that site. I have a lot more Jellyfish I'll be posting.

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