Oingo Boingo - Whisky A Go-Go, Los Angeles, CA, 8-17-1980

I'm a particularly big fan of early Oingo Boingo. I was reading an interview of the band's lead singer and songwriter Danny Elfman recently, which he was doing to promote his 2021 solo album "Big Mess." He commented that he has a short attention span, including musically. He gets tired of entire music genres, and wants to switch to something else entirely. This clearly happened with Oingo Boingo after a handful of years, with Elfman getting increasingly experimental before disbanding the group entirely in 1994. 

That said, Elman was all in with the band at the time of this concert, and they were firing on all cylinders. The band was so fresh that they hadn't even released their first album yet. 

One snag with Oingo Boingo bootlegs, in my opinion, is that many of them have okay to good sound quality, but very few have fantastic sound quality. However, this one has fantastic sound quality. It sounds so good that at times it sounds as good as a studio session, in my opinion.

Note that there's another bootleg of the band at this same venue, the Whisky A Go-Go, also from 1980. That one is also excellent, with more songs, but slightly lower sound quality. I believe this one was professionally recorded and filmed for material for the concert movie "Urgh! A Music War." Only the performance of "Ain't This the Life" was included in that, since it featured many artists. The other Whisky A Go-Go concert was recorded for a local radio station broadcast. I plan on posting that one here soon as well.

The one quibble I have with this boot is that it's rather short, at only 30 minutes. They played one more song, "Nasty Habits," but that wasn't recorded or included on the boot for whatever reason. So instead, I replaced it with "Goodbye, Goodbye," taken from another concert of unknown date and location, but also from 1980. With that song added in, the total length is 37 minutes long.

At this time, the band played a lot of quality songs that were never officially released on any of their studio albums. Even though this is a relatively short show, it includes three such songs, "Forbidden Zone," "I Was a Teenage Monster," and "California Girls" (a cover of the Beach Boys hit). Also, "Ain't This the Life" only appeared on an EP.

Oh, one more thing: at the same time I posted this, I redid the links to all the other Oingo Boingo albums I already posted, fixing the volume balance between songs and redoing the mp3 tags.

01 Forbidden Zone (Oingo Boingo)
02 Controller (Oingo Boingo)
03 Ain't This the Life (Oingo Boingo)
04 Only a Lad (Oingo Boingo)
05 talk (Oingo Boingo)
06 Imposter (Oingo Boingo)
07 You Really Got Me (Oingo Boingo)
08 I Was a Teenage Monster (Oingo Boingo)
09 California Girls (Oingo Boingo)
10 talk (Oingo Boingo)
11 Goodbye, Goodbye (Oingo Boingo)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15264512/OingBo_1980_WhiskyAGoGoLsAngelesCA__8-17-1980_atse.zip.html

As I mentioned above, one song from this exact concert, "Ain't This the Life," was featured in the concert film "Urgh! A Music War." So I took a screenshot from the video footage of that and used it for the album cover.