The Steampacket - BBC Sessions (1965-1966)

I've already posted an album of stray tracks by the Steampacket. If you want to know more about them, please look at that album posting. 

In short, they were a kind of super group, in that Rod Stewart, Long John Baldry, Brian Auger, and Julie Driscoll were members. But it wasn't really a supergroup, because only Long John Baldry was famous enough at the time to appear sometimes on British TV at the time. He and especially the others would become much more famous later. The group was only together for about a year in 1965 and 1966. Stewart and Baldry split for various reasons, including the inability to get the legal rights for all four of them to record together, since they were signed to different record companies. Auger, Driscoll, and the rest of the band stayed together as "Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, and the Trinity," and had a lot of commercial success in the late 1960s.

When I posted that other album by Steampacket, it gathered up pretty much all I could find by them other than their BBC recordings. That's so I could present their BBC stuff separately here. Unfortunately, there isn't much. They only did two BBC sessions for a total of seven songs.

I've added to that two songs that were done in concert and were broadcast on the US TV show "Shindig." Unfortunately, while the BBC tracks sound fine, those two are a lot rougher. There's plenty of audience screaming all the way through. That's especially the case for the second song, "I Feel Alright," because they were joined on stage by Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, and Steve Winwood, lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group. Both of those bands had considerably more commercial success at the time. For that song, you can hear Burdon, Winwood, Baldry, Stewart, and Driscoll all sing lead vocals at various points. So I figure it's historically important, even if the sound quality isn't great. If you want to watch it instead, you can find the video of YouTube.

It's too bad the Steampacket didn't stay together longer or record more, because they made for an interesting combination. Auger didn't sing much, generally sticking to playing the organ. But Stewart, Baldry, and Driscoll all take turns singing lead on the various songs here.

Two of the songs, "It's Alright" and "Going to a Go Go," have "[Edit]" in them because of the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. And I did the usual fix of using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe those vocals. I also added "[Edit]" to the first two songs because I made some edits in the audio editing program Audacity to try to improve the poor sound. Mainly, after separating the lead vocals out from the rest, I boosted those vocals relative to everything else to try to make them easier to hear over the and screaming and overall chaos. If you think this sounds bad, you should hear how they sounded before those edits. 

Even with the two live songs added, this album is only 25 minutes long. All of it is officially unreleased. I would have loved to add more, but this is all I could find. If you know of anything I've missed, please let me know.

01 Dear Lord Remember Me [Edit] (Steampacket)
02 I Feel Alright [Edit] (Steampacket with Eric Burdon & Stevie Winwood)
03 How Long Will It Last (Steampacket)
04 In the Midnight Hour (Steampacket)
05 It's Alright [Edit] (Steampacket)
06 Everything's Gonna Be Alright (Steampacket)
07 I Didn't Want to Have to Do It (Steampacket)
08 Going to a Go Go [Edit] (Steampacket)
09 The Drifter (Steampacket)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gAt2U

For the Idle Race BBC album I just posted, I was complaining about how hard it is to find even one decent color photo of a band like that. That does much more so for the Steampacket, since they were an even more obscure band. For the Steampacket stray tracks album I've posted here already, I selected a black and white photo and colorized it. For this cover, I selected a different black and white photo and colorized it too. 

I don't know of any genuine color photos of the group, although I have seen some very badly done colorized efforts (much worse than mine!). I have seen a color version of the two Shindig live songs here, but the picture quality was so low-res and generally bad that I decided not to use that. I also used the same exact font type and colors as with the Steampacket stray tracks album I made, for a bit of artistic consistency between the two albums.