Various Artists - Dead Man Walking - The Concert (Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, 3-29-1998)

Here's something I stumbled across the other day. I've owned the "Dead Man Walking" movie soundtrack since it first came out in 1996. I think it's great. It's rare for movie soundtracks in that all the artists wrote songs specifically about the movie after seeing an early cut of it, and that it's a great list of artists, including the likes of Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, doing excellent songs. I didn't know until I came across this that there was a concert that took place two years later. It was meant to bring more attention to the same issue as the movie and the soundtrack, namely, the moral issue of capital punishment.

There's good news and there's bad news. The bad news first is that the concert was over four hours long, and most of that isn't here. I found a bootleg of the full performance, and unfortunately the sound quality is too low to be enjoyable, in my opinion. The good news is, this portion of the concert came out on DVD (only, no album), so the sound quality is great. 

More bad news: two excellent musicians played this concert, and they're not here at all: Tom Waits and Michelle Shocked. Waits played eight songs and Shocked played four. Furthermore, Steve Earle played three more songs than what's here, Lyle Lovett played one more, and Ani DiFranco played two more. There also is an encore where everyone joined together on stage to sing Waits' song "Innocent When You Dream," and that's not here either. I'm guessing Waits and Shocked weren't included due to some kind of licensing or rights issue, and the other songs were cut to keep the DVD a reasonable length.

However, this is worth hearing just the same. All the musicians here did a good job, but the main reason I'm sharing this is Eddie Vedder's set. Personally, I'm not a really big Pearl Jam fan. However, I thought the two songs he contributed under his own name to the "Dead Man Walking" album were excellent. I like those better than almost anything else he's done in his long career. Both songs were written by Vedder, but performed with the famous Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a remarkable blend of Western music with Indian music that worked really well.

Luckily, all of Vedder's set is included here, and rightfully so, since it was the highlight (and closing act) of the concert. He started with a Cat Steven song done just solo acoustic. Then he had a little bit of accompaniment on the next song. However, the main event was the last two songs, with were those same two songs he did for the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack. Unfortunately, in the time between the release of that album and this concert, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. However, he was very capably replaced by his nephew Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and a famous musician in Pakistan in his own right. The two songs are much longer than their album versions, almost ten minutes apiece, and they took the world music collaboration to the next level.

The DVD was about ten minutes longer, but I cut out a bunch of talking. In particular, actor Tim Robbins, who directed the movie, had some long talking sections that I felt didn't have much relistening value. For instance, he had one section where he listed jokey and obviously made up song titles that didn't make the soundtrack album. All that got cut. But any talking between songs by the musicians here was kept.

This album is 57 minutes long.

01 talk (Steve Earle)
02 Ellis Unit One (Steve Earle)
03 Promises (Lyle Lovett)
04 L.A. County (Lyle Lovett)
05 talk (Lyle Lovett)
06 Lungs (Lyle Lovett & Steve Earle)
07 Crime for Crime (Ani DiFranco)
08 Up Up Up Up Up Up (Ani DiFranco)
09 talk (Ani DiFranco)
10 Fuel (Ani DiFranco)
11 Trouble (Eddie Vedder)
12 talk (Eddie Vedder)
13 Dead Man (Eddie Vedder)
14 The Long Road (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
15 The Face of Love (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602584/DeadMnWlking_1998_TheConcrtShrneAuditoriumLsAngelesCA__3-29-1998__atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any good images of many of the artists together. Since Eddie Vedder was the big star and musical highlight of the show, I went with a photo of him. This is from when he was the only one on stage, playing "Trouble" by Cat Stevens. Oh, and I used the actual logo from the concert at the top, but I inverted the colors so it would match the black background of the rest of the cover.