The Indigo Girls - The ArtsCenter, Carrboro, NC, 3-19-1988

A few days ago, I posted a 1991 concert by the Indigo Girls. In my opinion, this female duo peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but there's very little in the way of good concert recordings from them (other than their 1995 live album "1200 Curfews," but that's a mixed bag of all sorts of things, including some studio tracks). The fan website https://lifeblood.net/ has an incredible selection of hundreds of Indigo Girls bootlegs. Looking through their early years though, I only saw two that stood out in terms of sound quality: the 1991 one I posted, and this one.

This one is a soundboard bootleg. Unfortunately, soundboards can vary in quality, and this one sounded merely good, not excellent. So I passed it on to my musical associate MZ. I had the feeling he could make improvements to it that were beyond my limited skills. It turns out I was right. He made several tweaks across all the songs that significantly improved the sound quality. I still wouldn't say this has great sound quality, but it's very listenable now, and above all other Indigo Girls concert recordings from this time period.

This concert is drastically different from the 1991 one I recently posted. In 1988, the Indigo Girls were just starting to get famous. They hadn't even signed a major record label deal yet (although they had released one album independently in 1987, "Strange Fire). Whereas by 1991, they'd released two more albums, one of which had gone platinum twice. So perhaps it's not surprising that in this show they played just as an acoustic duo, because that was probably all they could afford at the time, while they played with a full band in the 1991 show.

The song list in this concert is very interesting, in my opinion. Between their 1987 album "Strange Fire" and their breakthrough hit album in 1989, "Indigo Girls," they wrote a lot of new songs. There were enough unreleased songs for them to put out another album, and in fact I've posted a version of this album that could have been, which I've called "Thin Line." You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-indigo-girls-thin-line-various.html

Many of the songs performed here are ones I've put on that album: "Cold as Ice,"  "Life's So Strange," "Up in Smoke," "I Should Have Never Crossed Your Path," and "The Ballad of Squeaky Fromme." Plus, they did two other unreleased rarities, "Peace Song" and "White House Blues." They also did some covers: "Summertime," "All Along the Watchtower," "American Tune," and "Love of the Common People." So this represents a kind of forgotten chapter in their career, with about half of the songs unknown even to fans who have all of their official albums.

There also is a lot of interesting banter, with talking before every song. This took place at an interesting time for them, right as they were transitioning from playing small clubs. They mostly still sound like they're talking to friends in a very small venue.

There were no big sonic flaws. However, I edited the song "All Along the Watchtower" because I felt the vocals were low in the mix. I used the X-Minus audio editing program to boost them. Also, I suspect the very end of that song got cut off. I tried to make it sound like it had a proper ending, especially by adding some audience applause.

This concert is an hour and 53 minutes long.

01 talk (Indigo Girls)
02 Prince of Darkness (Indigo Girls)
03 talk (Indigo Girls)
04 Cold as Ice (Indigo Girls)
05 talk (Indigo Girls)
06 Lifeblood (Indigo Girls)
07 talk (Indigo Girls)
08 Crazy Game (Indigo Girls)
09 talk (Indigo Girls)
10 Secure Yourself (Indigo Girls)
11 talk (Indigo Girls)
12 Up in Smoke (Indigo Girls)
13 talk (Indigo Girls)
14 Nashville (Indigo Girls)
15 talk (Indigo Girls)
16 Left Me a Fool (Indigo Girls)
17 talk (Indigo Girls)
18 White House Blues (Indigo Girls)
19 talk (Indigo Girls)
20 Center Stage (Indigo Girls)
21 talk (Indigo Girls)
22 Make It Easier (Indigo Girls)
23 talk (Indigo Girls)
24 Strange Fire (Indigo Girls)
25 talk (Indigo Girls)
26 Never Stop (Indigo Girls)
27 talk (Indigo Girls)
28 Pushing the Needle Too Far (Indigo Girls)
29 talk (Indigo Girls)
30 Summertime (Indigo Girls)
31 talk (Indigo Girls)
32 Walk Away (Indigo Girls)
33 talk (Indigo Girls)
34 I Should Have Never Crossed Your Path (Indigo Girls)
35 Peace Song (Indigo Girls)
36 The Ballad of Squeaky Fromme (Indigo Girls)
37 Life's So Strange (Indigo Girls)
38 talk (Indigo Girls)
39 All Along the Watchtower [Edit] (Indigo Girls)
40 American Tune (Indigo Girls)
41 talk (Indigo Girls)
42 Love of the Common People (Indigo Girls)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dsJuv

The cover is a screenshot I took of the duo on the TV show "The David Sanborn Show" in 1989. I took the fancy lettering of the band's name from a concert poster.