The Flying Burrito Brothers - Altamont Free Concert, Altamont Speedway, Tracy, CA, 12-6-1969

Here's a concert that appeared in high quality out of nowhere on YouTube about a week ago (as I write this in January 2023). It's remarkable to me that after 50 plus years, concerts like this still emerge. I'll be there are still lots of great records sitting in vaults or hard drives and not being shared.

It's great that this concert has appeared because the Flying Burrito Brothers only had a couple of peak years while Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman were members, and their recorded legacy from that time is small. There aren't many bootlegs by the band from that time, and their sound quality is generally poor. Whereas this is an excellent soundboard.

Also, it's interesting that it's from the infamous Altamont concert. If any concert deserves to be called "infamous," it's this one. To give an example of what a disaster it was, not only was somebody murdered in the audience during the concert, but Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) was stabbed in the leg while performing on stage, and Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane was punched unconscious while also performing on stage! If you want to know more, the documentary "Gimme Shelter" is a good way to go.

The Flying Burrito Brothers came on stage after Jefferson Airplane, so things were already bad. The security was a total fiasco, with 300,000 people attending, no police anywhere, and the Hells Angels biker gang supposedly providing security, but being more of the problem than the solution. Given all that, if you listen to this recording, you'd never realize things went so horribly wrong. This appears to be the full set, except for the song "Bony Maronie." The band were introduced by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. They played a surprisingly rocking set, and sounded good to my ears.

Let's hope that whoever released this to YouTube will also release similarly excellent sounding recordings of the other bands in the concert, like Santana, CSNY, and Jefferson Airplane. About half an hour of video footage from the concert was released by the Library of Congress in 2022, though with no sound. It would be great if all the video and audio comes out and then gets synched together.

This album is a fairly short one, at just 30 minutes long.

01 talk (Flying Burrito Brothers)
02 Six Days on the Road (Flying Burrito Brothers)
03 High Fashion Queen (Flying Burrito Brothers)
04 Cody, Cody (Flying Burrito Brothers)
05 Lazy Days (Flying Burrito Brothers)
06 Close Up the Honky Tonks (Flying Burrito Brothers)
07 talk (Flying Burrito Brothers)
08 Mental Revenge (Flying Burrito Brothers)
09 To Love Somebody (Flying Burrito Brothers)
10 Lucille (Flying Burrito Brothers)
11 talk (Flying Burrito Brothers)
12 Together Again (Flying Burrito Brothers)
13 If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Flying Burrito Brothers)
14 talk (Flying Burrito Brothers)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291665/FlyingBB_1969_AltamntFreeConcrtAltamntSpeedwyTracyCA__12-6-1969_atse.zip.html

The cover photo of Gram Parsons is from the Altamont concert featured here. For the text, I found the exact font from the band's first album and put that at the top, but in a different color. Then I typed in the bottom text with that same font.