The Jeff Beck Group - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 7-24-1968

This is easily the best sounding bootleg from when Rod Stewart was a part of the Jeff Beck Group in the 1960s. It has gotten around publicly, including with several grey market releases (meaning they look like official releases but the original artist has no say and gets no profit). In 2023, I found a recently posted version that was edited by Captain Acid and Professor Goody to fix speed and pitch issues. It's the best sounding version yet.

However, that version still had big sound quality issues, in my opinion. Some people, such as those two, are purists who only want to fix technical flaws. I'm more than willing to go further and tinker with whatever I think makes a recording sound better. In this case, I thought the lead vocals were too low in many places. So, using the audio editing program X-Minus, I went through the entire recording line and line, and made lots of little adjustments. That's because some areas needed much more volume boosting than others. For instance, Jeff Beck sang only one song, "Hi Ho Silver Lining." His vocals had to be boosted more than Stewart's. He's a lead guitarist, not really a singer, so I suspect his microphone was turned down lower. And on "Morning Dew," there were parts where Stewart's vocals were so low they could barely be heard at all. But now they come through loud and clear.

But I made some other edits as well. This is an excellent soundboard bootleg, overall. But one problem with excellent soundboards is that they sometimes capture the sound on stage so well that barely any audience cheering is heard. That was the case here, so I boosted the audience reactions at the ends of songs quite a bit. I also boosted what little banter there was between songs. Finally, the first fifteen or so seconds of the first song, "You Shook Me," were missing. I used the BBC version of that song, which I've also posted at this blog, to fill in that missing part. The two versions matched very well. That's why the first song has "[Edit]" in the title, although in fact I made many edits to all the songs.

The one downside to this concert is that it's relatively short. But it appears to be the whole thing. I found set lists of some other concerts they did around this time with the exact same songs in the same order. They weren't well known yet - their first album "Truth" came out several days AFTER this concert - so they only had a short opening slot. You can hear Beck mention at the end that Moby Grape was going to come to the stage next.

It's true this concert is short, only 32 minutes long. But the sound quality is fantastic for a 1968 live recording, and the band was on fire.

01 You Shook Me [Edit] (Jeff Beck Group)
02 Let Me Love You (Jeff Beck Group)
03 talk (Jeff Beck Group)
04 Morning Dew (Jeff Beck Group)
05 Jeff's Boogie [Instrumental] (Jeff Beck Group)
06 The Sun Is Shining (Jeff Beck Group)
07 talk (Jeff Beck Group)
08 Hi Ho Silver Lining (Jeff Beck Group)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15275902/JeffB_1968_FillmoreWstSanFranciscoCA__7-24-1968_atse.zip.html

I'm really happy with how the cover photo of Beck came out. It was taken at the Fillmore West in 1968, but later in the year, in December. The original was in black and white. However, I've found a new program to colorize pictures. It's called Palette and it does an even better job than Pixbim does, using the same kind of new AI (artificial intelligence) technology as that used in ChatGPT and other revolutionary programs. It's free, and you can find it here:

Palette - Colorize Photos