It also happens that this was a particularly good time for a concert recording. Fans may argue about the details, but it's pretty well accepted that Devo's music declined in quality after 1982, with each album thereafter getting worse reviews and worse sales. Their next well received album wouldn't come out until a reunion in 2010. The band didn't tour at all after 1982 until 1988, so 1982 was the last time to hear "prime" Devo in concert.
However, for whatever reason, it seems there are no good live recordings from that year other than this one concert. I know, because I ran into a big problem. Namely, the great soundboard recording that makes up the vast majority of this album had a couple of holes in it. First, the end of the song "Jocko Homo," all of the next song "Mongoloid," and then the start of the next song "Uncontrollable Urge" was missing. Then, a few songs later, the end of "Booji's Beautiful World," and well all of the last two songs, "[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction" and "Come Back Jonee" was missing.
So I looked around to see what other recordings were there to fill in those gaps. I discovered there were no other soundboards from 1982, and even the best sounding audience bootleg was a steep drop down in sound quality compared to this. It wasn't much better with 1981. (There is an archival live release from that year, but that comes from an audience bootleg.) So I ultimately went back to 1980 to fill in most of the missing bits. I used a 1982 audience boot for the end of "Booji's Beautiful World," because that was from a 1981 album, so 1980 concerts didn't have it. But luckily the other songs were from 1980 or before. So I used a concert at this exact same venue in Boston, but from July 17, 1980. Even that soundboard bootleg didn't sound as good as this one, but it was close enough to do the job. That's why three songs have "[Edit]" in their titles, because I had to put them together from two sources.
That's the bad news. But the good news is that, with these fixes, this concert sounds fantastic all the way through. This really deserves an official release, but I'm guessing that's never happened because of the missing bits.
When I began to listen to the first song for the first time, I found it hard to believe this was a live recording at all, due to the pristine sound and total lack of crowd noise. Later on, there's some crowd noise, but very little, even though I boosted the volume of it in spots. That's because some soundboards capture everything on stage really well but the audience not at all or only very little. This is definitely one of those kinds of soundboards.
This concert is an hour and 21 minutes long.
01 Time Out for Fun (Devo)
02 Patterns (Devo)
03 Speed Racer (Devo)
04 Big Mess (Devo)
05 Peek-A-Boo (Devo)
06 Out of Sync (Devo)
07 That's Good (Devo)
08 Freedom of Choice Theme [Instrumental] (Devo)
09 Whip It (Devo)
10 Girl U Want [EZ Listening Version] (Devo)
11 Planet Earth (Devo)
12 Deep Sleep (Devo)
13 talk (Devo)
14 Jocko Homo [Edit] (Devo)
15 Mongoloid (Devo)
16 Uncontrollable Urge [Edit] (Devo)
17 Gates of Steel (Devo)
18 Smart Patrol - Mr. DNA (Devo)
19 Gut Feeling [Slap Your Mammy] (Devo)
20 Booji's Beautiful World [Edit] (Devo)
21 [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Devo)
22 Come Back Jonee (Devo)
https://www.upload.ee/files/15994949/Dvo_1982_OrphmTheatrBostnMA__11-11-1982_atse.zip.html
I couldn't find a really good color photo of the band on stage in 1982, although there were some decent ones. So instead I decided to use parts of a concert poster from that year. It uses the same art style of the band's 1981 album, "New Traditionalists." Naturally, I had to crop a lot to get things to fit.
many thanks for this.
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