Donovan - The Bottom Line, New York City, 4-10-1976

This is one of my favorite Donovan concert recordings, if not the favorite. It's unreleased, but the sound quality is excellent, due to the fact that it was professionally recorded for live broadcast on the radio at the time. It's a solo acoustic concert, mostly, which allows one to hear many of his songs in a different way. (There are two other musicians subtly backing him up.) And it came at an interesting point in his career, resulting in some lessen known but still very good songs to get played.

Donovan is very closely associated with the 1960s. As a cultural phenomenon, the 60's actually started a few years into the 1960s, maybe around 1963 or 1964, and ended a few years into the 1970s. By 1976, Donovan's hippie image seemed increasingly out of step with cultural trends at the time. Then 1977 came along, with punk and disco, and his popular declined even more. So 1976 was the tail end of his most popular and creative era. For instance, note the archival retrospective album for him, "Troubadour," deals with that whole period, 1964 to 1976. After 1976, Donovan found it hard to even get record contracts to make new albums. But he was still going pretty strong up through 1976. I think a lot of his 1970s output is underappreciated.

So this turns out to be a really good time for a concert recording. He was still writing and performing excellent new songs, such as "Dark Eyed Blue Jean Angel," while also doing his older hits.

There were a few problems with the bootleg recording though. One of them was that the DJ for the radio station broadcasting the concert often cut in for station identification between songs. With some audio editing, I was able to remove all of that DJ talk while still keeping the appropriate amount of cheering after each song. The songs with "[Edit]" in their names are all cases where I had to make significant edits to get rid of the DJ chatter. Also, on a few songs, but only a few, the lead vocals were low in the mix. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to fix that.

After those changes, this is a really top notch recording. If you're a Donovan fan at all, you should give it a listen.

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long.

01 Sunshine Superman (Donovan)
02 There Is a Mountain (Donovan)
03 talk (Donovan)
04 Dark Eyed Blue Jean Angel [Edit] (Donovan)
05 talk (Donovan)
06 Laughing River (Donovan)
07 talk (Donovan)
08 Take Your Time (Donovan)
09 talk (Donovan)
10 Friends (Donovan)
11 Woman's Work [Edit] (Donovan)
12 talk (Donovan)
13 Catch the Wind (Donovan)
14 talk (Donovan)
15 My My They Sigh (Donovan)
16 Season of the Witch [Edit] (Donovan)
17 Black Widow [Edit] (Donovan)
18 Happiness Runs (Donovan)
19 talk (Donovan)
20 Lalena [Edit] (Donovan)
21 talk (Donovan)
22 Atlantis (Donovan)
23 I Love My Shirt (Donovan)
24 Mellow Yellow (Donovan)
25 Saturday Night (Donovan)
26 Hurdy Gurdy Man (Donovan)

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long.

https://www.upload.ee/files/16571793/DONVN1976ThBttmLneNwYrkC__4-10-1976_atse.zip.html

Wow, that's quite a suit Donovan is wearing. I wonder if they still make suits like that today. Anyway, I couldn't find any good photos of him in concert in 1976. This one is "circa 1975," but I don't know anything beyond that.