The Youngbloods - Fillmore East, New York City, 8-21-1970

I'm writing this on March 18, 2025. Yesterday, Jesse Colin Young, former lead singer of the 1960s band the Youngboods, died. He was 83 years old. So many great musicians from that era are passing away. When someone likes that dies, sometimes I'm slow to post an album in tribute, or I forget about it altogether. But this time, I had an album I'd been wanting to post already, so here it is, an unreleased concert from the Youngbloods.

The Youngbloods were together from 1965 to 1972. Their most acclaimed album, "Elephant Mountain," was released in 1969. They followed that up with a live album, "Rock Festival," which was released the same month as this concert. Naturally, there are similarities with the songs played on that album and this concert. However, that album is rather short, only 37 minutes long. I think this concert is much better, especially because the live album lacks all their biggest songs, like "Let's Get Together," "Darkness, Darkness," and "Sunlight."

This is a soundboard bootleg, and the sound quality is excellent. However, the recording had a lot of problems that I needed to fix. It was unusual in that it has wide stereo separation. The two stereo tracks often sound drastically different if you play just one at a time. But that turned out to be a lucky thing, because oftentimes a problem was just on one of the tracks. The biggest problem was that there was a loud hum during the first half of the concert. It generally went away during the actual songs, but it could get annoyingly loud during the applause and banter between songs. Since it was just on one of the stereo tracks, I deleted that track during the applause and banter, and then pasted in the other track for those spots. So every now and then, this stereo recording turns into mono. It's better than the loud hum, believe me.

There were other problems too, especially during the applause and banter. I often had to use noise reduction to reduce other buzzing and annoying background noises. But don't worry, I'm very aware of the problems that can cause, so I only did that during the applause and banter. I also boosted the volume of the applause a lot, since it was unusually low in the mix. And there was a lot of dead air between songs, so I cut most of that out while keeping all the banter.

In short, although this was a well recorded soundboard, it had lots of issues, but they're all fixed now. So if you had this already, you should definitely replace it with this version. 

This album is an hour and four minutes long.

01 Faster All the Time (Youngbloods)
02 Darkness, Darkness (Youngbloods)
03 talk (Youngbloods)
04 Rain Song (Youngbloods)
05 Sunlight (Youngbloods)
06 talk (Youngbloods)
07 On Beautiful Lake Spenard [Instrumental] (Youngbloods)
08 My Sweet Little Child (Youngbloods)
09 Sugar Babe (Youngbloods)
10 Interlude (Youngbloods)
11 talk (Youngbloods)
12 High on a Ridgetop (Youngbloods)
13 Hippie from Olema [Okie from Muskogee] (Youngbloods)
14 Donna (Youngbloods)
15 Misty Roses (Youngbloods)
16 talk (Youngbloods)
17 On Sir Francis Drake [Instrumental] (Youngbloods)
18 talk (Youngbloods)
19 Baby What You Want Me to Do (Youngbloods)
20 talk (Youngbloods)
21 Fiddler a Dram (Youngbloods)
22 Let's Get Together (Youngbloods)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/LzK85WAQ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/Ext4wFaOQi15F2g/file

The cover shows Jesse Colin Young in concert in Berkeley, California, in May, 1970. It was the only good photo I could find from 1970. Unfortunately, it was in black and white, so I colorized it with the Kolorize program. These programs are getting so good. Notice, for instance, how it made different colored stripes on the shirt.