Before I say any more about this album, note that today I posted upgrades to about 20 other Fleetwood Mac albums. I mainly changed two things. For the band's first seven BBC albums, I've found better sources for many songs, due to the anonymous person who has been sending me pristine BBC "Top of the Pops" radio shows. That updated maybe up to 25 percent of the songs on those seven early BBC albums. For all the other songs on those albums, I also double checked the balance between the vocals and the instruments, and boosted the vocals where need be. That was probably about half of the songs. I also found two songs I'd previously missed, on Volumes 5 and 7. So you might want to redownload those seven BBC albums.
Secondly, while I was at it, I realized a lot of the band's album covers didn't look that good, so I redid all the ones I thought needed work, with the use of the Krea AI program. That's why I've upgraded the links to about 20 albums, not just the seven early BBC ones.
Anyway, getting back to this album, Bob Welch joined Fleetwood Mac in April 1971, replacing Jeremy Spencer. For two albums, "Future Games" in 1971 and "Bare Trees" in 1972, the band was mainly led by Welch, Christine McVie, and Danny Kirwan, who all sang and wrote songs. But during the band's 1972 tour to promote "Bare Trees," troubles began growing with Kirwan. Band member Mick Fleetwood later recalled, "On that long tour in 1972 Danny became quite volatile ... He just got more and more intense. He wouldn't talk to anyone. He was going inside himself, which we put down to an emotional problem that we had no idea about. We thought he was just being awkward. I had no idea he was struggling at that level. ... Danny had been a nervous and sensitive lad from the start. He was never really suited to the rigours of the business. Touring is hard and the routine wears us all down ... Our manager kept us touring non-stop and we were being stretched to our limits ... and the pressure was obviously taking its toll."
Things would come to a head at a concert in August 1972. Right before going on stage, Kirwan flipped out, flying into a violent rage, smashing his head and fists against a wall, smashing his guitar to pieces, and trashing the dressing room. The other band members had a meeting afterwards, and fired him.
There are tons of concert bootlegs from the band in earlier and later eras, but very little from this era. (I've posted two, from the Swing Auditorium in San Bernadino, California, in 1971, and from The Paramount in Seattle in 1972. But that, plus this one, is basically it, at least when it comes to decent sound quality. I haven't posted this one until now, though, because it's a mere audience bootleg, with one major sonic flaw: the vocals were too low. I've noticed low vocals are a very common problem when it comes to bootlegs, but in this case they were way, way low, almost inaudible at times.
A year or two ago, I tried using the UVR5 audio editing program to pull the vocals apart from the instrumentation so I could boost the volume on just the vocals, but the results were disappointing. UVR5 does a good job most of the time, but the vocals were too low to get enough of them to boost them well. So I gave up. But since then, technology keeps improving. The latest version of the MVSEP program separates vocals and instruments much better. So I tried that, and the results were excellent this time.
I have to say... this concert sounds really good! True, it only comes from an audience bootleg source. But it was a very well recorded one for the era. Then, after fixing the vocals to instruments mix level, it sounds as good or better than most soundboard bootlegs from this era. I further improved things by running all the songs through MVSEP again, this time removing most of the crowd noise during songs while keeping the cheering at the ends of songs.
If you're a fan of the band in this time period, I highly recommend you give this a listen. The sound quality really is a big improvement, and the singing and playing is great. Kirwan was still playing at a high level with the band, probably for the last time that's been recorded and preserved.
This album is an hour and five minutes long.
01 Tell Me All the Things You Do (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Get like You Used to Be (Fleetwood Mac)
03 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Sunny Side of Heaven [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Future Games (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Homeward Bound (Fleetwood Mac)
07 The Ghost (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Shake Your Moneymaker (Fleetwood Mac)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/gFZizegR
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/Mmc1p72egoI6elD/file
The cover image is from an appearance on the "Midnight Special" TV show in 1973. I couldn't find any good images of the two band leaders at the time, Christine McVie and Bob Welch, in the frame at the same time. So I took a screenshot of McVie and another one of Welch and put them together in Photoshop.
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