Paul Simon - Bread and Roses Festival, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, 10-3-1981

Here's something I just randomly came across on YouTube the other day. For ages, I've been looking for a good solo acoustic Paul Simon concert. The only solo acoustic tour he did was in 1984, but all the bootlegs I've heard from that tour don't sound that good. I've finally found something worthy, though it's from 1981 instead.

This was a one-off, apparently the only solo concert he did in 1981. That was the year he did the famous concert in Central Park as part of Simon and Garfunkel, which was attended by over half a million people and released as a live album. That took place on September 19, just a couple of weeks prior to this concert. You can hear a passing reference to it in some of the banter near the end of the concert.

The Break and Roses Festival is an annual folk festival. I've posted albums from the festival before: Joni Mitchell in 1978, Stephen Stills in 1978, and Neil Young in 1980. Apparently, the other main acts at the 1981 version of the festival were Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Al Di Meola, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, and Mimi Farina. I'm not aware of any recordings of those. But I'm sure the fact that Joan Baez was there performing her own set made it convenient for her to join Simon on one song ("The Boxer") for his set.

I have to warn you this album is not up to my usual sound quality standards. It comes from an audience bootleg, when I almost always use soundboard or FM radio bootlegs as sources. But I'm making an exception because this sounds pretty good as far as audience bootlegs go. As I mentioned above, it sounds better than several bootlegs I heard from his 1984, which are all audience boots too. It helps greatly that it's a solo acoustic performance, since that musical simplicity makes more forgiving for recordings.

There are some flaws with this recording. One is that the taper obviously stopped the recording at the end of every song, in order to save tape. As a result, most of the cheering was lost, and no doubt a lot of the banter between songs too. For instance, there's no introduction of Joan Baez, though that surely must have happened before "The Boxer." She's just there on stage all of a sudden, without any cheering or anything. I managed to fix the applause problem by taking little bits of what applause there was, putting together several songs of it, and then patching that into the ends of all the songs. But there was nothing I could do to bring back the missing banter. 

A curiosity is that he led the crowd through a short rendition of "Happy Birthday" for some girl in the audience that he didn't know. We can tell he didn't know her because he asked her what her name was. Chances are there was more banter leading up to why he was even interacting with the girl in the first place, but we'll probably never know since it wasn't included in this recording.

Simon's most recent studio album was "One Trick Pony," released in 1980. Curiously, he didn't play any songs from it. Perhaps he thought most of the songs from it really needed to be performed with a full band. Or, it's possible this isn't the full concert and he did play some of those, I don't know. But more interestingly, he played two songs he hadn't released yet: "Song about the Moon" and "The Late Great Johnny Ace." Both of them would be released on his next studio album, "Hearts and Bones," in 1983.

If anyone has what they think is a worthy recording from Simon's 1984 solo acoustic tour, please let me know. I've found mention of a couple, like from Pine Knob, Illinois, and Vancouver, that are supposed to some pretty decent, but I can't find those anywhere. 

This album is 37 minutes long. 

01 Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard (Paul Simon)
02 Duncan (Paul Simon)
03 America (Paul Simon)
04 Song about the Moon (Paul Simon)
05 talk (Paul Simon)
06 The Late Great Johnny Ace (Paul Simon)
07 Mrs. Robinson (Paul Simon)
08 Slip Slidin' Away (Paul Simon)
09 American Tune (Paul Simon)
10 Happy Birthday (Paul Simon)
11 talk (Paul Simon)
12 The Boxer (Paul Simon & Joan Baez)
13 Something So Right (Paul Simon)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PPad69ov

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/GcRokWotsROGnIK/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. I found several, and I thought this one that also included Joan Baez was the most interesting. I used Photoshop to bring them closer together.