The Posies - Black Session, La Maison de la Radio, Paris, France, 3-1-1994

The Posies are one of my favorite bands that had their best years in the 1990s. I keep wanting to post more music from them, but it never seems to get to the top of my "to do list." But here, finally, is a concert from 1994, which was right around their peak of popularity and creativity, in my opinion.

Note that I have posted a couple other Posies albums, including this 1996 acoustic concert, which I posted back in 2018:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-posies-acoustic-duo-99x-fm-atlanta.html

My favorite studio album by the Posies is "Frosting on the Beater," released in 1993. So I've been wanting to post an album from just after that. Unfortunately, Posies bootlegs are rare and hard to find, since they're not nearly as popular as they should be. (In my opinion, they would have been huge if they had their careers about 20 years earlier, because their style didn't really fit with what was popular at the time.) I came across this bootleg, liked the sound quality, and decided to post it.

Unfortunately, I kind of regretted that decision, because I didn't realize how much work it would take to get it in good shape. The main problem is this was a broadcast from a French radio station. On the plus side, that meant soundboard level sound quality. But I've noticed that sometimes in continental Europe, DJs talk all over concerts like this to prevent them from becoming listenable bootlegs, and this was one such case. A DJ talked in French at every opportunity, including over the music, and sometimes even talking over the singing! Using the UVR5 audio editing program, I managed to get rid of his voice in most cases, although I had trouble with one instance of the talking over the singing. 

That's why I have "[Edit]" in the titles of three of the songs early on. Actually, I could have put that in the titles of most of the songs, but I only used it in the most egregious cases. This French DJ made the annoying BBC DJ Brian Matthew seemed restrained in comparison in the way he talked over the music. Ugh! 

But there was another big problem: about half of the song "How She Lied by Living" was missing. According to some notes about the bootleg I found, one source with the annoying talking French DJ ended right then, midway through the song. The rest of the concert is from a different source that had far less DJ talking for the remaining songs. But that second source didn't include the rest of this one song. So I found a different version from a concert in Toronto, Canada, in April 1995, and used that to patch in the missing part of the song.

Yet another problem was that the vocals were too low in the mix. So I fixed that for all the songs using the UVR5 audio editing program again. Furthermore, the applause after songs were often damaged as a result of the talking French DJ, or were sometimes missing altogether. I sometimes had to patch in good bits of cheering over bad or missing bits.

But, bottom line, the concert should be all fixed, and it makes for an excellent listen. This is the Posies in full band mode, when they were at their most rocking, as an effort to somewhat fit into the grunge sound of the time. (They were from Seattle, after all.) 

Note that four songs all covers: "I Am the Cosmos" by Chris Bell of Big Star, "Wiggly World" by Devo, "Song of a Baker" by the Small Faces, and "Black Night" by Deep Purple. (What diverse and good musical taste that shows, by the way.) All the others are originals, mostly from the "Frosting on the Beater" album.

This album is an hour and nine minutes long.

01 Definite Door [Edit] (Posies)
02 When Mute Tongues Can Speak [Edit] (Posies)
03 talk (Posies)
04 I Am the Cosmos (Posies)
05 Love Letter Boxes [Edit] (Posies)
06 Flavor of the Month (Posies)
07 talk (Posies)
08 Earlier than Expected (Posies)
09 Solar Sister (Posies)
10 Dream All Day (Posies)
11 Any Other Day (Posies)
12 talk (Posies)
13 Burn and Shine (Posies)
14 How She Lied by Living [Edit] (Posies)
15 talk (Posies)
16 Coming Right Along (Posies)
17 talk (Posies)
18 Lights Out (Posies)
19 Wiggly World (Posies)
20 Song of a Baker (Posies)
21 Black Night (Posies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QUnzTUL8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/uif1oYWJDoz9Lrs/file

The cover image of Ken Stringfellow is from a concert at the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, Britain, in July 1994. I wanted to use a photo showing both Stingfellow and Jon Auer, the band's two lead singers and songwriters, but this was the best image I found from 1994. It's a screenshot I took from a YouTube video.