Joni Mitchell - The White Swan, Leicester, Britain, 9-16-1967

I thought I'd found and posted all the Joni Mitchell bootlegs from the early part of her career with worthy sound quality, but I recently discovered one that I had missed. The sound quality was a little iffy, but I made some edits that make it sound as good as soundboards from this time period.

There are two things I especially like about concert recordings from Mitchell around 1967 and 1968. One is that she played a lot of songs that would go unreleased. That's the case here. Five songs from this set weren't released until decades later: "Come to the Sunshine," "Dr. Junk," "Eastern Rain," "Play Little David," and "Go Tell the Drummer Man." One more, "The Wizard of Is," still hasn't been released. That's because it's obviously heavily based on "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen, making it her least impressive original song, in my opinion. But still, even that one is interesting to hear.

The second thing I especially like is that she was very chatty between songs. She talked before most songs here, shedding light on her personality and her life at the time.

Now, let me get to the sound quality issue. The original recording was an audience bootleg, and those often have problems. When I found this, there was a certain amount of murkiness and echo on all the songs, as well as hiss. Happily, advances in audio editing technology often make fixing that sort of thing possible. I ran all the songs through the MVSEP program, using the "denoise" filter to get rid of the hiss. Then I ran all the songs through that program again, using the "reverb removal" filter. It's amazing what those filters can do. But the banter between songs was still hard to understand. So I ran all of those through Adobe's vocal enhancer program. 

In my opinion, these three fixes make this sound much better than before. Now, this sounds just as good as the 1967 soundboard concerts I have, in my opinion. It helps that she was performing in front of a small, respectful, quiet audience, so I didn't have to do additional work to get rid of crowd noise during the songs. 

According to the excellent jonimitchell.com website, Mitchell performed five concerts in Britain in August and September 1967. I believe it was the first time she performed outside of North America. Two of those were at this venue, separated by a couple of weeks. This was the second one. So it's likely some part of the audience was already starting to become familiar with her songs from the first one. (She hadn't released any records yet.)

This album is 58 minutes long. 

01 Play Little David (Joni Mitchell)
02 talk (Joni Mitchell)
03 Come to the Sunshine (Joni Mitchell)
04 talk (Joni Mitchell)
05 Chelsea Morning (Joni Mitchell)
06 The Wizard of Is (Joni Mitchell)
07 talk (Joni Mitchell)
08 Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
09 talk (Joni Mitchell)
10 Night in the City (Joni Mitchell)
11 talk (Joni Mitchell)
12 Song to a Seagull (Joni Mitchell)
13 Morning Morgantown (Joni Mitchell)
14 talk (Joni Mitchell)
15 Dr. Junk (Joni Mitchell)
16 Eastern Rain (Joni Mitchell)
17 The Circle Game (Joni Mitchell)
18 Michael from Mountains (Joni Mitchell)
19 Go Tell the Drummer Man (Joni Mitchell)
20 talk (Joni Mitchell)
21 I Don't Know Where I Stand (Joni Mitchell)

https://bestfile.io/en/7ZhcPpIHmzXuic8/file

I really like this cover. She looks so very happy. It was taken during her short tour of Britain in August and September 1967. It's taken in some street in London. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.