Spirit - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 3-6-1969, Late Show

In previous posts, I've lamented the lack of live recordings of Spirit during their peak years, 1967 to 1970, with worthy sound quality. But that's starting to change as I find a bit more. This one has some sound issues, but overall it's still one of their best live recordings from the 1960s.

This is the late show. I wonder if it's incomplete, because it didn't include any of their three best known songs up to that point in their career, "Fresh Garbage," "Mechanical World," and "I Got a Line on You." Perhaps some or all of those were played in the early show, and they didn't want to repeat themselves. Or this might be incomplete. It seems pretty short, but I believe they were the opening act for Ten Years After, and it does have what sounds like the beginning and the end.

The band started with an instrumental that I thought was just terrible, virtually unlistenable, which I just called "Intro." For two minutes, they simply hit the same chord over and over again, with nothing else happening. I cut it down to a mere seventeen seconds (which is why that has "[Edit]" in its title). At that length, it's fine. But at two minutes, it's an ordeal to hear. Strange. 

Anyway, another curious inclusion here is a song which I have titled "Boogie," but I don't know if that's the real name. I also don't know if it's a cover or an original. They explained that they had been touring with the likes of Canned Heat, and they'd heard a lot of boogie songs, so they felt compelled to try one out. If anyone has a better name for this song and/or knows anything more about it, please let me know.

As I mentioned above, the sound quality is pretty good, but not great. The three other Spirit concerts I've posted so far (from the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969, Boston in 1969, and the Fillmore West in 1970) sound better. But this is still worthy of listening to, in my book, especially since there's so little live recordings from this era. And they were interesting in concert, thanks in part to the jazz backgrounds of some band members.

This album is 33 minutes long.

01 talk (Spirit)
02 Intro [Instrumental] [Edit] (Spirit)
03 New Dope in Town (Spirit)
04 It Shall Be (Spirit)
05 Poor Richard (Spirit)
06 talk (Spirit)
07 Darlin' If (Spirit)
08 Aren't You Glad (Spirit)
09 Boogie (Spirit)
10 talk (Spirit)
11 Uncle Jack (Spirit)

https://bestfile.io/en/evOK830TvZYD03a/file

The cover photo was taken at a concert at the Palladium, in Birmingham, Michigan, in March, 1970. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. Also, there were a couple of large heads of audience members at the bottom, but they were blurry and washed out, and didn't look good. So I replaced them with other heads in the same spots, and added a couple more, so I could extend the image further down the bottom. 

From right to left: Randy California, Ed Cassidy, and Jay Ferguson.