Given that The Velvet Underground were essentially a far-out R&B band, you can almost imagine “Sister Ray”as a single on Stax... or Pickwick... in 1968, the 17-minute album version cut down and split into Part 1 and Part 2.
Sister Ray (pt. 1): 3:04
Sister Ray (pt. 2): 3:21
The first thing to say about this mix is that none of these performances appear on “The Complete Matrix Tapes” (November 26-27, 1969).
This compilation is intended to be the second place to go for 1968-1969 live Velvet Underground, in the period when both Mo Tucker and Doug Yule were in the band. It contains a version of every composition that made it onto an audience tape, with one exception, and only three compositions are repeated: 39 tracks, 36 different songs.
Practically speaking, this compilation replaces “1969 Live,” the glorious, old, murky double-LP, which was whittled down to four unique tracks, when the release of “The Complete Matrix Tapes” provided upgrades of all the other performances. Likewise, it upgraded nearly a third of the performances on “The Quine Tapes.”
So, the live VU universe lies in splinters around the amazing soundboard monolith of “The Complete Matrix Tapes.”
I’ve tried to fix that with these 3.5 hours of lovingly selected audience tape performances. The "Live 1969" leftovers are here in the context of their original show, some tracks are pulled from the Quine tapes, and all the rest are unreleased.
Many of these selections are the only live recording of a song (at all), the only audience recording of it, or the only version in which the vocals are clear (enough) and the distortion low enough to deliver for real. That’s a sad truth about the poor quality of the few tapes that exist, but it’s also miraculous that so many songs actually exist in versions that you want to hear repeatedly. We got lucky in our unluckiness, I guess.
I had good, known- or seemingly-uncompressed sources for most of this material, though some come from mp3s. I have applied no compression filters, and very, very little frequency-EQing. (i.e., No attempt has been make to make these diverse recordings "sound like" each other.) However, those who are familiar with VU recordings of this sort will find that I have significantly fixed the problem of wild volume variations between and within songs. It's nowhere near perfect, but it's not all over the place.
The three volumes outlined below are zipped up together here, as 320kbps mp3s - 500MB total.
A Complete Show: October 19, 1969 Dallas – 83 minutes
The leftover songs from “1969 Live” (*) came from this show, including the album's opening address to the audience and first song. It’s a great performance, and it is absolutely the best audience recording of the band in this period. It's the one, complete (non-Matrix) show that everyone should have. (If you already possess it in full, you might still appreciate some of the refinements I’ve made.)
A Quiet Set (composite) – 56 minutes
Low-key VU – concentrated. More from the October Dallas stand, Lou Reed singing “Candy Says,” Doug and Mo singing “Rock and Roll,” “Lisa Says" with four improvised verses, a fast live version of “I Found a Reason,” and – yes, truly – a “Sister Ray” that belongs in something called “a quiet set.” This is the only non-Matrix 1969 “Sweet Jane” (another fun variation) and the only live recording of “Ride into the Sun.” The “Ride into the Sun” demo is one of four tracks that were presumably an acetate at some point, two of the others having been officially released on archival sets (“Countess from Hong Kong,” and “I Found a Reason”).
Caveat: I did my best to moderate the defects on “Jesus” and “That’s the Story of My Life,” which seem to be on all my VU fan friends’ versions as well.
This set leads with the other unreleased 1969 demo/acetate recording, then works its way through all the rockers not represented by the October 19th Dallas show. Sound quality gets a little rough as it proceeds, but in terms of a balance between exhilarating crunch and listenable songs, these are the ones. "Ferryboat Bill" is unlistenable, with only the delighted crowd response at the end to tell you how great it must have really been.
I’ve been neglecting The Grateful Dead, so I’m going to exploit a guest DJ.
Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) is the only person I know who has set out to listen to every Grateful Dead concert in chronological order. On his 40-year delay, he reached the end of 1977 a week ago. In a couple of decades, he will be the King Deadhead; no one else will be able to claim to have gone to every show, in order, and live-tweeted it.
Jarnow shared his ideal setlist from the 1977 New Year’s Winterland run, and I’ve edited it together here. Thrilling. First "China > Rider" since October 1974.
100-minute mp3 mix here (source dates included in title tags)
I think the cover photo is actually from the Dead New Year’s show exactly 10 years later. I just wanted a good balloon drop, and that's what the search engine handed me. Here's an actual photo from the run:
Cover photograph by Henry Chalfant.
This is my late entry into the “lost fourth album” competition. VU completed its eponymous third album at the end of 1968, and then, in 1970, released a very strange final (actual fourth) album, “Loaded.”
In between these documents, the Velvet Underground were peaking live and writing and recording new songs for two different labels. But the closing of the fourth album gate was deferred and deferred, until Lou Reed had actually quit the band, and the final batch of released songs only slightly represented what had transpired since December 1968.
So, this is the space-of-an-album that I wanted to fill:
This fake double album includes 20 songs, including three straight from “Loaded” and three live ones from “The Complete Matrix Tapes.” The other 14 are studio outtakes, demos, and alternate versions drawn from various vault releases.
It’s a portrait of a band at its peak, happy to be here with you, appreciative of your ears – intimate, generous, unhurried. Do you want two short sets, or one long one? Anyone have a curfew?
82-minute mp3 pseudo-album here
Side One:
Side Two:
Side Three:
Side Four:
Let’s pretend that the music Bob Dylan recorded circa 1970 had resulted in a series of different albums than the ones we got. In the real world, those recordings are smeared all over the place: Self-Portrait, New Morning, Dylan, Greatest Hits Vol. 2, vault releases, and bootlegs. The point of this curation is not to include everything, but to finally give persuasive form to a period that remains blurry (based on commercial releases) and that is often derided as a low point. I consider it a high point, even at its weirdest points. This is my case, via four imaginary albums.
Volume 3: The Boxer
“Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”
“What is this crap?” a famous critic famously asked, after being exposed to “Self Portrait.”
This third volume of my 1970 reconfiguration is a journey to the center of the crap. I’ve piled it up until there’s a whole statement’s worth of it. It’s delightful. It coheres. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not a joke.
And it’s not crap at all, of course. Dylan’s not singing as Mr. Nashville, or taking on any fixed poses. He’s taking all of this seriously and covering a lot of ground. He’s putting quarters into his private jukebox. Next up, “Mr. Bojangles.”
If he’d named these songs in an interview as what he was listening to, we’d find it fascinating, but his playing of them, and the way he played many of them, are often ridiculed: covers of contemporary songs, lightweight originals that sound like those contemporary songs, weird oldies, non-adversarial-Dylan approaches to interpreting it all, backup singers all over the place.
Yes, it is Dylan’s easy listening album from 1970, and aren’t you glad you can finally listen to it all the way through?
43-minute mp3 pseudo-album zipped up here
Additional notes:
Let’s pretend that the music Bob Dylan recorded circa 1970 had resulted in a series of different albums than the ones we got. In the real world, those recordings are smeared all over the place: Self-Portrait, New Morning, Dylan, Greatest Hits Vol. 2, vault releases, and bootlegs. The point of this curation is not to include everything, but to finally give persuasive form to a period that remains blurry (based on commercial releases) and that is often derided as a low point. I consider it a high point, even at its weirdest points. This is my case, via four imaginary albums.
Volume 2: To Woody
This is the sub-plot of 1970-ish Dylan studio recordings that I most wanted to pull together – the record I always wanted “Self-Portrait” to be. It’s something like the return of folk singer Dylan, but with the wider, weirder scope of traditional music opened up by The Basement Tapes. Covers and originals sit together comfortably.
At the edge of the imaginary stage, alone in the spotlight, is Dylan, with microphone, acoustic guitar, harmonica, and a nearby piano. He’s singing his heart out without raising his voice, inhabiting each song as though it’s the most important or delightful story he’s ever told. Additional musicians appear in various formations to provide reserved accompaniment for one song or another.
If this had been the 1970 comeback concert or “Self Portrait," I think it would be revered.
63 minute pseudo-album zipped up here
GH2 tracks and “George Jackson” were recorded in 1971. ASP songs are sometimes SP takes without the overdubs.
Let’s pretend that the music Bob Dylan recorded circa 1970 had resulted in a series of different albums than the ones we got. In the real world, those recordings are smeared all over the place: Self-Portrait, New Morning, Dylan, Greatest Hits Vol. 2, vault releases, and bootlegs. The point of this curation is not to include everything, but to give persuasive form to a period that remains blurry (based on commercial releases) and that is often derided as a low point. I consider it a high point, even at its weirdest points. This is my case, via four imaginary albums.
Volume 1: The Morning After
One reviewer called “New Morning” a mid-term report from a position of domestic tranquility. However, the final report card, based on original songs recorded in 1970 and 1971, is a much more unsettled communique.
The first volume of my 1970 reconfiguration attempts to turn “New Morning” into the most substantial possible album of originals recorded in this period. The result includes six songs from "New Morning," three dramatically different versions of "New Morning" songs, and four songs that weren't on the album.
The object of thematic puzzling is time. Simplified into biography (which isn’t fair), the plot involves “Bob Dylan” fleeing himself and celebrity into domestic tranquility and artistic freedom in upstate New York, but ending up estranged from wife and self, that masterpiece he was going to paint colliding with not having much to say, the past a mixed-up confusion, the future a blank, the river of time continuing to flow by. The gypsy he goes to see in the end, and can't connect with, is the Bob Dylan he escaped from and now can’t find his way back to. He’s the restless wallflower in his own life. He’s half-inclined to consider religion. Or he's just a restless Bob Dylan, hanging out in the cafes and bars of upstate New York, taking notes.
It’s the mighty Bob Dylan album, hiding in plain sight, that marks the mid-point between the official mileposts planted by “John Wesley Harding” (1967) and “Planet Waves" (1973). This re-stacking should startle even those who are intimately familiar with this material in its original contexts, especially in the second half.
42-minute pseudo-album zipped up here.
Born four years apart and releasing their first albums one year apart, Prince and Elvis Costello are artists that I also associate as eventually becoming capable of writing and singing nearly any kind of song exceptionally well.
This mix is not intended to represent everything fantastic about EC 1994-2006 – not by a long shot.
It specifically curates the Costello development that proceeded from such early indicators as “Alison,” “Hoover Factory,” “Almost Blue,” “Boy With a Problem,” “Shipbuilding,” etc., and from Costello’s abiding interest in what can loosely be called American Popular Song. These are songs that might have originated in a musical, sung by a character, later to be picked up by others as a standard.
This mix is also a celebration of the dynamic duo of Elvis Costello and pianist Steve Nieve, collaborators for nearly two decades by the time of the earliest recordings on this mix. Nieve appears on every, or nearly every song here.
The selections come from the albums of the period (including expanded edition material), a series of EC & Steve E.P.s, and a little bit from bootlegs. The cover photo is from some years later, but I couldn’t find one that I liked better.
When I made this mix in 2010, I titled it “We’re All Alright,” a phrase from a classic Seventies Cheap Trick song that also describes the band’s shocking renaissance after a long, long period of being lame. A bad thing had happened, but now it was alright, those guys were alright, and they were picking up the dropped threads with great enthusiasm.
In 2017, the band released a new album with that same title, so now I’ve gone to Plan B with my mix titling.
My target audience is probably anyone who loves early Cheap Trick and doesn’t have much idea of what happened afterwards. You will be pleased.
This mix draws from four albums, singles, soundtrack & tribute contributions, and bootlegs. In the same period, the band re-recorded “In Color” with Steve Albini and performed the “Sgt. Pepper” album live. You can find the former on the internet and buy the latter on Amazon.
My split into two volumes roughly follows the original yin/yang of the band, which was that they were half Electric Light Orchestra and half a CBGB band, sharing bills with The Ramones. They were extremely talented writers and musicians, who wrote and played soaring, baroque, Beatlesque songs and caveman head-bangers with equal authority and impact. By mixing these modes up into pop hits, they paved a lot of road in rock music that less talented people drove down.
So, start wherever you want – with the more Beatley one or the thrashier one. Neither is a sequel to “Heaven Tonight” or “Dream Police,” or wherever the “classic period” is supposed to end. However, the band that can seemingly do anything is intact, the songs are strong, and the performances are sharp. Even when the song is a commercial jingle, it's Cheap Trick – and there are plenty of reminders here of what forms of commercially successful music were enabled by Cheap Trick's early groundbreaking.
An example of the general mix of originality and homage here is the band's cover of Big Star's "In the Street," compared with the original composition, "Dream the Night Away." The vertically-oriented Big Star melody becomes a harder, more horizontal story in Cheap Trick's reading, largely organized around a version of Aerosmith's "Draw the Line" riff. Meanwhile, the lost Big Star melodic verticality manifests itself in the original song, "Dream the Night Away," which also pulls in Byrds moves. There's a sense of endless recombination of instinctual and homage-conscious moves in latter day Cheap Trick, but who else is keeping track of and reengineering these moves? The song "Everyday She Makes Me Crazy" is a slight revision of a literal Pepsi jingle, but it's also an amped-up take on '65-'66 Beatles. That's the excellent line that Cheap Trick always walked, in one way or another.
Both volumes in mp3 zipped up here.
Volume 1: After a Brief Interruption (55 minutes)
Volume 2: Garage Days Revisited (47 minutes)
MP3s of both discs zipped up here
Main Course: 67 minutes
Bonus Disc: 56 minutes
After contributing to the recording of “Wake of the Flood,” Joe Ellis (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Martin Fierro (flute, saxophone) went on the road with The Dead for nine shows in September 1973.
It was a fairly ramshackle affair. The horn section audibly contributed to only seven songs, several of them performed only once or twice. Some of them are quite well arranged/developed and some sound almost ad hoc, just an idea or two, repeated.
As we’ve always known, the horn episode didn’t live up to the potential inherent in the idea of The Dead taking trumpets, flutes, and saxes onstage in 1973.
The first half of my curation is the best I can do to forge the horn episode into a compelling, surprising, frequently amazing listening experience with minimal repetition. It approximates a one-hour, all-horns set.
The second half (the bonus disc) is the “best of the rest,” mostly. To be considered, a recording had to be high-fi, and the horns had to be clear in the mix, and the second disc contains most of what hit that threshold without being the best representative sample, IMO. I think there is perhaps no definitive performance of "Let Me Sing Your Blues Away."
In the cases of “Let It Grow” and “Eyes,” the horn playing is great during the instrumental breaks in the latter portions of the songs themselves. However, I’ve put a seamless track division before the all-out jamming, because that’s where the horn episode really delivers on 1973 Dead promise. Fiero and Ellis play wildly and wonderfully, soloing, getting really far out, sound-wise. They and the band respond to each other, and it leads to some great places. It’s a shame that they weren’t given a chance to shake up other improvisational songs. Anyway, while I’m not suggesting you skip the song sections, there’s great pleasure to be had in listening to just the jams. (On the "bonus disc," the "Eyes" jam is nothing special, compared to the Buffalo version, but both "Let It Grow" jams are excellent.)
There was no feasible song/jam cut-point in the one performance of "Truckin'." The horns don't come in until the later stages of the song section, but they're all-in pretty fast, and propel the transition out of vocals and into the immediate "Truckin'" jam. When the band takes that turn that moves closer to "Nobody's Fault," the horns sit back for a while, but they come back in for a very nice stretch. Outside of "Let It Grow" and "Eyes," this is the only place the horns seem to have improvised in wide open space with the band.
The Buffalo “Let It Grow” and “Eyes” performances are the greatest things to come out of this collaboration, IMO. It was the final horn section show, and it’s as close as The Dead ever got to sounding like The Mothers of Invention. RZZZZZ!
Source and editing notes: