Save Your Face

Volume 2 of “Pre-Columbian Live” complements the first volume with a big slice of the best overall 1975-1976 Little Feat concert recording (Halloween ’75), plus an additional LP’s worth of 1975 rarities and bonus items. 

First volume here.

Together, these two collections offer what I think are the most essential 3.5 hours of unreleased 1975-1976 Little Feat, based on the recordings housed on archive.org, all of which are freely downloadable. Each of the five discs of this combined collection conforms to the time-span of a traditional vinyl LP. The mix is a download code for a Record Store Day vinyl box that doesn’t exist yet. 

The full Halloween ’75 show is certainly worth your time (archive.org stream/download). It’s as close as you can get to a single-show “Waiting for Columbus”-style experience with a 1975-1976 show, on your big speakers or best headphones. I trimmed off six songs and smoothed out the gaps resulting from my deletions, made mostly for mix/sonics/tape defect reasons. All the compositions I omitted from this show appear in hotter/higher-fi form on the Volume 1 mix. 

The “bonus disc” contains some wonderful 1975 stuff, plucked from lower-fidelity tapes. A January soundcheck in Amsterdam provides a ghostly “Truck Stop Girl” and two unique, improvised grooves. An October show in Venice, CA included exceptionally rare (recorded) performances of “Roll Um Easy” and “Mercenary Territory.” And finally, a December show in Tulsa, OK offers a “Cold, Cold, Cold > Dixie Chicken > Tripe Face Boogie” medley that’s exciting and longish, with some pleasant audience tape vibes.  (I did some gentle EQ-ing on all these tracks.)

Near as I can tell, after “Truck Stop Girl,” Lowell George intones, “Bigger than life. Protean. And 580,000 units of pectin.” What a fantastic gloss of the song’s tale of gallant integrity and a heart so broken that it makes the protagonist forget that he’s got a truckload of fruit that’s shifting all around, and which will soon kill him.

2-hour mp3 mix zipped up here

LPs 1-2: Halloween ’75, Boston (80 minutes)

• Intro > Two Trains
• Fat Man in the Bathtub
• Walkin’ All Night
• A Apolitical Blues
• On the Way Down
• Day or Night
• All That You Dream
• Romance Dance
• Long Distance Love

• Cold, Cold, Cold >
• Dixie Chicken >
• Tripe Face Boogie > Bag of Reds > Tripe Face Boogie
• Teenage Nervous Breakdown
• Sailin’ Shoes
• Spanish Moon

LP 3: Rare & Bonus ’75 (37 minutes)

Amsterdam Soundcheck (1/30/75)

• Truck Stop Girl Approximately
• Groove 2
• Groove 1

Venice, CA (10/10/75)

• Mercenary Territory
• Roll Um Easy

Tulsa, OK (12/4/75)

• Cold, Cold, Cold >
• Dixie Chicken >
• Tripe Face Boogie

You'll find all the Save Your Face Little Feat mixes here.

This virtual Little Feat box consists of two curated mixes and one complete performance. I reviewed every ’73 Feat tape on archive.org, and this is how I decided to compress them for my own perpetual listening pleasure. It includes at least one version of every composition captured on the year’s (available) tapes, except “Oh, Atlanta!” and "Rock & Roll Doctor." None of the options really sold those songs.

The sextet version of Feat debuted in January 1972, but no tapes from the year circulate. That’s a shame, since it would be amazing to track that band finding its groove, adapting early songs to the new player-palette, etc.  In any case, by 1973 they were fantastic, and regular radio broadcasts, augmented by intrepid audience tapers, ensured that many shows would be captured for posterity. 

3-hour mp3 mix zipped up here, comprising the following three discs.

Live ’73: Ultrasonic (4/10/73 complete)

The most famous Feat bootleg is the 1974 Ultrasonic Studios session. This 1973 session at the same location isn’t far behind – a live radio promo for the studio album, “Dixie Chicken, which was released three months before this performance. If you already have this, but you haven't upgraded your file in a few years, this might be a better master. I converted directly from FLAC. 

59 minutes:

• A  Apolitical Blues
• Got No Shadow
• Willin’
• On Your Way Down
• Walking All Night
• Band intro & Lowell George chat
• Two Trains
• Fat Man in the Bathtub
• Sailin’ Shoes
• Cold, Cold, Cold > 
• Dixie Chicken > 
• Tripe Face Boogie
• Teenage Nervous Breakdown

Live ’73: Oddities

1973 Little Feat set lists contained mostly the same songs, but a healthy number of outliers were captured on tape. Here they are, and they are a hoot. “Spanish Moon > Skin it Back” is on this mix because it needed to be somewhere in this collection, and “Spanish Moon” is actually very rare on the 1973 tapes.

70 minutes:

• China White (11/2/73 Sugar Hill Studios)
• Bag of Reds (9/17/73 Atlanta) 
• Ass for Days (7/21/73 Denver)
• Chevy 39 (3/20/73 Santa Monica)
• Airplane (4/1/73 Boston)
• Eldorado Slim (3/20/73 Santa Monica) 
• Day at the Dog Races (11/2/73 Houston)
• High Roller (11/2/73 Houston)
• Someone’s Leaving Tonight (11/2/73 Sugar Hill Studios)
• Spanish Moon > Skin It Back (3/20/73 Santa Monica)
• China White (w/Bonnie Raitt, 4/1/73 Boston) 
• Ass for Days (4/1/73 Boston)

Live ’73: Oldies

This mix collects performances of songs that appeared on the band’s first two albums, plus “The Fan,” which goes back to 1970. Most of these songs fell out of the band’s repertoire by 1974, with only “A Apolitical Blues,” “Sailin’ Shoes,” “Willin’” and “Teenage Nervous Breakdown” making it to 1975 and beyond, during the George years.

It is fascinating to hear these songs transformed by the sextet’s approach, and I had to fight myself not to include every recording of “Hamburger Midnight.” Even the shittiest bootleg can’t break that song. I decided not to include “Cold, Cold, Cold” and “Tripe Face Boogie” on this oldies disc, because there are lots of great 1973 versions of those, and the Ultrasonic recording of them is plenty good enough for this boxed set.

49 minutes:

• Hamburger Midnight (7/21/73 Denver)
• Snakes on Everything (7/21/73 Denver)
• Texas Rose Cafe (7/19/73 Denver)
• Got No Shadow (7/19/73 Denver)
• A Apolitical Blues (7/19/73 Denver)
• Cat Fever (7/19/73 Denver)
• The Fan (7/19/73 Denver)
• Sailin’ Shoes (w/Bonnie Raitt, 4/1/73 Boston)
• Willin’ (4/1/73 Boston)
• Teenage Nervous Breakdown (4/1/73 Boston)
• Teenage Nervous Breakdown (w/sax 4/15/73 NYC - Max’s Kansas City)

You might look at the above track sources, or listen to this mix, and conclude that the 7/19/73 tape must be a classic. It isn’t for me. Its immaculate crispness works great for these early songs, but when it comes to the thicker grooves/major new tunes of the era, the sound does not gel for me. I do not groove. 

If these mixes please you, you'll probably want to see all our Little Feat posts. 

This mix is my best shot at carving out a second LP to augment Miles Davis’ 1970 album, “Jack Johnson.” 

That album contains two very different, 25-minute tracks (“Right Off” and ”Yesternow”), each made up of multiple takes, brilliantly spotted and edited by producer Teo Macero.

The complete sessions for that album run to 368 minutes and cover a bunch of different compositions and jams. You can hear them all on "The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” (5-discs, 2005, still in print, with a fantastic book of liner notes).

Quite a few outtakes from the sessions ended up sprinkled (whole or partial) across a decade of subsequent Davis releases. That might be why there’s hasn’t been an official, concise “Jack Johnson Sessions” collection. 

This is my version of that collection, almost exactly equal in length to the original “Jack Johnson” album, and an attempt to meaningfully expand and enrich that album, rather than simply providing a grab-bag of cool stuff. 

This material gets more abstract than the chillest moments of “Yesternow,” and extends the fusion-jam-rock attitude of “Right Off” further into blues and funky Herbie Hancock zones – but not too far! I’ve tried to make this a credible, every-minute-counts, jazz-fusion album, avoiding performances you could say are just a riff that is hoping for something great to happen.

I ignored whether or not a recording appeared on a later album somewhere, so several tracks will be familiar to fans of post-1970 Davis releases. I also edited a couple of tracks.

52-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

Side 1:

• The Mask (part 2) (15:46)
• Little High People (tk 7, edit) (4:44)
• Archie Moore (4:45)

Side 2:

• Selim (tk 4B) (2:14)
• Little Church (tk 7) (3:16) 
• Konda (16:28)
• Ali (tk 3, edit) (4:38)

Once you get used to these "sides," I recommend putting the original album's "Right Off" before both, and "Yesternow" in between them. 

Session and release information on Wikipedia

This post offers a double-LP-sized live Little Feat album covering May 1975 to May 1976, drawn from four good soundboard bootlegs. 

Post-1974, George-era Little Feat needs a little more advocacy and canon-building. The final few studio albums with Lowell George were overcooked, and only the fabulous, live “Waiting for Columbus” (1977) plants a decisive post-1974 flag for the era. 

Even the band’s latter-day live archive releases (“Hot Tomatos” and “Ripe Tomatos” [sic]) hardly broach 1975-1976 live material.

So, here’s a concise bootleg-bridge collection to slot between the 1974 Ultrasonic Studios recordings and the 1977 Tower of Power Horns live moment of “Waiting for Columbus.”

Overlapping setlists made it fairly easy to reduce these sources to an album of performances that offer contrasts with the familiar recordings or are simply very exciting. There are several great 2-and-3-song sequences with perfect segues by the band. Compared to the familiar recordings, there are also some notably long versions – a seven-minute “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now,” and an eight-minute “Day or Night.” Lots of charming moments, too. 

100-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

LP 1 (1975):

Atlanta (5/23/75)

• Oh, Atlanta!
• On Your Way Down
• Juliette >
• Lafayette Railroad >
• Day Or Night
• Feats Don’t Fail Me Now

Rochester (10/18/75)

• Down Below the Borderline
• Romance Dance
• Willin’

LP2 (1976):

San Francisco (2/14/76)

• Skin It Back
• One Love Stand >
• Rock & Roll Doctor
• Cold, Cold, Cold >
• Dixie Chicken > 
• Tripe Face Boogie
• Teenage Nervous Breakdown

London (5/3/76)

• On Your Way Down
• All That You Dream 

Artwork: Neon Park, “Jesus and the Three Pigs” (ink, 1976)

No audio edits except proper tracking divisions where the band executed a segue, track start/end-points, and some volume EQ.

This is our second Little Feat proposition. The first one is here. 

When the Save Your Face mixtape blog began, several years ago, it was entirely devoted to boiling down unreleased 1972-1975 sound boards and sessions, in order to create a giant jukebox of that era with no crap. 

By 2019, Save Your Face had shifted its Grateful Dead focus to curated explorations of neglected/abused eras, unique musical episodes, transitional moments, and forms of Dead music that are easier to appreciate when they’re pulled out of the show context and combined with similar material. 

In that spirit, Save Your Face’s 2019 offerings are probably the most valuable we’ve put out there – a library of Dead “albums” built on different principles than official releases, that make the long strange trip longer and stranger than you realized it was. 

Grateful Dead: 1968-1969 Mutations Series

In 2019, Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) continued to inspire, instigate, and/or directly collaborate on mixes. These include a best of mix of late ’68 Mickey and the Hartbeats recordings, an ambient album made up of nothing but the quiet conclusions of 1969 “Feedbacks,” and three surprising perspectives on late summer 1969 – a country single and a batch of cartoon music from a rehearsal session, and a big August-September live mix that finds the Dead in a wild protean place that Jarnow constellates in his liner notes. 

Details and downloads for each release here

Grateful Dead: Not Sucking in the Early Eighties Box (1982-1984)

Two mixes each from four consecutive years, all from April or October, pulled from unreleased shows that match great performances with great (or nearly great) sound board mixes. If you think of this period’s Dead and their recordings as thin and plinky, these many hours of full-spectrum “good old Grateful Dead” will surprise and delight you with both small songs and big jams. 

Details and downloads for each release here

Grateful Dead: 1994 - Spring, Summer, and Fall Tour Digests

Yeah, I checked out every 1994 soundboard and digested them down to a large collection of mixes, organized around runs, months, or whatever other frame made sense, based on what was worth anthologizing. Minus the fuckups, mostly due to Garcia, 1994 was a very tight and nuanced version of the band, with a wide dynamic range. I honestly love them. The Save Your Face ’94 series provides a fantasy version of the year, when every minute of music was very good to great – including Jerry’s contributions.

Spring Tour mixes

Summer Tour mixes

Fall Tour mixes

Grateful Dead: The 1994 Drums/Space Ambient Series

In 2018, I posted mixes of 1994 Spring and Fall Tour Drums/Space highlights. In 2019, I added a Summer Tour mix to complete the set. You can ignore traditional 1994 Dead if you want, but peak MIDI improv Dead is amazing, far out music that you dismiss at your own risk (of eventual embarrassment). 

Find all three mixes here

Grateful Dead: Unique Events

Putting a frame around a specific aspect of the Dead, or tightening something that’s baggy/tedious into something that’s album-tight, are obviously favorite pastimes here at Save Your Face. 

The 1968-1969 link, above, will get you to three of those tightly-framed moments - 1968 Hartbeats, 1969 cartoon music, and a quiet 1969 feedback/space anthology. 

“Knot Jazz” is a career-spanning mix that zeroes in on various jazzy tendencies and all of those knot-riffs that the band liked to tie and untie in jams and songs. 

“Jamming with Brent” boils and edits a 1979, pre-live-debut studio jam session with Brent down to a funky, jazzy album with a lot of surprising corners. 

“Stone House Sessions” edits together bits of some unorthodox 1983 sessions that range from drum machine based patterns to gorgeous ambience, with the result being some really long, strange tracks.

“Brown Eyed Women (May ’77 maxi-edit)” puts the instrumental breaks of every (I think) performance of the month into a single, super-long, complete version of the song. 

“Lost in Space: The Derelict” is an ambient/noise remix album by Bubba Ayoub, using Grateful Dead and live Seastones recordings. It was one of the year’s most popular posts, and for good reason. 

If you know a few of these songs, you’ll be able to anticipate the Venn diagram vibe of this mix: funky, loopy, moody, samply, jazzy, and 1990s electronica-tinged, but mostly played by bands and reaching around chronologically. Dark-tinged funk for winter nights.

Several years ago, from somewhere between Maine and Los Angeles on a solo road trip, Jonathan Lethem phoned to tell me that a version of this mixtape CD had served him well. I’ve been making some favorite playlists permanent ahead of my next Apple OS update disturbance, and this one seemed worth sharing in a time of darkness, when slinky, late-night dancing with the ambiguous future might be essential to personal survival. 

71-minute mp3 mixtape here (tagged to be its own album)

• Under Your Skin (Luscious Jackson)
• Roadkill (Rickie Lee Jones)
• I Cover the Waterfront (Billie Holliday, James Hardway remix)
• Ocean (Brazzaville w/Joe Frank)
• Do the Wrong Thing (The Lounge Lizards)
• Red Right Hand (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)
• Of These, Hope (Peter Gabriel)
• Rising Above Bedlam (Jah Wobble)
• The Hop (Radio Citizen, featuring Bajka)
• 19 (Acetone)
• Mood Swing (Luscious Jackson)
• Sway (Shriekback)
• Rain (Jon Hassell)
• Souvenir (Morphine)
• Might as Well (Acetone)
• Astroluxe (Bill Nelson)
• 200 Bars (edit) (Spiritualized)

The cover photo is a crop of a 2017 traffic stop iPhone photo in Chicago. Not quite right for the night-mood of this mix, but urban twilight enough to start it off. 

Nearly every “Feedback” The Grateful Dead played in 1969 included a gentle, gorgeous section of drones, whines, and knob-twiddling. This mix isolates and combines 14 such passages into a 35-minute ambient album. 

This particular aspect of “Feedback” ought to have its own name, since literal feedback is not the dominant feature, and there is great consistency among the performances. When you put them together, they sound like movements of a single, larger composition... or stanzas in a tone poem.

The mix includes 14 tracks, each labeled “Tones (mm/dd/69).” 

35-minute mp3 album zipped up here

Joy Division’s live expression was the opposite of the clean, spacious, icy one that producer Martin Hannett honed on the band’s studio recordings. Live, they were a filthy, thick, hot power trio mess, with a sound not so far from Stooges/Crazy Horse, and a lot of moves that seem to come from The Velvet Underground. 

The live Joy Division oeuvre/experience can be intimidating to both moderate and super fans, because nearly every document is an audience recording, and there are a lot of them. Also, the band was loose/sloppy, which led to both great and terrible performances of songs. And they only had so many compositions in their repertoire. 

So, nobody really needs to spend a lot of time with 35-40 JD concert recordings. I have spent that time, over a decade, and I have ended up being a track-by-track fan.  

The folder I’m sharing has 50 of those tracks. I automatically excluded live material that appeared on the official releases “Still,” “Heart & Soul,” “Preston,” and “Les Bains Douches.” I think of those as the most official, canonical, available, live releases – and the ones that most fans will already know well.   

Anyhow, I had to a draw a line in the murky official/bootleg sand somewhere – in order to create a mix with value to serious fans – and this seemed like a reasonable one. 

A few overlaps with official releases remain, because better masters of the recordings appeared after the band attached them to releases (several tracks each from 1/11/80, 2/8/80). The 2/20/80 High Wycombe source is the bonus disc attached to the fleeting, limited edition 2007 reissue of “Still.” The person who mastered it for release apparently remastered it a few years later, but I have not found that version.

I didn’t pay any attention to how many or how few songs came from a show, or whether or not every possible song was represented. 15-20 bad-sounding shows went totally into the trash, as did plenty of good-sounding recordings of badly played songs. 

These are simply the tracks that I think are worth hearing a lot. 

File Format & Track List: Choose Your Own Adventure

So that it’s easy for fans with any level of interest to identify and delete any tracks they’ve already got, these files are still tagged show-by-show, rather than being wrapped into some kind of album. The screenshot below shows you exactly what you’ll get. 

3h20m mp3 mix zipped up here

Zappa’s brought his new piece, Jerry’s back from California. 

Lou’s sucking on some king kong, I’m searching for my main ten.

Just like Ed Varese said, I might have heard some Pigpen. 

Whip it on.

This mix attempts to show how close The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, and the Mothers of Invention got to each other in the late 1960s, despite seeming to be on different planets at the time. The sequence takes you from sweetness through strange, kindred jams, to pure noise. 

84-minute mp3 proposition zipped up here

• VU: Ocean instrumental edit (Atlantic outtake, 1970) (2:05)
• Hartbeats w/Elvin Bishop: Jam (super tight edit, 10/30/68) (7:38)
• VU: Sister Ray pt. 1 (10/18/68) (8:29)
• MOI: King Kong excerpt (11/8/68) (10:19)
• GD: The Main Ten (6/19/68) (9:51)
• VU: Sister Ray pt. 2 (11/7/69) (15:27)
• MOI: The Orange County Lumber Truck excerpt (4/28/68) (7:36)
• GD: Feedback > What’s Become of the Baby > Feedback (4/26/69) (17:44)
• MOI: Octandre (8/25/68) (4:35)

Notes:

• Most of this music has already appeared on other SYF mixtapes, though I’ve pruned and noodled some of it. A few fortuitous segues presented themselves.
• The notable upgraded Dead edit is the Hartbeats/Elvin Bishop jam, which appeared on the “Fate Music 1968” mix I put together with Jesse Jarnow. For this mix, I’ve trimmed out two additional minutes, eliminating 90% of the cowbell. 
• To the best of my knowledge, only “Ocean” and “Octandre” have been officially released. You can find the latter on Zappa’s “Road Trips vol. #1,” which is an essential release for fans of the original Mothers.

This mix includes almost three hours of thrilling, unreleased, instrumental Mothers of Invention from the final year of the original band’s existence. I reviewed approximately 15 concert recordings, and these are the bits that I think everyone should hear. 

This is my second mixtape of late-1960s live Mothers. The first one is here, with notes explaining my enthusiasm for the original band and listing the musicians. 

Together, these two mixes include five hours of ambitious compositions and live improvisation by a large band at the peak of its powers. They include at least one version of most of the major compositions from this era, plus lesser known themes, lengthy jams, and a glimpse of “Hot Rats” (which would be recorded just a month after the latest Mothers' date on this mix). 

2h45m mp3 mixtape zipped up here 

Disc 1: Possibly Commercial (76 minutes)

This disc concentrates buttoned-up performances with great sound quality, mostly from two shows. This “Trouble Every Day” rides a fantastic, mechano-groove. 

• Son of Mr. Green Genes (10/26/68 Paris)
• Behind the Sun (2/23/69 Toronto)
• A Pound for the Brown > (2/23/69 Toronto)
• Sleeping in a Jar > (2/23/69 Toronto)
• Charles Ives (2/23/69 Toronto)
• Corrido Rock > Pachuko Hop (2/23/69 Toronto)
• King Kong (10/26/68 Paris)
• Trouble Every Day (8/3/68 New York)

Disc 2: Fatty Goodness (61 minutes)

This disc collects extended jams, solo sequences, and slinky grooves. “Jam in A” is an A+ dance party. My first mix included a lot of angles on “King Kong”; this one has a lot of “Sleeping in a Jar” variations. 

• Jam in A (10/20/68 Amsterdam)
• Jam Fragment (10/3/68 Copenhagen)
• Sleeping in a Jar excerpt (10/10/68 Amsterdam)
• Help I’m a Rock > Transylvania Boogie (10/20/68 Amsterdam)
• Sleeping in a Jar excerpt (6/5/69 Portsmouth)
• Blues Jam (10/26/68 Paris)

Disc 3: Orchestral Tendencies (32 minutes)

This disc stacks up some smaller compositions/passages that lean away from rock, culminating in the “Big Medley” (OCLT). 

• Interlude (5/24/69 Toronto)
• Cabin Boy > Wedding Dress > Little House > Dog Breath (4/28/68 Detroit)
• Little March (5/24/69 Toronto)
• Uncle Meat (5/24/69 Toronto)
• OCLT 1: Let’s Make the Water Turn Black > Harry You’re a Beast > Oh No (10/20/68 Amsterdam)
• OCLT 2: The Orange County Lumber Truck (4/28/68 Detroit)
• Octandre (10/6/68 Bremen)

Caveats:

• To the best of my knowledge, none of these tracks have appeared on official releases, but Zappa and the estate have sprinkled tunes from all eras across so many anthology releases that it is hard to be sure.
• Dates/cities are based on the bootleg recordings I have and may not all be correct. You can investigate yourself on the Frank Zappa Gig List: 1969 
• With these two mixes, I’ve used up all the unreleased live 1968-1969 Mothers recordings I have been able to get my hands on.