Save Your Face

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. 

I am grateful to Bubba Ayoub (@otdispace) for permission to share his mesmerizing ambient/noise Grateful Dead remix album.

Ayoub is a modular synthesizer performer and builder, and a lightshow artist. I suspect he is also the world’s leading expert on/appreciator of the Phil Lesh/Ned Lagin “Seastones” project from the mid-1970s, which contributes to this remix album. If “Seastones” has eluded you, so far, track 3 on Ayoub’s album might be what you need. 

Ayoub’s Dead reprocessing aligns directly with my own fascination with the band’s 1990s MIDI explorations and the band’s lifelong resonance with avant garde music, including Eno, Budd, Hassell, Frith, Krautrock, etc. If the Dead had addressed their weirdest recordings the same way those artists did, they might have produced documents like Ayoub’s remixes. 

Ayoub is active on many creative fronts:

Check out this live synthesizer rooftop concert video on Youtube. 

View Ayoub’s lightshow work on Instagram @juggableoffense

Or just give thanks that someone is doing Ayoub’s day job, building badass synthesizers at STG Soundlabs. 

Regarding the Dead appropriations and mutations on this mix, Ayoub explains: “I'm done being frustrated by the lack of completely buckshitfuckwild official releases in the vein of ‘Grayfolded’ and ‘Infrared Roses,’ and that's the driving force behind the Grateful Dead-adjacent portions of the “Lost in Space Tapes.”

63-minute"Lost in Space: The Derelict" mp3 album zipped up here. Ayoub’s track-by-track notes, below.

1. Your Zones Are Short (24:27)

Drums and or Space and or BEAM from 083178, Egypt 78, 072988, 062694, 041882, 041982. Seastones from 071974 and 102074. Two June 68 Feedback segments provide some extreme noise, and finally littered throughout are bits and pieces of the 012278 Close Encounters Jam. 

This was the sort of test case for cramming in as many of these little nuggets of weird Dead as possible onto a cassette 4-track to create a way of exploring a kind of econo plunderphonics. 

2. All Your Zones R Belong To Us (7:23)

Combines a bass/drums jam from 062273 with various Seastones in a sort of reimagining of what Seastones could have been had the stars aligned differently.

3. Seazzzones (24:23)

Combines every Seastones from the October 1974 Winterland run. This is where I wanted to end up once I got the idea to plunderphonicize as much weird Dead as I could get my hands on. 

I was listening to a version of Seastones and reviewing it on Twitter one afternoon and I tweeted out something to the effect of "jeez, I wish this was just drenched in reverb and delay" to which Jesse Jarnow responded "why don't you just do that to it yourself?" I ran with the idea and immediately knew I wanted to try layering Seastones. 

There's a lot of dead air in Seastones performances, so putting them on top of each other helped me create a more cohesive, all consuming mass of sound that doesn't recreate the experience of perceiving all those strange frequencies beyond the human range of hearing but does hit the listener's perception centers with less "what the fuck were they doing up there in the 16 second pause between one blip and the next?" 

4. Out of Pocket Guest Spot Zones (7:36)

This tape combines a bunch of Space segments with special guests - the Guyto Monks and Edie Brickell specifically, as their appearances with the Dead are my favorite guest appearances. Long story short I just think it's real cool when people join in on the one truly, fully improvised vintage psychedelia moment in every Dead show so I wanted to see what it was like when I put a bunch of them together.

Cover art by Ruth Poland adapted from a Seastones concert poster

This mix pulls from the first four shows of The Grateful Dead’s 1984 East Coast Spring Tour – April 13-17, in Hampton, VA, Rochester, NY, and Niagara Falls, NY.

Weird mixes and performance flaws encouraged me to boil this one down to the extensive jamming, which is great. There are some burps in “Help on the Way" (Garcia's guitar may go out for a bit), but it was too good a place to start this mix to resist.

There are a number of strange sounds within these tracks. At several points, chorus vocals are mixed into a huge, echo-filled mass, and there's some wild hand drumming on "Fire" that adds an extra twist to the groove. 

92-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

Disc 1 (46 minutes)

• Help on the Way > Slipknot!
• Eyes of the World
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain Edit
• Estimated Prophet Jam > Jam

Disc 2 (46 minutes)

• Playin’ Jam >
• Terrapin Station > Playin’ Mini-Jam
• Jam >
• The Other One > Jam > Other One
• Shakedown Street Edit

Editing Notes: Aside from some of my usual abbreviation moves (skipping the song-parts of “Scarlet,” “Estimated,” and “Playin’), a couple of tracks are edited more esoterically. “Fire” is instrumental except for the final two choruses, which includes that massed, echo effect. I think you’ll find the whole “Scarlet Jam > Fire” sequence quite compelling. “Shakedown” is instrumental until the final verse, after which it flows uninterrupted. The vocal chorus effect is used here, too. Don't miss this "Other One," which ventures far from the main theme.

Here’s another early-1980s Grateful Dead “Road Trip” mp3 mix that finds an extensive convergence of exciting performances and inviting soundboard mixes. Plus, statistically significant events!

I already hit October 1985, so here we step back six months to April. The two official, whole-show releases from the year are from June and November.

2.5-hour mp3 mix zipped up here

Disc 1: April 13 (66 minutes)

• Why Don’t We Do It in the Road
• West LA Fadeaway
• Little Red Rooster (edit)
• Terrapin Station >
• Playin’ in the Band
• Drums
• Space > 
• The Wheel
• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Discs 2-3: April 14 (93 minutes)

• Hell in a Bucket >
• Sugaree
• Down in the Bottom/Ain’t Superstitious
• Brown-Eyed Women 
• Big Railroad Blues
• I Need a Miracle >
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• Women are Smarter
• Space Jam >
• Dear Mr. Fantasy >
• The Other One
• Sugar Magnolia
• Gloria

Notes:

• This may be the only instance of “Miracle” opening a 2nd set, and the only time it flowed into “China Cat.” Garcia’s voice is ragged on “China Cat.”
• This is one of only four 1980s “Glorias.”
• “Down in the Bottom” was played nine times, and “Ain’t Superstitious” eight times. They appeared together this way four times.
• The band played “Do It in the Road” seven times.
• Edits on this mix are limited to removing a second Weir slide solo from this otherwise fine and slinky “Rooster,” and skipping over a messy “Sunshine Daydream.” On the April 13th mix, you’ll hear a segue from “Drums” to “Space,” but that’s fake; I cut out the second half of drums. 
• The April 14 SBD source I’ve used is one generation back from the latest, which has bigger dynamics, but which also includes a maddening, gargly defect. The 13th board mostly sounds great, but the “Terrapin” and “Wheel” vocals could have been handled more forthrightly. 
• Cover art elements obviously swiped from Rick Griffin.