Save Your Face

Here’s an imaginary, early-1970s, soul-jazz-funk studio album by Little Feat. It does not include anything from the seven Lowell George-era studio albums. 

This mix is a customized shoe for some fascinating extra Feat toes. It shuffles together selections from the band’s recordings with jazz drummer Chico Hamilton (1973), with Lowell George sound-alike singer Robert Palmer (1975), and from officially-released studio outtakes compilations (1972-1975, with two 1969 outliers). 

Nearly all the material is contemporary with the band’s third and fourth albums, “Dixie Chicken” and “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now,” the first to feature the band’s classic second lineup: Lowell George, Bill Payne, Richie Hayward, Paul Barrere, Kenny Gradney, and Sam Clayton. The famous bootleg Ultrasonic Studios session is from this same period (September 1974).

While every player isn’t on every song (see notes below the track list), this mix documents that group during its flood years, when riffs and grooves seemed to spill out of them, and they were a very sensible studio band choice. 

By giving the Hamilton and Palmer tracks a better setting – by culling and combining them with each other and with a handful of kindred outtakes – this mix tries to supply a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and a coherent album that isn’t much like any of the band’s official ones. 

One-hour mp3 mix zipped up here

• Spanish Moon (1973 single version)
• I Can Hear the Grass Grow (1973 w/Chico Hamilton)
• Here with You Tonight (1975 w/Robert Palmer)
• Conquistadores (1973 w/Chico Hamilton)
• All That You Dream (1974 outtake)
• Gengis (1973 w/Chico Hamilton)
• Work to Make It Work (1975 w/Robert Palmer)
• Eldorado Slim (1972 outtake)
• Stu (1973 w/Chico Hamilton)
• Juliet (1969 outtake)
• Fine Time (1975 w/Robert Palmer)
• High Roller (1975 outtake)
• Stacy (1973 w/Chico Hamilton)
• Jazz Thing in 10 (1969 outtake)
• River Boat (1975 w/Robert Palmer)
• Trouble (1975 w/Robert Palmer)

Chico Hamilton’s “The Master” (1973) features all the second formation members of Little Feat except Richie Hayward (who is replaced by Hamilton on drums), with additional organ by Jerry Aiello and Stu Gardner, and more congas by Simon Nava. The limitation of the album is that it’s mostly just riffs and small jams, and almost sounds like “sessions for,” rather than a true album, clocking in at a meagre 35 minutes. I’ve included all but three tracks, which happen to be the album’s first three tracks!? More information here.

Robert Palmer’s “Pressure Drop” (1975) features all the second formation members of Little Feat, but also includes enough additional musicians to make it unclear exactly who is playing on each track. Those that overlap Feat instruments include James Jamerson on bass, Ed Greene on drums/percussion, and Jean Roussel and Gordon DeWitty on clavinet, organ, and/or other keyboards. I have included five of eleven tracks; the others are hopelessly cheesy and un-Feat-like. More information here.

Little Feat have done a great job of releasing non-album material from the George years, on “Hoy Hoy,” and “Hot Cakes and Outtakes,” plus two double-disc live archive albums, “Hot” and “Ripe Tomatos” [sic]. Nonetheless, there’s no way to stack all or most of the studio outtakes into anything that feels like more than a warehouse of outtakes, demos, early versions, etc. Pulling some of them out and threading them into the Hamilton and Palmer material seemed to bring them into focus as meaningful Feat moments. 

Here’s another slab of delightful 1994 Grateful Dead highlights, covering the first two weeks of the band’s final Fall Tour, 25 years ago (September 16-29). 

I’ve now posted mixes covering the whole year, with the exception of December. I think they establish that when The Grateful Dead were on point in 1994, they were an excellent band, whose best recordings are worth keeping handy. 

More notes, and links to the other 1994 mixes, below the track list…

6h15m mp3 mix zipped up here (dates included in tags)

Disc 1:

• Let the Good Times Roll
• Cumberland Blues
• Jack Straw
• West LA Fadeaway
• They Love Each Other (final performance)
• China Cat Sunflower (instr. edit) > I Know You Rider
• When I Paint My Masterpiece
• Brown Eyed Women
• Tennessee Jed
• The Same Thing
• Black Peter

Disc 2:

• Feel Like a Stranger
• Touch of Grey
• Greatest Story Ever Told
• Jack-a-Roe
• The Music Never Stopped
• Little Red Rooster
• Wang Dang Doodle
• Ramble on Rose
• Queen Jane Approximately
• Standing on the Moon

Disc 3:

• Playin’ in the Band >
• Uncle John’s Band
• Terrapin Jam
• Playin’ Jam >
• Eyes of the World
• Jam (after Samba)
• He’s Gone
• Stella Blue >
• One More Saturday Night

Disc 4: 

• Victim or the Crime
• All Along the Watchtower
• Estimated Prophet >
• Eyes of the World
• The Wheel >
• Good Lovin’
• Iko Iko
• Throwing Stones >
• Not Fade Away
• Don’t Ease Me In

Disc 5:

• Saint of Circumstance
• Jam
• Spanish Jam >
• The Other One >
• Wharf Rat >
• Sugar Magnolia
• Cassidy > (acoustic, no drummers)
• Bird Song (acoustic, no drummers)

In the month of September 1994, The Grateful Dead played three shows at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA and three at Boston Garden. In between was the first Phil Lesh and Friends show, which featured an acoustic set featuring everyone but the drummers. All these performances, except the first set of the first Shoreline show, circulate as soundboards, and this mix is drawn from them. 

I’ve previously presented highlight mixes from the year’s Spring Tour and the Summer Tour, as well as posting two Fall Tour mixes from October, including one titled “October ‘94.” (Note that the Fall Tour link will take you to a page that starts with this September post - scroll down for the previous two.)

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Someone posted an enthusiastic comment about one of my Rolling Stones studio outtakes mixes, which reminded me that I never posted this one. It's definitely more marginal than the others, but it's a pretty serviceable super-extended 12-inch remix of an aspect of the band that was never allowed to dominate any official album.

This is a very selective sampling of Ron Wood era outtakes, focusing on the band’s half-formed funk/disco/jam band persona. Many of the tracks are the long, unedited basic takes of songs that were finished and released between ’75 and ’81. It was typical for the band to record instrumentals, which Jagger either picked up for songwriting or didn’t. Jagger’s ongoing engagement with contemporary pop, funk, reggae, disco, etc. seems to have equipped him well in this period to turn the sketch of an idea into a persuasive, half-rapped vocal. He sings, he declaims, he chants, he talks conversationally about Puerto Rican girls. In this long “Miss You” (which was perhaps released on a 12”) you hear him figuring out where his lyrical hooks are, which stories to tell, and which to cut.

Yes, there are three takes of “Dance” on the bootlegs, but don't get too excited. They don’t have any connection to the “part 1” and “part 2” designations of the songs on Emotional Rescue and Sucking in the Seventies. Instead, they are three very similar performances of the song’s basic moves, with Jagger sketching in some vocal angles, totaling 21 minutes. 

100-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Come on Sugar (1981 1975)
• Slave (raw take 1975)
• Hey Negrita (raw take 1975)
• Everything is Turning to Gold (raw take 1977)
• Miss You (alternate 1977)
• I Love Ladies (1975)
• Worried About You (original 1975)
• Heaven (original 1979)
• Jah is Not Dead (1979)
• Disco Muzik (1978)
• Dance 1, 2, 3 (1979)

Artwork: I have deleted the cover art I originally used, which turns out to be the logo of very cool DJs and remixers that you can check out here. 

This sixth and final volume of SBD highlights of Summer '94 Grateful Dead is a lively conclusion to the series – approximately the length of a single show, 1970s-centric, and book-ended by some great deep cuts. 

The 1994 tour ended at Giant’s Stadium, in New Jersey – but the circulating soundboards end one stop earlier, in Auburn Hills, MI. The band played two shows at The Palace, and this mix is drawn from soundboards of both second sets and one first set.

3-hour mp3 mix zipped up here (performance dates includes in song tags)

Disc 1: 60 minutes

• Satisfaction
• Way to Go Home (released on “So Many Roads”)
• Greatest Story Ever Told
• Row Jimmy
• Me and My Uncle >
• Mexicali Fakeout > Big River
• Lazy River Road
• Spoonful
• Black Peter

Disc 2: 50 minutes

• Estimated Prophet > Jam
• Spanish Jam
• New Speedway Boogie (edit) >
• Truckin’ > Other One tease >
• He’s Gone

Disc 3: 60 minutes

• Victim or the Crime
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: The Creature Wakes Up
• Improv: The Creature Checks Its Texts >
• Improv: The Creature Attacks the Watchtower >
• All Along the Watchtower
• In the Midnight Hour

Notes:

• This is the first “Satisfaction” since June 1992, and the last one the band ever played. It’s currently my favorite version, but I’m no expert on all the versions.
• This is the first “Midnight Hour” since April 1993, and the third from last. (The other, final two were played during the Fall ’94 tour.)
• This is the first “Spanish Jam” since March 1993, the fifth from last, and quite cool. The next one, in September 1994, is nowhere close. 

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This volume of the Summer ’94 highlights series covers a stretch of the tour for which there are few circulating soundboards. 

Only 1.5 of the 5 shows played in Chicago, Maryland Heights, MO, and Hebron, OH (July 23 – July 29, 1994) currently circulate as soundboards (a full Chicago/Soldiers Field show and a Maryland Heights/Riverport Amphitheatre second set). No shortage of great stuff, though.

2-hour mp3 mix zipped up here (dates included in song tags)

• Samba in the Rain
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• New Minglewood Blues
• Cassidy
• One More Saturday Night
• Playin’ in the Band
• Jam Out of Terrapin
• Improv: Beat
• Improv: Between Stations
• Improv: Tone Poems
• The Other One
• Estimated Prophet
• The Wheel >
• Attics of My Life >
• Sugar Magnolia

Notes:

• Jam Out of Terrapin: Great, as usual. This one slides in behind the same show’s Playin’ jam very comfortably.
• Estimated: 20 minutes long with jazzy sidetrips.
• The Wheel > Attics > Sugar Magnolia: 22 minutes of as-played pleasure.
• Improv: Between Stations: This is one of the coolest ambient-mode drums/space segments I’ve found. A locomotive that drifts in and out of signal range.
• Yeah, I opened the mix with “Samba in the Rain.” I’ve included two performances of it in this Summer ’94 series, the first one a nice, precise execution, and this one, which really cooks.
• Notable flaw: Second verse of China Cat Sunflower.

Volume 4 of this Grateful Dead 1994 Summer Tour series jumps three stops into the tour’s eastern U.S. leg. They started with a lumpy show in Vermont (bad soundboard), followed by two shows at R.F.K. Stadium in Washington, D.C. (no soundboards). All three of the Noblesville, IN shows at Deer Creek Music Center circulate as soundboards – curated below.

2.5 hour mp3 mix zipped up here (performance dates included in title tags)

Disc 1:

• Shakedown Street (edit)
• Easy Answers
• Tennessee Jed
• Jack-a-Roe (small edit)
• Maggie’s Farm
• Looks Like Rain
• Childhood’s End (debut)
• If the Shoe Fits
• Ramble on Rose
• Greatest Story Ever Told

Disc 2:

• Playin’ in the Band > Chaos Jam
• Improv: Ghost Factory
• Improv: A Narrow Escape

Disc 3:

• Help on the Way > Slipknot! >
• Franklin’s Tower
• Matilda (debut)
• Uncle John’s Band >
• I Need a Miracle
• Wharf Rat
• Johnny B. Goode

Notes:

You'll find all the posted Summer '94 mixes here

Sorry about the odd disc divide, which creates a 25-minute disc 2. I just couldn’t find a way to sequence these tunes onto two discs that worked as well as this sequence. (Not that I imagine many people are burning discs, but I try to be physical-format friendly.)

Shakedown Street: I’ve tried to avoid editing tracks for this series, except to remove some easy-to-remove, brief blemishes. One big exception is this Shakedown, which had a messy first verse, but which is otherwise very nice.

Easy Answers: I put this after Shakedown to make the point that the two songs’ grooves are closely related, and you can sing “well, well, well, you can never tell” on top of Easy Answers quite easily. You tell me this town ain’t got no heart? Easy answer. If they’d turned Easy Answers’ one-minute instrumental break into a six-minute jam, that would have been great.

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This third volume of highlights from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour completes the brief West Coast leg of the tour. All three Shoreline Amphitheatre shows circulate as soundboard tapes.

You can find additional Summer ’94 highlight reels here.

4-hour mp3 file zipped up here (performance dates in title tags)

Disc 1:

• Cold Rain and Snow
• Black Throated Wind
• Samba in the Rain
• Stagger Lee
• Don’t Ease Me In
• Tennessee Jed
• The Promised Land
• If the Shoe Fits
• Good Lovin’

Disc 2:

• Here Comes Sunshine
• All Over Now
• Althea
• Sugar Magnolia
• Playin’ Jam
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2

Disc 3:

• Improv: A Hot, Dry Summer
• The Music Never Stopped > Sugaree > The Music Never Stopped
• Help on the Way > Slipknot! >
• Franklin’s Tower
• Desolation Row
• Eternity

Disc 4:

• Bird Song
• Stella Blue
• Eyes of the World >
• Fire on the Mountain
• Corrina
• Smokestack Lightning
• One More Saturday Night
• Improv: Please Find the Nearest Exit

Notes:

Althea: I've only come across a few immaculate performances of this song from the final years. This is one of them.

Here Comes Sunshine: This is a startlingly vocal-correct, musically-punchy version. Of course it’s not perfect, because it never was, but certainly a notable, late-period contender. 

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This is the second of six highlight mixes drawn from 48 hours of soundboard recordings of The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour. Only one song from this tour and one show from this year have been officially released. “That's how it stands today - you decide if he was wise.”

Word to the wise: Don’t miss this “Terrapin Station > Jam.”

The first leg of the summer tour kept the band in an orbit around California, with the only out-of-state dates being Seattle/Eugene (Vol. 1 of this series) and this Las Vegas stop. Two of the three Vegas shows circulate as soundboards (25th and 26th), and this mix is drawn from them.

3-hour zipped-up mp3 mix here (tracks dates in files)

Disc 1:

• Improv: Powering Up
• Corrina
• Improv: Dilapidated Funk 1
• Liberty
• Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
• When I Paint My Masterpiece
• Peggy-O
• New Minglewood Blues
• Hell in a Bucket

Disc 2:

• Mississippi Half-Step
• Cassidy
• The Music Never Stopped
• Improv: Dilapidated Funk 2
• Improv: Featured Cellist
• Stella Blue
• Terrapin Station > Jam 

Disc 3:

• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: A Sad & Complicated Tale
• Victim or the Crime >
• Eyes of the World
• All Along the Watchtower >
• Morning Dew

Notes:

“Improv: Powering Up”: Drums>Space style Dead would have been a great way to open shows. Build a monolith of hypnotic sound, and then launch into a groove, like… 

“Corrina”: This song would have been a fine opening jam, setting the same dance-party tone as “Shakedown” or “Stranger.” And this is a really crackling version. 

Terrapin Station: The Vegas “Terrapin” is one of the year’s very best, while also being notably different from most. 

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This is the first of six highlight albums from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour, which began exactly three months after the end of the Spring Tour and ended a month-and-a-half before the start of the Fall Tour: June 8 to August 4. They played 29 shows.

Roughly half the tour’s minutes circulate as soundboard recordings, which amounts to almost 48 hours of music. My mixes reduce that to about 19 hours, or 40% of the music played on the soundboards. I passed over some other good music to avoid repeating too many songs, so the very-good-to-great level of the tour is probably more like 50%. Not a bad hit rate. Nonetheless, only one song from this tour has been officially released. 

Cover art for this series combines typographic elements from a 19th Century patent medicine almanac with scans of my own cassette tape-case art from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  

After tour-opening shows in Sacramento, CA (no soundboards), The Grateful Dead’s first Summer Tour road trip was a five-show visit to the Pacific Northwest: Two shows in Seattle, WA and three in Eugene, OR, June 13-19. Circulating soundboards cover 3.3 of the 5 shows. In truth, this is mostly a Eugene mix; the Seattle soundboards did not include as high a percentage of exciting material.

3h7m mp3 mix here (source dates included in mp3 tags)

Disc 1 (54 minutes):

• Beer Barrel Polka
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• It’s All Over Now
• Sugaree
• When I Paint My Masterpiece
• Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
• Good Lovin’
• One More Saturday Night

Disc 2 (73 minutes):

• Improv: Daybreak
• Bird Song
• Improv: Woozy
• Eternity
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: Espionage
• Improv: Jam >
• The Other One
• Improv: Lonely
• Improv: Ominous
• Improv: The Long Hello

Disc 3 (60 minutes):

• Samson & Delilah
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain
• Jam Out of Terrapin
• Victim or the Crime Jam
• Standing on the Moon
• Sugar Magnolia

Additional Notes:

• The band inflected the latter-day “Jam out of Terrapin” several different ways. Sometimes it retained more “Terrapin” elements/echoes for longer. Sometimes it seemed like a “Playin’ jam” reprise. And in the case of the one on this mix, the sproinginess makes it feel possibly related to “Scarlet > Fire,” which did indeed appear earlier in the same set. This jam ought to have a better name than “Jam Out of Terrapin,” which is what the version on “So Many Roads” was titled. Maybe “Gamera Jam.”

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This mix presents some of the oddest Grateful Dead music I’ve heard. In January and February of 1983, the band spent several days recording at Stone House, in Marin County, near Fairfax. 

They mostly didn’t pursue songs, but instead worked extensively on several patterns. The tapes we have might be reels of the more together passages, pulled aside. There are also indications that additional parts were recorded on some tracks that have been wiped from the edits we have.

Stone House is not a studio but rather a large, historic building in the country. Mickey Hart, Dan Healy, Betty Cantor, and Rex Jackson worked in Stone House in 1974, recording Zakir Hussain’s album “Venu” in the building's large, central room. Check out this reminiscence of what that space was like, and the ambience it created.   

In 1983, perhaps Hart encouraged the band to shake things up by experimenting at Stone House. Perhaps everyone was supposed to bring in one idea. What was the actual intent of the sessions? What do the circulating tapes represent? I have no idea – but there’s very cool music to be heard. It's definitely not what you'd expect from 1983 Dead, nor what the Dead recording in an old building in the countryside might imply about the character of the music. 

90-minute mp3 mix here

• Stone House Disco Mix (16:00)
• Stone House Dub Mix (24:34)
• Victory (Long Edit) (15:38)
• Knot Jazz ’83 (Composite Edit) (7:42)
• Molly D (2:56)
• Stone House (Straight Edit) (23:03)

TRACK & EDITING NOTES:

Stone House Disco Mix

Stone House Dub Mix

Stone House (Straight Edit)

The band spent a day working on a pattern built around a programmed drumbeat, which isn’t titled on the tapes. I pulled all the most together pieces, removed stumbles from them, and edited them into a 23-minute version (straight). 

There is no repetition within the edit; it’s all different bits of real-time playing. You’ll hear one or more members exhorting the others, vocally or with handclaps, at several points. You’ll hear Garcia’s guitar at the beginning and end; otherwise he’s absent.

The three versions presented here are the exact same edit, straight and reprocessed two different ways. I think the band was playing this too slow AND too fast, so I’ve taken the liberty of @#$&ing around with tempo, pitch, and reverb.

Victory (Long Edit)

It’s called “Victory” on the tapes. Here, too, I’ve edited together many pieces without repeating any. It’s a gorgeous, narcotic groove, somewhere between VU’s “Ocean” and something far more contemporary. There’s plenty of richness within the super-low-key musical texture, and I’ve done my best to provide good dramatic turns in the places where I stitched bits together – or to hide the stitches entirely. (Listen at 9:18 for four seconds of a Garcia guitar lead – a trace of a track that wasn’t included in the mixdown/transfer we have.)

Knot Jazz ’83 (Composite Edit)

This is an edit made from three “takes” of everyone but Garcia moving back and forth through a structured pattern that has multiple references to the jams of old. 

Molly D

Grateful Dead ska, more or less! This is presumably an instrumental version of this Hunter/Hart composition, but I don’t have a vocal version for comparison’s sake. There are five versions of this on the tapes, and they seem to represent a process of recording to a drum track and then creating an edited track without the drums. I’m not sure who all is playing. 

Thank you Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) for tipping me off to these recordings and for providing the background sources.