mp3 compilation here (re-loaded to add a few more minutes of music)

Part 1 (43 minutes):

• Brown-Eyed Women (7/28)  (4:56)
• Bird Song (instrumental edit - 7/27)  (11:21)
• Garcia & Lesh > (7/28)  (1:05)
• Eyes of the World (instrumental edit - 7/28)  (16:17)
• Sing Me Back Home (7/28)  (9:19)

Part 2 (43 minutes):

• Here Comes Sunshine (instrumental edit -  7/28)  (6:41)
• Deal (7/28)  (6:09)
• Playin’ Jam (7/28)  (20:26)
• Nobody’s Fault Jam (7/28)  (2:06)
• China Cat Rider (instrumental edit – 7/28)  (8:01)

(Cover image: Luigi Serafini)

This mix aims to figure out what happened at Watkins Glen, other than the amazing, famous, 20-minute improvisation from 7/27: “The Watkins Glen Jam.” That jam isn’t included here, but it can be found on the official release, “So Many Roads,” and in part on an all-improvisation mix I made and posted here. Among other glories, that jam includes an early, extended trip into “Fire on the Mountain” territory. 

One show was scheduled at Watkins Glen; two were played. The venue was a racetrack, and the context was “Summer Jam at Watkins Glen,” scheduled for one day, July 28, 1973, featuring The Grateful Dead, The Band, and The Allman Brothers Band. However, so many people had shown up by the 27th that the sound check became a concert in its own right, The Band and Allman Brothers playing a couple songs each, and the Dead playing for 90 minutes. 

Wikipedia’s got a good article about the festival as a whole, and The Dead have posted a nice tribute to the “sound check,” which includes complete, streaming audio.

I got intimate with the shows because I wanted to know what kind of other improvisational playing occurred around that epicenter of excellence, “The Watkins Glen Jam.” (Just like you want to hear the August 1972 Berkeley Community Theater shows, because they immediately preceded Veneta, OR.)

It turns out that there was plenty more stupendous improvisation at these shows, as well as a few highly pleasing examples of more routine songs. By the end of my own listening/culling saga, everything I continued to love came from the 7/28 show, except for one mind-melting performance from the 7/27 “sound check.”

Two of the jam passages seem notable, beyond simply having great playing:

• “Bird Song” and “Dark Star” are almost the same song to begin with, but this extraordinary “Bird Song” demonstrates the resemblance to an uncanny degree. 
• This long “Eyes of the World” jam becomes a real adventure, eventually hitting the synchronized riff five times, including one that becomes a fantastic moment of disintegration and one that commandingly bookends the song. The others are all in the pretty-solid to not-together range, but I don’t think that diminishes the thrill of the whole thing very much. (Is a five-riff “Eyes” a record?)

SOUND QUALITY/EDITING CAVEATS: There’s a soundboard tape-flip gap during “Bird Song” that I joined up, and there’s a little jog in the “Playin’” jam that has nothing to do with my edits. My soundboard (or perhaps all soundboards?) also suffers from some tape-speed wobbles and warps. You’ll hear those in a couple of places, but mostly they didn’t impact the music I thought was worth pulling aside.

72-minute mp3 curation here

• PA #1 (montage) (1:04)
• Cold Rain and Snow (5:31)
• PA #2 (montage) (0:50)
• Sugaree (7:20)
• Stella Blue (8:12)
• PA #3 (0:18)
• Playin’ Jam (9:20)
• Dark Star > (12:17)
• Jam > (7:39)
• Space > (6:10)
• Space Jam > Dark Star > (4:40)
• Comes a Time (7:04)
• PA #4 (1:24)

The “Dark Star”/improvisation sequence is the big deal here. 

The initial investigation of “Dark Star” is a fine one. It falls squarely into the center of the sleepy/aggressive spectrum, getting intense and wandering off course in nice ways. 

The portions I have titled “Jam” and “Space Jam > Dark Star” are amazing. It’s because I feel so strongly about them that I have separated them from the intervening “Space,” which just isn’t in the same category. (My track separations let you skip across “Space” without much of a disruption, if you want.)

“Jam” is not entirely unknown territory for late 1972: Some bass & drums, Keith entering on piano to organize things into a trio, then the guitarists joining to take it into a feisty jam that resembles “The Eleven.” I’d give this the nod over a similar passage from 8-21-72 BCT. 

However, the thing that the band suddenly, steadily builds out of unformed space, about six minutes after the jam described above, is a one-time-only event, as far as I know. It is as if The Iron Giant were reassembling himself, one disconnected gear and limb at a time, a chaotic rhythm of metallic interactions, steadily coordinating themselves, until, suddenly, the giant stands up and stretches, not as Superman but as the Dark Star Reprise. Amazing. Garcia isn’t ready to nail the second verse, but still.

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This is a fake 2-LP Bowie album from 1974, made up almost entirely of officially released songs. It is intended to be the soul-funk-disco Bowie edifice that the year’s albums implied but never quite pulled off, IMO. 

Soul-funk-disco Bowie got put in a lot of different places: “Young Americans," “The Gouster,” “David Live,” to a limited extent “Diamond Dogs," and the more recent "Cracked Actor," a live show from late in the 1974 tour. Beyond those sources, I've pulled in an old Rykodisc bonus track (from a better source), and an astounding alternate mix of "Across the Universe" (from a bootleg). 

I would argue that the year’s output was great, but that it was not a trail-blazing moment for Bowie. Instead, it was mostly a shaggy homage to varied Black American music, some of it old, some of it contemporary. He was definitely intuitive about where popular music was going in the mid-to-late 1970s, but he didn’t make it thoroughly his own the way he did glam beforehand and Krautrock/”new wave” afterwards. 

So, I don’t think you get to the strongest case for 1974 soul-funk-disco Bowie by trying to find the 10 best songs; you aim to cover as many angles as possible, with as many songs as possible. I got to 20.

This particular Bowie pose feels natural and complete to me, blown out into a double-LP. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as it arguably is with many of the Seventies’ double albums. Quantity, variety, and pacing make it seem like a bigger deal. 

Maybe that’s why Bowie and Visconti struggled with the track list for a single LP that year – first proposing the 7-song “The Gouster” configuration, then releasing the 8-song “Young Americans,” each including tracks the other doesn’t. Neither strikes me as a balanced album; you need all of the combined tracks, plus some more.

Most of those additional, necessary tracks come from “David Live,” which documented a blurry transitional tour, in which Bowie began to sort out his soul-funk-disco moves, ahead of “The Gouster”/”Young Americans” sessions. It’s a good album – a good band and tour – but it delivered a mix of songs played straight (rock and roll) and songs played through the 1974, “American year” aesthetic. I pulled those latter tracks into this mix. 

Between Ziggy and The Thin White Duke, there was this guy.

Sources:

• Young Americans
• The Gouster
• David Live
• Cracked Actor
• Diamond Dogs
• Bootleg

100-minute mp3 mix here

My dive into innumerable, overlapping, frustrating Stones bootlegs yielded three studio companions to the Mick Taylor years (1969-1974). A handful of interesting “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers” alternate takes didn’t fit into this arrangement, but otherwise, this is pretty close to a thorough account of unreleased songs and a generous curation of all available material. Going deeper into iterative bootlegged versions of this sort of Stones material is a recipe for madness, based on my experience.

Shake Your Hips (outtakes ’69-’72)

This mix is comprised of "Exile" outtakes and kindred material. I have not taken into account what was released  on the “Exile” bonus disc from a few years ago (some tracks overdubbed by today’s Stones); everything here comes from bootlegs and is as-recorded originally. The dating goes back to 1969 because some of these songs were demoed that far back. They played “Loving Cup” at Hyde Park, July 5, 1969, their first – and historically gigantic – show after their drug busts and Brian Jones’ death. 

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These are all finished Prince tracks that didn’t appear on his general release albums. Many of them were released online through the NPG Music Club. One appeared as a CD b-side. Some remain unreleased.

If you like 1990s Prince, and don’t know this material, you will be knocked out. If you like Prince, but aren’t sure you can name any of his 1990s albums, these compilations are probably a good way to persuade you to look into that decade. He could seem to be trying a little too hard (to do/be what?) on some of those albums, but this stuff all sounds effortless.

The two fake albums presented here came about in the usual way. I swam around in oceans of non-album/unreleased Prince for a long time, until tracks I couldn’t get tired of started to sort themselves into groups. (The dates with the titles are recording dates taken from the invaluable Prince Vault site.)

Pop Album (52 minutes)

• Vavoom (2000)
• Eye Am the DJ (1995-1996)
• Van Gogh (1995)
• Peace (1999-2000)
• Northside (2000-2001)
• Horny Pony (1991)
• The Sex of It (1987)
• Get Blue (1990)
• Feel Good (1995)
• Beautiful Strange (1998-2000)
• Empty Room (live 2002)

Groove Album (72 minutes)

• The Daisy Chain (2000)
• Sadomasochistic Groove (1997)
• Well Done (1990-1993)
• Poor Goo (1993)
• Good Life (2000)
• Paradigm (1990-1992 & 2000 with George Clinton)
• The Undertaker (1993)
• Habibi (1998)
• Nagoya (2002)
• My Pony (1990-1991 with George Clinton)
• U Gotta Shake Something (1985)

Both in one mp3 file here

49-minute mp3 folder here

• English Civil War
• White Man in Hammersmith Palais
• Tommy Gun
• I Fought the Law
• Groovy Times
• Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad
• Guns on the Roof
• Gates of the West
• Last Gang in Town
• Pressure Drop
• Safe European Home
• Stay Free
• Time is Tight
• Capital Radio 2

This mix aims to be the absolutely fantastic second Clash album that might have been. At least as good as “The Clash” and “London Calling.”  It might even have been the one you would have given to a friend to try to convert them to the band – far more mature than the first album, shinier and less shaggy than the third one. 

The main problems with “Give 'Em Enough Rope” are that all of the 1978 songs that sound most alike are on it, some of them are the weakest of the year, and there are only 10, total. Tempo and mood keep coming back to the same place. It feels like a heavy slab and an insubstantial album at the same time.

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In 1975, about to go on tour with Ron Wood and unable to get Black and Blue out in time, the Stones released Made in the Shade, a canon-building, tour-supporting compilation drawn from their four most recent albums: Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, Goats Head Soup, and It’s Only Rock and Roll. The album defined the early Seventies as “Bitch,” “Angie,” “Tumbling Dice,” “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” etc. – the foundation of what would become the permanent post-Sixties Rolling Stones brand. 

This companion compilation is drawn from the same four albums as Made in the Shade and is intended to be its opposite. 

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This bootleg mix presents three distinct slices of material associated with the Rolling Stones' “Some Girls” sessions and tour: Unfinished songs, R&B rehearsals, and 1978 tour highlights.

This period was arguably the band's last gasp as a working band, and the sessions resulted in a huge number of songs, finished, half-finished, and roughly-sketched. At least one version of everything that was at least close to half-finished is included here, unless the only version I could find had audio too shitty to tolerate.

The sessions also provide an amazing demonstration of the band's core competency as a rhythm & blues outfit. They often warmed up in the studio playing the blues, and a large amount of such material was recorded during these sessions. I definitely prefer it to the '72 Dallas rehearsals, the only other substantial recording of such material I know of.

Lastly, the '78 U.S. tour is generally regarded as a sloppy mess, but when it wasn't, it was far, far better than the '76 tour, and IMO really delightful. They played all but two of the "Some Girls" songs, so there was lots of fresh material to enliven their usual cruise through older hits. I picked versions from shows that were recorded for FM broadcast, but I can't tell you anymore which songs came from which shows, except for "Hound Dog," the chaotic show-opener from Memphis. This mix includes almost every song they played on the tour.

Unfinished Songs

mp3 mix zipped up here

Rhythm & Blues Rehearsals

mp3 mix zipped up here

1978 Tour Highlights

mp3 mix zipped up here

75-minute mp3 zipped file here

I downloaded and studied something like 28 discs of these sessions. They mostly sucked as hard as every two-LP bootleg of them that I bought in my youth. I came away with one disc that reliably delights me and suggests/simulates a band that was really going for it, collectively. Most of their supposed recordings of (seemingly juicy) covers during these sessions were lame piss-takes that inspired no real band performance. So, my picks are mostly focused on interesting/hot performances of original tunes, which they attempted 1000 times each, plus some outliers. 

"It was in the city of shapes that she made love to several apes. She felt weird for a couple of days, but pretty soon she got used to their ways." (Robyn Hitchcock) I think you'll have a similar encounter with these mixes.

mp3s here  (if you want to download). Or stream the tracks, below.

Talking Heads: One Mix About Buildings and Food (8:51): An edit made up of pieces from nearly every song on "More Songs About Buildings and Food" that is looking for the proto-“Remain in Light” jam lurking inside it.

Television: Marquee Miniature (4:51): An almost entirely instrumental recombination of most of the album's  short instrumental breaks, which results in something that sounds surprisingly prog-y, and surprisingly like one song.

Talking Heads vs. NEU! (6:34): NEU!’s “Negativland” segues seamlessly into the “Psycho Killer” jam from the Talking Heads’ live performance in Sydney, Australia in 1979. A hint about what The Talking Heads were listening to and being inspired by.