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.
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.
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