Save Your Face

This tour deserves way more respect. For one thing, the band performed all of the “Some Girls” songs, except the title track and "Before They Make Me Run." That alone makes the tour’s setlist exciting and historically anomalous. The Stones were mostly a hits band, before and after this tour, and I don’t believe there’s any album that was as throughly performed live at the time of its release.

And it’s “Some Girls,” played exactly right by a gloriously fucked-up and entirely appropriate Rolling Stones. This mix pulls from all the FM broadcasts I could lay my hands on (a while back), plucking one version of nearly every song played on the tour. When it was right, it was great. 

There are a million miles between this band and the thoroughly boring one documented on the 1975 tour album, “Love You Live," released in 1977 – and between the 1978 tour all all subsequent, highly-professional ones. I’m not saying that all later live Stones is to be ignored, but rather that the 1978 tour was probably the last time anyone witnessed the unruly entity that built the Stones legend.

So, this mix tries to lock down that moment in an enduringly satisfying, album-like way. 

I messed with the typical setlist order of the tour, so that all the “Some Girls” material is grouped together. The mix leads and closes with older tunes.

80-minute mix zipped up here

• Hound Dog
• Starfucker
• All Down the Line
• Honky Tonk Women
• Miss You
• Beast of Burden
• Shattered
• When the Whip Comes Down
• Lies
• Just My Imagination
• Far Away Eyes
• Respectable
• Love In Vain
• Tumbling Dice
• Jumping Jack Flash

Important caveats:

• I compiled this in 2010 and did not tag my selections with dates/locations. Subsequently (2011), The Rolling Stones released a full 1978 show from Fort Worth, Texas. I am sorry I can’t tell you which, if any, tracks come from that show.  
• This mix was originally (and is still) posted as a Save Your Face virtual boxed set that includes two discs of curated studio outtakes from the “Some Girls” era. It’s one of several such multi-disc sets on the SYF blog. Since this live disc has more mass appeal than the half-finished outtakes, I thought it might make sense to break it out. (And I felt like making a cover image!) Choose your own adventure.

It may be time for a reencounter with “Hair” (the musical) – as a document of 1968-1970 rock, as a legit/ersatz entry into the cultural stream, and apart from it being a stage musical. “Ain’t got no” is a timely rallying cry. The songs are good.

This mix curates performances from four of the era’s released productions and tries to assemble them into an interesting 2020 alt-music album:

• Off-Broadway 1967
• Broadway 1968
• London 1968
• London 1970

The show’s music was composed by Galt MacDermot and the lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado. The show’s various arrangers and performers slanted the songs in a lot of different ways.

That created a great opportunity to curate a version that sounds less like a musical and more like a 1969 radio station playing an hour of solid, contemporary pop, rock, soul, Brill Building tunes, etc.  

68-minute mp3 mix zipped up here, as follows:

Caveats:

I’m neither a “Hair” nor musical theatre expert. I inherited “Hair” in multiple production and language recordings from my dad, who died in 2010, after DJ’ing a syndicated NPR musical theatre show for 20+ years. That same dad provided two vinyl LPs of “Hair” productions to me before I was 12 years old, so I’ve got a biased relationship to these songs. 

I have four non-English productions of the show from my dad. Another mix will happen. if you have high-quality, non-English production audio files, please contact me. 

This mix curates tracks from the jazz remix craze of the early 2000s. I was really into it, because I love jazz, and the electronica I sought out at the time already leaned in a jazzy direction – with interesting syncopations, slinky undertows, slower tempos, and minimal clatter. 

The two hours compiled here are tracks that are still in my regular rotation 15 years later. I have compiled one hour each of vocals and instrumentals from seven of the era’s remix albums. I endeavored to make the metadata as complete and systematic as possible (see below). Title tags conclude with shorthand for the source release (e.g., Verve, Savoy). 

121-minute mix zipped up here

The vocal disc: Ten songs come from “Verve Remixed, Volumes 1-3” (3-releases, various producers), and three come from “Ladies of Jazz Remixed,” remixed by James Hardway.

The instrumental disc: By far the most consistent of the instrumental jazz remix albums is “Re-Bop: The Savoy Remixes,” produced by Joshua Sherman and Stu Fine. Nine of the tracks in this mix come from that album. “Bird Up! The Charlie Parker Remix Project,” produced by Matthew Backer, provides four of the others. The additional track comes from “Impulsive!” There are vocals on some of these tracks, but no sung songs.

This edit merges the first composition on Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” with coded shortwave radio broadcasts from the 20th Century. It’s an ambient vocal track that speaks in tongues. Zero, zero, zero, echo, victor, sierra, eight, four, six, yankee, hotel, foxtrot...

The method was mostly an oblique strategy, followed by some editorial tweaks. The two sources automatically created a collective drama that I didn’t mess with very much. The edit preserves the stereo separation of Eno’s album, with the mono shortwave broadcasts layered in.

Stream:

Download:

16-minute, 320kbps mp3 track here

This is the rarest Gang of Four studio recording, released only once, on a flexi-disc inside of the magazine “Vinyl Music” (Netherlands, July 1982). 

I obtained a copy at the time, played it just twice to record it to cassette, then played it again circa 2000 to rip a digital file.

This post is based on that uncompressed rip, re-EQ’ed to address the limitations of flexi-disc sonics. This is as hard as I can make it kick.

The issues were primarily a thin, stabby drum machine (and cheap plastic) at the high end, and distorted, non-musical thumping on the low end. I also adjusted the volume in a several places, because the original mix includes sudden shifts that disrupt the flow. My main focus was on clarifying the bass articulation and Andy Gill's fantastic dueling guitars.

I can’t find any information about when the track was recorded or what it is. Song-wise, it sounds like the Dave Allen period, but it's not Allen playing bass, and it was not included on the recent boxed set covering his period. I'm guessing the recording is a 1981 Gill/King demo of an abandoned song, which would make it a logical candidate for a throwaway flexi-disc in 1982. Maybe discarded in favor of "Capital (it fails us now)." 

Cover art is adapted from the flexi-disc’s label and a cover detail from “Entertainment.”

320kbps mp3 file here

Foetus (JG Thirlwell) released three amazing, extended disco-industrial 12-inches in 1984, the same year as the album “Hole,” and a year ahead of “Nail.”

As far as I can tell, these full-length tracks are currently unavailable to buy or stream, and they may never have been released digitally, except in shortened edits.

The compilation presented here uses my uncompressed vinyl rips, circa 2003, mildly EQ’ed to bring up the bottom end and blunt some high end needles, converted to 320kbps mp3s.

Thirlwell is still making great music! Official site and store.

45-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Calamity Crush (6:06)
• Finely-Honed Machine (9:35)
• Wash It All Off (6:12)
• Today I Started Slogging Again (7:45)
• Catastrophe Crush (7:09)
• Sick Minutes (Unmutual) (8:51)

Original 12-inch art, x3: JG Thirlwell. 

This mix provides a prequel to Blue Oyster Cult’s 1975 live album, “On Your Feet, or On Your Knees,” which capped the band’s classic, initial studio run: “Blue Oyster Cult,” “Tyranny and Mutation,” and “Secret Treaties” (1972-1974). 

In 1976, everything changed, with the release of the completely different “Agents of Fortune,” containing the hit, “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

Pulling from four bootlegs recorded April 1972 through December 1973, this mix compiles as many different songs as possible, mostly in the earliest live recording available. (The NYC Academy of Music show predates the recording of “Secret Treaties.”) 

I’ve only repeated two songs, one because it changed a lot, and the other because it was the big jam number. The fidelity of the sources varies, but all should be pleasurably inhabitable by fans. Volume has been equalized.

130-minute mp3 mixtape zipped up here

Rochester, NY: 4/3/72

• The Red and the Black
• Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll
• Workshop of Telescopes
• Stairway to the Stars
• Transmaniacon MC
• The Last Days of May
• Before the Kiss, a Redcap

Detroit, MI: 4/2/73

• OD’d on Life Itself
• Wings Wetted Down
• 7 Screaming Dizbusters
• Buck’s Boogie
• It’s Not Easy

Cleveland: 10/8/73

• Screams
• Quicklime Girl
• Workshop of Telescopes
• It’s Not Easy

New York City: 12/31/73

• Dominance and Submission
• Astronomy, a Star
• ME262

If you’d like to hear an 18-minute jam by BOC’s earlier incarnation, Stalk-Forrest Group, you’ll find that here.

This track edits the jammy passages of six Stalk-Forrest Group studio recordings (1970) into an 18-minute instrumental suite. 

It’s a prequel to Blue Oyster Cult’s “black and white years” and right in line with 2020 jam band tendencies. 

18-minute mp3 file here

From August 1980 through February 1981, Talking Heads toured North America, Europe, and Japan as a gigantic band, making groundbreaking music. 

An entire show, including the tour’s whole setlist, is beautifully documented on the expanded version of “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads.” There are also several exciting live videos from the tour that you can easily find online.

From an audio quality POV, the Amsterdam soundboard stands out, both for clarity and for being quite a different mix than the one featured on “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads.”

The Amsterdam mix is also notable because it is not dominated by huge bass and drums and massed vocals. Instead, the higher end of the percussion is emphasized, the guitars are quite prominent, and the individual vocalists are more discernible. 

That balance makes some songs fall flat, but it takes others into a fantastic, wiry, “Fear of Music” place. Those performances are featured on this mix, re-EQed somewhat to bring up the bottom end.

28-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Born Under Punches
• Crosseyed & Hungry (edit)
• Drugs
• Warning Sign
• Cities

You’ll find a couple of other weirdo Save Your Face Talking Heads experiments here.

This 29-song live mix collects as many “Get Happy” songs as possible (16 of 20), plus contemporary non-album originals and covers that occupy similar territory (e.g., soul, R&B, Sun Studio rock). Four songs appear twice, three in contrasting arrangements, so 25 different songs are represented.

All material is unreleased, as far as I can tell.

This is my favorite era of The Attractions as a crack live combo. They were making up fabulous arrangements (and rearrangements) for dozens of songs at a furious rate, in a seemingly almost co-equal creative partnership. 

The 2003 Rhino reissues of this period’s albums provided a lot of great live bonus tracks, as well as amazing studio outtakes. Nonetheless, I’ve continued to want a big double live LP that captures the thing that these guys were pursuing between “Armed Forces” and “Trust.” 

Many thanks to @tywilc and @louchelarue for helping me find additional sources for this mix. I’ve had a half-baked version of it sitting around for a long time. Thanks also to the band for playing nine “Get Happy” songs in a row in Liverpool in February 1980. That performance makes up a large portion of LP2.

I’ve balanced the volume and made EQ tweaks to tamp down sources with high-end stab, to add a bit more dimension to flatter sources, or to reduce a noisy frequency band somewhere. 

There’s not much “album sequencing” on this mix. I kept songs from the same shows grouped together, so there would be as few sonic change-ups as possible, and then sorted them into two, LP-length sequences, both of which begin with "B-Movie."

All source dates, cities, and guest-musicians are noted in the song title tags.

85-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

LP 1:

• B-Movie
• So Young
• Girls Talk
• Don’t Look Back
• Help Me
• One More Heartache
• Need Your Love So Bad
• Little Sister
• Temptation
• Secondary Modern
• Clowntime is Over
• New Amsterdam
• High Fidelity
• Opportunity

LP2:

• B-Movie
• Sad About Girls
• Big Tears
• Motel Matches
• Opportunity
• I Stand Accused
• Possession
• King Horse
• Girls Talk
• 5ive Gears in Reverse
• The Imposter
• Human Touch
• High Fidelity
• I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down
• Beaten to the Punch