Turbonegro 05/29/2005 Birmingham

Mom and I watched this on Xmas day together- this cock rocking performace of God's favorite rock and roll band: Turbonegro. I know that Jesus loves the Negro because I got this disc from Bishop O'Leery right after midnight mass, he patted me on the ass and squeezed my hand a little when I reached out to take the DVD. Boy, was I excited.


What's really exciting is that I couldn't find a post of this on you tube. Whereas everything else I've reviewed you pretty much could just as well look at it yourself why-the-fuck-you-care what I got to say, this is a performance of Hank & the boys you're gonna have to find somewhere else or rely on me to tell you how good it is. So here goes:

Vid is a single camera audience at a fair distance from the action. The captures above right are as close as the zoom ever gets and that picture where you can hardly make anything out shows you the scene from the distance of the shooter. It's a little bit dark when the lights are blue or green and sometimes a little shaky...about 3/4 of the time there's something easy to watch. Whatever camera is in use here has got a very sharp resolution. Sound is average...a lot of hall reverb but fairly good balance of instruments and no distortion...

I could go on and tell you how Turbonegro is destined to become the biggest band on the planet...how "I Got Erection" is my ring tone...how my sweat soaked denim dreams involve sailing the high seas with Happy Tom and Euroboy. I could tell you all that but... fuck, it's getting hot behind the keyboard and I've gone more than a few hours without some barefisted buggery...And so if you'll excuse me, I've got a Boy Scout meeting to get to...





All My Friends Are Dead
Back To Dungaree High
Sell Your Body (To The Night)
Don't Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker
Blow Me (Like The Wind)
Selfdestructo Bust
City Of Satan
Get It On
Wasted Again
Fuck The World (F.T.W.)
Age Of Pamparius
Prince Of The Rodeo
I Got Erection

Filmed by Mickie Rockchick & P.J.Peanutz.
Audio: Codec MPEG-1 Layer 2 Bitrate 256 CBR
Video: Codec MPEG2 Resolution 720 x 576 Framerate 25.000 Bitrate 4379 Format PAL Aspect 4.3

Prince and The Revolution 08/03/1983 Minneapolis

Benefit Show for Minnesota Dance Theater - First Avenue, Minneapolis. Putting this in into context: "When Doves Cry" was the #1 single in the US for five weeks, from July 7, 1984 to August 4, 1984... Six days earlier, July 27, 1984 was the release date for the Purple Rain movie. During Prince 's next tour, in November of 1984, the band was doing three to five night runs in north american arenas:

1. Let's Go Crazy
2. When You Were Mine
3. A Case Of You
4. Computer Blue
5. Delirious
6. Electric Intercourse
7. Automatic
8. I Would Die 4 U
9. Baby I'm A Star
10. Little Red Corvette
11. Loyce Houlton Speech
12. Purple Rain
13. D.M.S.R.

# Prince: Lead vocals and guitar
# Wendy Melvoin: Guitar
# Brown Mark: Bass
# Matt Fink: Keyboards
# Lisa Coleman: Keyboards
# Bobby Z: Drums

3.36 GB....mpeg 2...720X480
snatched this description from the internet nether regions:

the classic First Avenue 1983 concert which spawned the Purple
Rain album versions of 'I Would Die 4 U', 'Baby I'm A Star' and of course
'Purple Rain'. The recording has been sourced from the circulating video
footage, and because of this the audio suffers from the same glitches the video
footage does. These are slight, very minor and affect only a small part of the
show. They are most obvious during the opening 'Let's Go Crazy, 'When You Were
Mine' and again during the intro to 'Purple Rain'. Sabotage have attempted some
repair work on the tracks, and have done a pretty decent job of patching up the
incomplete parts with a different source recording. As this is sourced from a
video recording it has a slightly gritty feel to it and is certainly not as
crisp and clear as one would like - that said it is an improvement over the
various other releases this show is circulating on and is undoubtedly the best
we have to date. The show has quite rightly earned itself legendary status for
reasons including the birth of many Purple Rain tracks and Wendy's live debut as
a member of The Revolution - however mention must also be given to the
performance which is inspired and amongst the best of Prince's career. Full
length live versions of tracks such as 'Computer Blue and 'Purple Rain' are
special enough however add to the mix the only live performance of the
unreleased 'Electric Intercourse' and it's quite impressive how many unique
moments are stuffed into the 65 minute concert. And I shan't even mention the
closing funk jam of 'D.M.S.R.'.

Here's what came to mind as I was watching this: first of all, it is pro shot multicamera for the house video...It was hard to get screenshots of anyone other than Prince. He's basically on screen for the duration of the whole show. Highlights include a very rocking "Computer Blue"...and fantastic spacey keyboards throbbing away at the ending to "Delirious"...The drums could have been miked louder...the picture could use some saturation and contrast...but it's all generally noise free. The disc can hold the interest of casual viewers for a few songs or so.


. I imagine you can't find this stuff in youtube because of Prince's well publicized antagonism to the network. I wonder if there's some lowly websurfing Google employee whose job description is whack-a-moling Prince videos.

Sex Pistols 01/10/1978 Dallas 07/21/1977 Stockholm

One week after the Zeppelin show I just finished reviewing, the Sex Pistols took the stage in Stockholm. I'm not going to go any further than that. There are plenty enough books to tell you what it all means. The horse has been flogged to nothing but a stain in the road.

4.05 GB mpeg 2... 10800 kb/s vbr... 29.970 fps...NTSC... 720X480... DVD_LPCM_AUDIO

The disk I got has three things on it.
36:30 of Dallas 3:41 of "anarchy" from the So It Goes TV show(i think) and 20:16 of Stockholm. The quality of the footage is pretty good...Both shows are multi-camera with pretty much clean sound. There are upgrades of all of this, if you get this and want better...The Dallas has some occasional vhs farty tape rolling that came about in a generation loss. The European stuff is NTSC on my disc, so that tells you right there you can probably see this stuff a little more cleanly in boots from the original format. In fact, I have a whole disc of Tony Wilson doing a greatest moments retrospective TV special somewhere- pretty hazy memory but I think it's pretty sharp disc.
Strictly speaking, this Dallas show is not a bootleg. It's been released on VHS and DVD a couple of times over the years. The official Sex Pistols site mentions it as official product and offers a link to an amazon page. This DVD is, however, out of print- at least the region 2 north american version. Getting a new copy could set you back $100. While that's a little out of my price range, I would like to have a cleaner copy of this show. The quality of the you tube embedded below is a dozen times better than the disc that I possess.



Both of the shows are interesting to watch. The Stockholm is the better filmed of the two. The crowd is eager to get swept up into the phenomena and the camera operators run about the stage framing all the expressionistic camera angles that would become MTV ten years later. The colors are kind of fucked up. It took all my resolve to keep from photoshopping the screenshots to look better. The Dallas gig is sort of like watching a sporting event. You kind of only can see it once: all the while, you're wondering if the band is going attack the audience or the audience is going to attack the band. There's three cameras, but they are all cautious and distant.


The official fan site has a list of all the fifty or so shows that were done. I wonder exactly how many total minutes of Sex Pistols on camera there is prior to their split in 78? It can't equal more than a few hours. I've only seen bits of the many documentaries. Watching those with a paper and notepad would probably be the best way to get started answering it. For other full shows, there's Winterland, of course. Not much else seems to be traded. One of the heavyweight hoarders on tapetrader is the exclusive owner of three other gigs: 11/22/1976 Fagons,/07/15/1977 Beach Disco Halmstad, 12/11/1977 MAF Centrum Maasbree.



Came across THIS interesting bit of parasitism on the first google page for "Sex Pistols Dallas"...It's apparently some sort of aggregator of postings of concert videos-damn if people aren't working overtime trying to regurgitate content in order to funnel the surfers over ad links .

Led Zeppelin 07/17/1977 Seattle

As far as bootlegs go, in and of themselves, there are three recording artists whose identity as musicians really go hand in hand with the existence of unofficial recordings. the first of these, obviously, is the Grateful Dead. During the last dozen years of the band's existence, if not longer, you were not even a real fan of the Grateful Dead unless you exchanged live show cassette tapes with your brethren. Another is old Bob Dylan. Not long after he killed folk music and plugged into celebrity, he kick started the black market recording industry by simply being fascinating enough to his fans that they were interested in every stray word and note that could be captured from him. Coming in at third place is Led Zeppelin.

I'm talking audio boots here. There is an industry of Zeppelin bootlegs. As recently as 2004, Page was in a courtroom wringing his hands over people selling this stuff. There's an audience for it. Unlike a lot of acts, the songs sounded a little different every time they were played.

Preparing to write something about Zeppelin, I gave another look to their fairly recently released 2 DVD set, and felt kind of relieved. Famous rock and rollers lost their appeal for me a long time ago. And writing a blog about them is more than a little tedious. But I have my vague reasons. And so yeah, I'd rather be listening to nose bleed techno, or folk crunk grime fusion, or 1910-era gamelon recordings or anything that I couldn't have imagined yesterday. But frankly, I had the damn thing on in the background while I was working through some internet or another and I have to confess it didn't bother me one bit. Some of the Earl's Court acoustic stuff, in particular, comes across really well.



Beyond what the group put together to create the DVD set, there is really not a wealth of unseen video out there. The fan has three things to chase down. First, there apparently are more complete versions of 3 of the 4 shows that comprise the official release. Traders have assembled and reassembled the footage for them multiple times. And will go on upgrading them long past our lifetimes, seeing as the analog materials can be tweaked for hi def...higher def....3d def i.e. whatever consumer electronics is going to string us out with....Second, there are snippets of things, a few tv appearances- super 8 concert footage etc. Third... I believe that there are a few complete shows on the 1977 North American tour that cameras happened to be rolling for. I asked one of my Zep collector friend for a copy of one of them and wound up with the proshot Seattle kingdome






DVD 1: 1. The Song Remains The Same 2. Sick Again 3. Nobody's Fault But Mine 4. Over The Hills And Far Away 5. Since I've Been Loving You 6. No Quarter 7. Ten Years Gone 8. Battle Of Evermore 9. Going To California 10. Black Country Woman 11. Bron-yr-Aur Stomp
DVD 2: 1. White Summer / Black Mountain Side 2. Kashmir 3. Out On The Tiles Intro / Moby Dick 4. Guitar Solo 5. Achilles Last Stand 6. Stairway To Heaven 7. Whole Lotta Love 8. Rock And Roll


Now, my review of what I have is not going to be as useful as it could be. Apparently, someone has taken a disc that a bootlegger has professional mastered and played it back while copying it with a stand alone burner...Hence the menu that I snapped above. Automatically we are faced with a lack of quality from what was originally made. I can tell you that the original bootlegger, Celebration, had enough cheek to place their own logo in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. It appears there through the entire show. This automatically tells you that the Celebration release is not the one that you want. The video is grainy but watchable, the audio however, occasionally has split second drop outs and warbles that are very grating. Once again, I don't know if this is because of the Celebration title itself or the way my copy was burnt...



As far as the performance itself, there are arguments among the fans about how this rates compared to all the other dates for which there are recordings. I feel it's pretty fair. I was really impressed with Jones improvising all his little nuances and variations at the last half of "Stairway". Bonham really puts his all into the rolls on "Sick Again". But the encores are half-hearted, shortened versions of the songs. The "Moby Dick" straight into theremin wankery part of the show goes on for a seeming forever. People must have been climbing the walls.

Jackson 5 12/??/1984 Los Angeles

Never particularly personally interested in Jackson at any point of his career. Yet, the subject/object of this line of effort is fame itself, how it is created...or was created- as the power of making someone publicly memorable at the global scale is diffusing away. Links in a global brain...traffic on the impulse of the left click..The thought at the words: "Michael Jackson" something that is memorable- scale invariant: a dilation that characterizes a transition in phase. From solid into air. A thought that my own consciousness attempts to parasite on: "Michael Jackson"...Perhaps these ridiculous musings are right now flashing across the eyes of some distant stranger in their pursuit of their obsession with those words: "What is all this nonsense?", they will say "I only came here looking for the image of my idol: Michael Joseph Jackson"

Prince or Madonna or Bruce Springsteen or Sting or u2...corporations that owe the inconceivably vast magnitude of their fame to the dawn of cable television - the zenith of USA pop cultural lingua franca all across the globalization of reality. The respective merits of one of these Persona (TM) versus another. Eclipsed in any way that you might relate to them as a person in the room- some occasion for whom expression is a conflict with the moment. Like some brand or fashion of clothing that, in its novel early days, was evocative of something you could be identify with, and then, finally...it reaches such a breadth of ubiquity that it becomes the definition of banality to mention it in conversation or pretend that you can possess a relation to it. ("I was there first...I was there in the old days...") Even objecting to it is the recognition that you are subject to its power- It's better to remain silent, wait for a moment in which you can be present...Hope that it might soon just fade away.

The sound on this bootleg recording is very, very thin...as if it was recorded on a cheap plastic microphone with no dynamic range. Sometimes, when the singers hit the mike, there is some distortion. But even with all that into account, it's not actually painful to listen to..

And the video is proshot and edited from 4 or so cameras. time coded and the images faint and blurry, ghostly somewhat. I could see someone who was really into dance moves and choreography really getting some interest out of examining this show.

...Now I was searching for the you tube footage of this show and I couldn't find the exact match. That is to say, people have posted versions of the footage that is distinct from what I myself downloaded from the internet. Some versions are unedited- show footage from all four cameras side by side in the frame for the entire duration of the concert. Some versions are edited, but the quality is superior to the copy that I managed to find. If you are interested in watching this, that's the kind of version you want. Good luck finding it. I am posting an excerpt from a text file that accompanied the download- so that if you wind up with it as well, you will know that a superior version of the video still awaits your discovery:

"PRO SHOT, mainly from the front stage pit camera, the video and audio quality is 2+/3-,but
the simply outstanding performance of the Jackson 5 captures your attention to make this
a very enjoyable show for MJ and J5 enthusiasts. Lots of great dance moves from the
23 year old Michael Jackson. Michael was wearing his vertical sequence shirt,
with white pants having sequence patches on the knees. This is just months
before Michael went into the studio to record Thriller.

No official material. **Let's hope that the Jacksons will release this show officially one day.**

enjoy! - Shafi, ChargerSRT

; Checksums generated by ExactFile 1.0.0.15
; http://www.exactfile.com
; 8/22/2009 10:47:12 AM

8a5fa118f0b7b638c11fd7eb30a05ba6 *VIDEO_TS.BUP
8a5fa118f0b7b638c11fd7eb30a05ba6 *VIDEO_TS.IFO
bd45d73b6cdacd7c210ec7b805eb8003 *VTS_01_0.BUP
bd45d73b6cdacd7c210ec7b805eb8003 *VTS_01_0.IFO
866efbf7d4b0c42c9f1113116f97a981 *VTS_01_1.VOB

; 5 files hashed."

Spiritualized 06/25/2004 Glastonbury

Trying to get closer to time and space with this one. Watching Hendrix a few days ago, it reminded me of the efforts of the space brothers, their promise of free energy, and the elusive rainbow bridge. Energy has not yet become free, but images have, or at least nearly so. In my computer struggle to become acquainted with the 21st century, I spent a few hours scrolling through a few of the innumerable torrent trackers that are devoted to recordings of live music. When I chanced across a fair amount of seeders sharing a Spiritualized gig, I felt the impulse to see what J. Spaceman was up to. Last thing I heard was a promo copy of Amazing Grace in a bargain bin about the time of its release, decided it just wasn't for me, and have gone ignorant of the group since then. My internet search of "Spiritualized" ten seconds ago reveals that "ladies and gentlemen" is being given the live performance treatment. There was an all tomorrows UK show just weeks ago and another one upcoming.

GSpot tells me this is MPEG2 AC3 25fps 8221 kbps and 720X576

It hardly seems right to apply the word "bootleg", with all of its romantic history, to this kind of computer file, as all it really amounts to is somebody capturing a broadcast with their home recorder, sorting it out with a menu and chapters and tossing a pointer to it up onto the internet. But that's the present and the future. There are a dozen or so European festivals that receive extensive TV coverage and many times they wind up broadcasting full sets by bands. In the future, I'd imagine they will keep this content online and allow people to grab it when the interest strikes them, perhaps it will work if they keep the cost low enough that the convenience beats getting it from other sources



Ah...the rock festival, I feel that they have seen a resurgence of popularity. Hard to say why, really. For one thing, they are run better, I suppose. Take the Behemoth called Live Nation: it promotes over 22,000 events with total attendance over 50 million. It owns Download Festival, o2 Wireless, and has 50.1 in the production of Glastonbury. For a serious machine like that, I also imagine people's attraction to festivals is assisted with some intelligently planned marketing.

Not to get too dour, though, it is still really just a shitton of people milling about in a cowpasture.

Last words on Glastonbury I'll leave to Pulp's Cocker, who let go an honest impression chatting during the director's commentary to Temple's DVD: "It seems like when it was first starting out, it was people looking for a whole new lifestyle...a whole new way to live...and there still are a few of those people left...But now it's like, people go there for a weekend...It's like a little holiday from normal life...but they know: "Yeah, I'm going to go back to normal life right after it"...It's not like they think: "Yeah, I'm going to live in a teepee or I'm going to live in a field for the rest of me life..."







So yeah, This Spirtualized stuff was a TV broadcast, baring HD, 5.1, or alternate angles, it's as good as any official live disc product that the band could have chosen to put out...Except for saying frankly, I don't expect that this was one of their best gigs. I wasn't able to keep enough interest to watch this whole show. Writing this, I found an OK arenagrande interview, which features moments of a performance in a room with decent acoustics, the superb gospel background singers, and a far more energetic Pierce. That's what I wouldn't mind watching, with, say, some stark lighting and intelligent strobes. Overall, a lot of the 2008 audience depicts a lot more engaging act then this glasto affair. The pitchfork2008 stuff went online in pretty fair quality, but, once again, it's a festival setting, and the music has far more of a concert hall vibe.

If you are interested in audio live show bootlegs from Spiritualized, http://spiritualizedlive.blogspot.com/ has pretty much got you covered with more than 100 shows available for download!

The Jimi Hendrix Experience 01/09/1969 Stockholm

Setlist:

Killing Floor
Spanish Castle Magic
Fire
Hey Joe
Voodoo Child (slight return)
Red House
Sunshine Of Your Love


First off, some of the material on here has seen an official release: Sunshine Of Your Love and Red House were featured as part of: Experience: Jimi Hendrix (AKA "See My Music Talking" by Peter Neal)- a 2001 DVD/VHS release which I have not seen and believe is out of print.

This show was pro shot in a TV studio. The very first thing that strikes you is the vivid quality of the image. The analog videotape signal really had an electric looking contrast and has some strange overexposure effects. There's some compression noise in the blacks, unfortunately. I had a projector at one point and threw this up on the wall for a party. It was very striking, one of the best looking bootlegs that I own.

As for the performance itself, I've searched around a bit and all the reviews I've encountered say pretty much the same thing: Hendrix was not really feeling it for this occasion. He starts the show explaining that the band hadn't played together for six weeks and that they are going to play "oldies but baddies," suggesting his enthusiasm for his older material was on the wane. Mitchell and Redding often extend the verses by a few bars or just lay out to let Hendrix try to take the solos somewhere. But it never really comes.

As far as the greatest moments of Hendrix unreleased in his lifetime, both in terms of recording and performance, I have to say, sadly, I haven't had the time to really dig into it. Top 10 recommendations would be appreciated. I know a few things here and there. I was listening, for example, to "Spanish Castle Magic" at the Atlanta Pop Festival the other day. Its ride-the-feedback solo never fails to mesmerize. Overall, there are 1000s of hours of Hendrix audio recordings. I just had a online look inside of Black Gold and the second part's list of films and videos is a Hendrix Studies 101. Some guy at In from the Storm.com has done some meticulous years of research and gives you some idea of how big the continent really is. The estate, controlled now by his sister, I believe, is attempting to slowly present the material in a curated, well packaged way that keeps pace with casual demand. In contrast, other parties, some affiliated with Hendrix' deceased manager, persist in cranking out cds like hotcakes. I remember feeling overwhelmed just thinking about a recently released 22 cd set! I'm no slouch when it comes to obsessive compulsive disorder, but for Hendrix, at least, I'd really prefer to depart with someone else's reader's digest roadmap.

My intuition is that, of all of the recording artists of the twentieth century, Hendrix is one of the dozen most deserving for someone coming along and fashioning a high tech navigation database for every single recorded moment that remains. With dead authors, publishers eventually put out a collected works: with all of the ephemera, like mail correspondence and such, all of it annotated by the dates at which they were written. A certain nerdy, scholastic margin of society, whiling away their hours in the shadows of such monuments, attributes to them an almost supremely stunning beauty (guilty.) Now, the official Hendrix website has a history tab, with a daily diary of the last three years of his life in which there are links to the resulting recordings. It's nice, but it could certain use a little infusion of Web 2.0. A complete terabyte of the digital simulacrum of the Jimi Hendrix Experience may await us one day.

If you've been reading this blog for more than a page or so, you've gathered that I've been using these DVD acquisitions to comment on the achievements of Rock and Rollers on the whole, above whichever bootleg I happen to be talking about. It is very hard to find something about Jimi Hendrix that goes beyond what others have tried to say. I've discarded a number of drafts of this, finally deciding that I may have to wait to review one of my other Hendrix bootlegs before I can articulate something that approaches the subject.




The one thing that I always think of, in the context of Hendrix, has to do with the character of music itself: with music, talent consists of something more than ability. When the music of one celebrity creates more of a response in you than the music of another, why does that happen? It's more than mere technical know how. Music is more subtle than the Olympics- where a stopwatch or a number of pounds lifted can declare the world's greatest.

At the bottom of the day, I find myself thinking that it might merely be whoever is there to make the imprint at a critical time. Like Dr. Lorenz and the geese that followed his boots. Most people worship their childhood celebrities in some fixed image of a never changing ideal.

And of course, from thoughts of Hendrix, follow thoughts of "the summer of love", whatever that was, is, could have been, or never could have been. Of course if the task of meaningfully describing Hendrix seems to challenge our abilities, discussing revolutions..................capturing them in dead words on a page................I feel convinced that it would require an altogether total effort to get anywhere close to what is required. Although it is unlikely, perhaps some further images will force the occasion.

The Ramones 02/19/1978 Houston

Climbing out from under it with a plastic disc in my cold dead hand, I was going to try to spend a couple of hours doing something a little more vital than write a concert video review. Shit out of inspiration, I'm afraid. I have some friends that work at a Vegas show...I went and saw some Vegas show with dozens of people all dancing synchronized with music and lights. The audience sat stupifed and applauded at all the right parts, got up and wandered off in a million different directions and said it was great to whomever asked them what they did that day.

In 1978, who knew what the Ramones were? A secret society, more or less. Like everything that was ever really any good. Your friends let you hear it or it was at that one record store where all the fucked up people hung out. Maybe the radio wasn't Death on Earth at that point, but it was certainly nearly so.

The best quality of rock is the energy and Ramones had it in spades, and the energy is tempered with humor. All the aggressiveness or pretentiousness that kills most rock, for a broader audience, shouldn't stop you from the Ramones. The first four albums had their best CD era presentation on All the stuff vol. 1 and vol. 2 , these days it's all just a click away. Once those recordings have overwhelmed you, the next thing to do is to watch the end of the century which really manages a nice portrayal of these truly unique characters, all totally unsuited for anything else, somehow managing to create a world for themselves out of next to nothing.

As far as what i am describing here...here we have a single camera audience shot 1978 show. Shocking well done given the era. The audio from the camera has a very narrow frequency range and the highs are cut completely, no cymbals whatsoever. Surprisingly, it's very listenable, especially if you are capable of fussing with your player's EQ: there's no distortion, all the instruments balance real well. The cameraman is on Johnny's side of the stage and does a real good job of keeping track of the action. When he moves the camera, It takes a second or to for the autofocus to kick in...but it adds to the rawness and the feeling of the video. A great show. You watch it and wish that you were there.

show is 56:17 at 1.70 GB, MPEG2, AC3, NTSC, 29.9 fps 720X480... i did this tracklist on fast forward, so it might be a little off:

rockaway beach
lobotomy
blitzkrieg
i wanna be well
glad to see you go
shock treatment
he's gonna kill that girl
i don't care about this world
sheena
havana
here today
surfin bird
warm california sun
i don't wanna walk
pinhead
wanna dance
texas maxxacre
i wanna be good boy
down to the basement
sniff glue
happy family

I started this blog with no intention of sharing this stuff, but I realize that my clever commentary alone is not going to keep your attention. I clipped out a song of this show with vlc, converted it to a mov file with Super and put it up on youtube, I think I might do this with each post, leaving it up for a limited time and pulling it down with the next blog entry. I doubt the financial fate of those who own the legacy of the Ramones is going to suffer any negative impact. I doubt that this will incur the wrath of internet authority and fuck up all the pages I've posted to blogger...There's a million torrents and whole album blogs out there laying waste to the music industry- this is comparatively pretty harmless.



Watching End of The Century, made me wonder how much footage there is of the Ramones. Probably quite a bit, given the legacy of 2200+ concerts, 22 years and a museum in Berlin. Hopefully there's somebody out there who is meticulously cataloging it all. For me, the early stuff is always nice to see because it really evokes the time and place with its unique atmosphere. This Houston footage is probably one of the first full concerts. I found some guy at ramonesblog.com who's listed what he has collected:

1975-02-03 NYC-Rehearsal
1977-00-00 Swallow Your Pride, Pinhead (promo)
1977-00-00 Live in CBGB's, New York
1977-00-00 Swallow my pride, Pinhead, studio
1977-07-16 Houston, TX
1977-08-09 Don Kirschner Rock Concert
1977-12-31 Sheena is a punk rocker, Rainbow Theatre, London
1978-02-19 Houston, Texas
1978-09-13 Live in Bremen, Germany (FULL show)
1978-09-19 Old Grey Whistle Test (Don't come close, She's the one, Gone mental)
1978-12-28 San Francisco(with the Tubes)
1979-06-08 San Francisco, California Civic Center (California Sun; Pinhead)

Is there any band out there right now rocking as hard as the Ramones did circa 1978? I keep checking with the In the Red/ Hozac/ Goner set, to see if anybody happens to be carrying the fever, but I feel like the contenders are few. If you've happened upon this blog and are familiar with some under the radar hellraising, feel free to speak up in the comments...

U2 07-11-2009 Paris

Setlist:

1. Breathe
2. No Line On The Horizon
3. Get On Your Boots
4. Magnificent
5. Beautiful Day / Blackbird (snippet)
6. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / Movin' On Up (snippet)
7. Desire / Billie Jean (snippet) / Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (snippet)
8. In A Little While
9. Unknown Caller
10. The Unforgettable Fire
11. City Of Blinding Lights
12. Vertigo
13. Let's Dance (snippet) / I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight
14. Sunday Bloody Sunday
15. Pride (In The Name Of Love)
16. MLK
17. Walk On / You'll Never Walk Alone (snippet)
18. Where The Streets Have No Name / All You Need Is Love (snippet)
19. One

encore(s):
20. Ultra Violet (Light My Way)
21. With Or Without You / Rain (snippet)
22. Moment of Surrender


It's getting a little tiresome thumbing over all these nostalgia films of yesteryear, so I decided to crank up the time machine a little and see what is going on with the dinosaurs of today. It's pretty fascinating, really. What is the bootleg world like for one of the biggest rock and roll acts in the world? Lets take a look. As of September 2009, U2 is in the middle 0f the 360 tour. (U2 360 tour presented by Blackberry, to be exact ) The second leg of this tour is gearing up for North America, and I'm sure many fans are curious what to expect. The 360 part of the name refers to this tremendous round video screen that is situated above the band on a giant tripod. Apparently, it takes a couple of days to set the damn thing up and the neighborhoods of various cities have gotten a little peeved at all the racket. Of course, people are coming and money is being made. You can't have it both ways. U2 set an attendance record at Wembley- upwards of 80K a night two nights running.



So how is it? Thanks to a torrent file I found on the storm cloud laden Pirate Bay, I managed to get a look at some audience taper's Paris show. He's at more than a bit of a distance...but damn does his little Panasonic have a fucking ace 30X zoom on it. The sound is OK, it distorts on the vocals a bit, but it's rarely painful...I'd say it's likely that somebody with a better audio recording (looks like two audio tapers were also in the crowd) will find their work flown into this video before too long. And there seems to be another audience cam version out there as well. Some U2 fan with some extra time on their hands might end up cobbling it together into something that is very watchable. Not to say that that the video I got isn't worth viewing by itself, but it's certainly fan only.

The man with the cam has posted the description of his efforts at a really ace U2 boot site. He says it's his first bootleg, and you know what, buddy? My hats off to you. In my eyes, you're a star. As for U2 boot sites, there are at least a couple of them, and they are the future of popular bands- bands should just step in here and merge these with the official fan clubs and music delivery systems...Is there money to be made this way? Everybody that obsesses over what the best all time live version of "where the streets have no name" is gonna buy every official DVD that the band puts out. Even if it's a DVD of stuff they already have. Witness the Kissology release- package it right, and they will buy... I'm gonna rent that Beastie Boy Dude I Shot This and have a look at it, because bootleggers will evolve to productions like this as time passes. There is already a seven (!) camera mix of a U2 show- made entirely by audience members collected and edited together by an industrious fan. Of course, next time they should chat each other up beforehand and coordinate which band member they are gonna follow with the camera...


That's it for this blog for a while, I'm a little burnt. Ill be back with posts on Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and whomever else is famous enough to bring this blog some traffic. If you have any advice on how I can draw attention to this crap, please speak up and fill me in. This internet thing is still a little novel to me. I wonder if it's really gonna last?

Elvis 7/21/1977 Rapid City, South Dakota

"In the final analysis, stars are not created by their talent or lack of talent or even by their lack of talent, or even by the film industry or advertising . They are created by the need that we have for them. A pathetic need, arising out of a dismal and anonymous life that would like to enlarge itself to the dimensions of cinematic life. The imaginary life of the screen is the projection of this real need. The star is the projection of this need."

"there's got to be a reason... why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley.'"

I'm pretty damn articulate, but nothing I can say touches this: a television special filmed a few weeks before Elvis' death and televised shortly afterwords as "Elvis in Concert" . The soundtrack was released as a record album. The video, in contrast, has never been released on VHS or DVD and an official release is unlikely...



I found this as a 442MB divx file without too very much effort on some non-registration required torrent site. The sound and image is superb...Whoever was behind the origins of this file was definitely using some close to the source materials.

As far as unofficial live Elvis goes, THIS blog has links to 22 different audio recordings

I had a roommate who would throw this on for hangovers. I enjoy a occasional moment of lucidity every now and then, but there's such a thing as being a fucking nuisance...

I mean, look, in 1956, they called this guy a savage and threatened to arrest him for shaking his ass on stage. And then, much later, he got into the Aztec jumpsuit and walked down the last hallway. Where does the sun rise?...If, today, they were to call you a savage for loosening up---shaking up the whole god damned world a damn sight for the better, what would you be doing- what is there that's analogous to that today? What is there to be done?

Flipper 1/26/1983 San Fransisco

Allow me to try and weigh in with this one. I've been in the bleachers for a few of the groups that everyone knows. Were any of them the greatest gig ever? There's a lot of different meanings of the word "greatest"obviously. Let me paste in a list of the greatest gigs of all time...an official one, more or less, courtesy of the United Kingdom and its BBC.

1. Queen, Live Aid (13th July 1985)
2. Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock (18th August 1969)
3. Sex Pistols, Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall (4th June 1976)
4. Bob Dylan, Manchester Free Trade Hall (17th May 1966)
5. David Bowie, Hammersmith Apollo (3rd July 1973)
6. Bob Marley, One Love Peace Concert (22nd April 1978)
7. Bruce Springsteen, Roxy (7th July 1978)
8. U2, Red Rocks (5th June 1983)
9. The Rolling Stones, Hyde Park (7th May 1969)
10. Radiohead, Glastonbury (28th June 1997)
11. Clash, Rock Against Racism, Victoria Park (7th May 1977)
12. The Who, The Isle of Wight Festival (29th August 1970)
13. Pink Floyd, Earls Court (17th June 1981)
14. James Brown, The Apollo (24th October 1962)
15. Oasis, Maine Road, Manchester (27th April 1996)
16. The Beastie Boys, Brixton Academy (24th May 1987)
17. Johnny Cash, San Quentin (29th August 1969)
18. Brian Wilson Smile Concert, Royal Festival Hall (20th February 2004)
19. Elton John & John Lennon, Madison Square Gardens, NYC (28th November 1974)
20. Nirvana, Reading (30th August 1992)



The thing about a list like this is, all these groups are gonna sell you out when the time comes. You're gonna see their brand names next to Exxon or Ipod or Walmart and all their supposedly personal voice rock and roll image is just the public relations face of exclusion...of money and control. Once you put yourself in the position of expressing yourself for a living, eventually you're going to have to be a mouthpiece for someone bigger than you, bigger than a genuine, living person. Something that has the money to get your face on the video screen.

"But don't you like ---------insert famous celebrity name here-----?
"...like that guy? I don't even know him. I never even met him."


No, I never saw Flipper. My familiarity with the band consist almost solely with the Public Flipper Limited live LP ( recently reissued on both CD and vinyl). Those recordings are heavy... too heavy, in fact, most of them go on for far too long. "Hard Cold World" and "If I Can't Be Drunk, I Don't Want to be Alive." trumped Joy Division, Christian Death, and all of the posturing negativity legions with some truly belligerent rawness. There is a sense of provocation going on where the band is really going after the audiences. For me, personally, you get a good band playing in a room of 50 people- there are occasionally these moments of interaction where everybody is paying attention to everybody else. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hostile vibe- I've caught all styles of music where the whole room full of people itself seemed to be the show. Size is much closer to the key. More often than not, it's the smaller club sized shows that really make it.

Reviewing this Flipper cable access show was just an excuse to talk about Flipper. Because it's not even a live show, really- it's a TV studio performance with films projected on the band, primitive state of the art video effects, and some interview segments where the band attempts to evade answering every single question. The music itself is actually good. I've sat through it a number of times.

MVD has reissued a target video live show which supposedly captures Flipper going all out to make a real impression. Speaking of Target Video and the Greatest Gigs ever, how do you not have the Cramps at Napa on that list? The list is bullshit, my friends. One of the only performances that really made it...that really made it all the way...missing from the official top 20 ! A good thing that you and I were on camera for that one!