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!

Van Halen 1-21-1983 Sao Paulo

There's not a lot in the way of Roth era Van Halen concert videos out there. It seems like there are about seven full shows being traded. The best quality footage is probably from the US festival. However, it's widely agreed that this is not one of the band's best performances. Someone has uploaded it in full here, so you can decide for yourself:


If you enjoy the 6 Roth albums, you are no doubt curious to hear some live material from that time. There are two sites that give you an carefully researched overview of what people have amassed over the years. HERE and HERE. You could, of course, see the band now. Obviously, however, twenty five years is a lot of time, and I expect that the shows are pretty different. This Brazil show demonstrates how much energy the band expended on stage, constantly running back and forth, sliding across the floor, jumping from things, Roth's trademark scissors kick. I wouldn't say that Rock and Roll is necessarily something that can only be accomplished by people under 30. For the majority of bands, though, dance moves and sex idol posturing are a big part of the on stage performance.

As far as VH boots go, It's interesting enough to hear the records with Van Halen playing guitar in some studio, but it's even more impressive when you are confronted with the fact that this guy would rip solid versions of these songs with all their inventive sounds and techniques...that he would do them on stage one song after the next. Its amazing, actually. After you have heard the albums enough so that you know all the songs, it's great to have live versions of them, where the players are in different balance with one other and there are different nuances to how they are played.

Of course, if that's what you are trying to appreciate, I'd recommend some soundboard audio boots over this video. Because the low end is non-existent and there is a moderate amount of tape hiss. It doesn't sound bad. Its just not all there... As far as which audio bootlegs out there are the best...I'm in the process of going over what I've heard. Check back and I might amend this post with some suggestions.

The image on this boot is also mediocre. It's pro shot, but there's a lot of generation loss. It's also one of those shows where they haven't taken the cameras into account as far as setting up the lighting for the show. It probably looked good from the bleachers, but the image is way dark on the video...somebody could tweak the hue and give it some reds and it would look a lot better. There is a two disc upgrade of this show. I haven't seen it and I don't know how it has improved


Absurdly enough, (given that I've spent some hours putting this blog together) I don't really get a lot of mileage out of concert videos. It's kind of a problem with the genre. Sure, it's involving to watch musicians make music right in front of you with thousands of people around you all having a good time, but it's something else to watch recordings of it on TV. It's not for everyone. Even when you have the best quality footage of a band performing really well, only seriously devoted fans and people who are particularly interested in stage performances are going to sit through these things multiple times. As opposed to purely sound recordings, which people will put on time and time again while they are doing other things. I'd risk supposing that concert goers are generally only a small fraction of the audience for music, Many times in life I've heard people tell me: "I don't like concerts; it's too crowded. When I want to listen to them, I can just as well do it in my living room."



This didn't prove to be the case for Van Halen in 2008, the pent up demand for people to see the Roth version of Van Halen grossed 93 million dollars for the band. Becoming one of the quintessential arena rock bands involved the continuous climb of making and selling 80 million records. It seems pretty safe to say that no band starting today can expect to sell 80 million records. Entertainment dollars are headed in different directions. People expect sound recordings for free. That being the case, will there be rock bands in 25 years that can fill an arena? Is being able to fill an arena the definition of rock music? I suspect that it's all over. If there are guitar players out there trying to top Eddie Van Halen, they're not gonna do it with respect to fame and fortune. Safe to say, Van Halen fans are content with the old songs that they have always loved. For them, 1983 will live forever.