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
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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
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!
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 havenot 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.
There is nothing on this site for sale and no links to anything that you can download. If I have embedded a file that has been uploaded to youtube, rest assured that I am not the person who uploaded the file, neither do I condone such behavior. The media discussed here are materials that have no existing commercial distribution. For many years, people have been making copies of these discs and sending to them to one another through the mail. All of this is facilitated by websites that are set up for that purpose, which I can refer you to if you are interested. The legality of such things is interesting to me, but I am no lawyer, and therefore I cannot tell you whether selling, trading, owning, seeing, or describing any of these things entails copyright infringement or criminal behavior. I am not too very interested in trading at the present time. If you have underground videos of things that are not rock and roll but more strictly subversive or psychedelic, I'd be pleased to hear from you. Keep it rolling...
if thinking is merely plagiarism, progress is mechanically reproducible
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evolution is a function of surprise
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WWW.MOTIVESBEYONDREASON.NET
an index to whatever sites I'm entering information into
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...
