Grateful Dead - Terrapin Station Live - 1977

Terrapin Station was the Grateful Dead's ninth album. While generally well received, the band, the critics and the fans were a bit perplexed, annoyed, even a bit angry about the production values of the LP in general. Especially the band.

After the folding of their own record label the Dead signed with newly formed Arista records. One of the contingencies set by label president Clive Davis was that the band must work with a producer on the next record. Something they hadn't done since their third album Aoxomoxoa. They settled on Keith Olsen who had just finished producing Fleetwood Mac's first LP with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Clive's one instruction to Olsen was that he wanted a commercial record.

Keith Olsen's production style clashed with the Dead's recording style right from the start. Olsen wanted the band to do 20 takes until it was perfect while the Dead would just play it until it felt good. Once principal recording was done Olsen layered on strings and horns in ways the Dead never did and pushed them to the front of the mix. It was this over the top production that prompted me to see if this project was possible. So what would it sound like if the Dead played the album live in its entirety with no overdubs?

01 Estimated Prophet [1977-03-18 - Winterland Arena]
02 Dancin' In The Streets [1977-05-15 - St. Louis Arena]
03 Passenger [1977-06-08 - Winterland Arena]
04 Samson and Delilah [1977-03-18 - Winterland Arena]
05 Sunrise [1977-05-09 - War Memorial]
06 Terrapin Station [1977-03-18 - Winterland Arena  (end coda 1977-12-29 - Winterland Arena)]

Reality Notes

To make sure that this construction was even possible I first had to confirm that every song on the album was performed live. Thankfully they were. My next task was to track down all performances and whittle them down to the best versions. I limited myself to 1977 which was the year of release for the album itself so the songs would be their freshest. Keith and Donna left the band in 1978 after the next album. Once they left Donna's Sunrise was retired from the setlist.

I trawled through the live Dead collection on the Internet Archives looking for the best sounding shows. I ended up going with matrix sources which consist of soundboard recordings synced up with audience tapes as they tended to have a better and fuller live feel to them.

For the core I used the 1977/03/18 Winterland Arena show. I chose this show because they played three of the six songs that night and this was the most complete Terrapin Station suite they ever played. Unfortunately this version ends with drums then segues into Not Fade Away instead of reprising and resolving the suite. To fix this I tacked on the end of the performance of this song from 12/29 after finding a good spot during drums to segue back into the song. A slightly dodgy edit but it works.

I then chose the best versions of the remaining songs that struck the best balance between performance and sound quality that would blend well with the tracks from 3/18. Sunrise proved the most problematic. Not because of poor performances but due to the fact that most recordings (even soundboards) had Donna's vocals mixed almost to the point of being inaudible. (I know some of you think that that would be a good thing but I mostly like her voice.)

Even though these are live recordings I did my best to simulate a studio album by trimming as much of the audience that I could. I did attempt to create a full live version that kept the crowd in but the results did not come out as well as I had hoped. I also did not attempt to edit these songs down to match the original album lengths. While my editing skills might be capable I find it hard to edit Jerry when he's in the zone. Which is why we have a 16 minute epic version of Dancing in the Street and an overall length of 55 minutes. Maybe that's a task for John Hilgart over at Save Your Face. He excels at getting to the best parts of a performance.

The cover is a collage of several elements from the original. I wanted to keep the original cover but also wanted it to be different. Love those turtles.

KISS - The Elder - 1981

I've had this project finished for some time but other projects kept insisting they go up first. The project I had planned for this week needs a little more time so finally here is The Elder the heavy version.

In 1981 KISS released their follow up to Unmasked. The first album to feature new drummer Eric Carr and produced by Bob Ezrin, KISS promised to deliver their heaviest album to date. On some levels they succeeded in spite of a couple of soft songs.

Some fans also noticed that some songs seemed to be connected with each other with a loose common thread plot wise leading to some speculation of a hidden concept album below the surface. Still not one of their more popular records, at least the boys were rocking again. It would take the departure of Ace Frehley and the entrance of Vinnie Vincent on the next album to bring the band fully back into the hard rock/heavy metal sound they were known for before the 80s.

Side One
01 The Oath
02 I'm A Legend Tonight
03 Mr Blackwell
04 A World Without Heroes
05 Escape/Partners In Crime

Side Two
01 Nowhere To Run
02 Dark Light
03 Only You
04 Down On Your Knees
05 I

Reality Notes

This is the final album in my KISS series. As much as I would like to be able to fix Dynasty and Unmasked we just don't have the material to do so. We could maybe combine the best of the two but then we'll end up with an album with more Ace songs than Gene and Paul songs and we still have to keep Peter happy. I'll look into it.

The Elder is the most contentious album in the KISS catalog. Recorded at a time when they were trying to change their teen idol ways the band had been promising in the press to record their heaviest album yet. To accomplish this the band hired producer Bob Ezrin. Ezrin had produced their iconic Destroyer album and the hope was that lightning would strike twice. Ezrin had other ideas.

Fresh off of his success with Pink Floyd's The Wall Bob Ezrin somehow managed to talk the band into dropping the metal album and instead record a concept album. While Ace felt they should keep to the original plan Gene and Paul sided with Ezrin. Gene sketched out the story line and recording began at Ace's home studio. When recording moved to a bigger facility Ace stayed home. And poor Eric Carr. His first album with the band and this is what they give him to do.

When the label was finally allowed to hear the finished album they were less than thrilled with the results. Records execs insisted the the track order be changed to put emphasis on the more commercial songs. Unfortunately this confused the story line which confused the fans and most likely contributed to this album being the only album in the KISS catalog not to achieve gold record status. Recent remasters have restored the original track order.

Before Ezrin's involvement and the rise of the concept album idea several songs were written that were intended for the heavy album. These songs were released soon after The Elder appearing on the European only best of compilation Killers. I've used these four songs to flesh out the album after removing anything that didn't rock. While that is not enough songs to truly fix the album completely to my liking it is certainly improved to the point of making the album enjoyable (still not a fan of World Without Heroes but it works better in this context).

Editing was limited to volume matching and a few nips and tucks. I did join Escape from the Island with Partners in Crime to create a single track by means of a hard edit that removes the last power chord from Escape and the first sliding intro note on Partners. I did this for two reasons. One, Escape is an instrumental track but it's an Ace track so I did not want to lose it but it seemed weird on its own. Two, KISS albums were typically ten songs each. By combining the two the track count was reduced by one giving us ten tracks, five songs each side.

This is a transitional album for the band. After Ace's departure they would go on to record Creatures of the Night, hiring Vinnie Vincent and removing the makeup. The return to a heavier sound and the taking off of the iconic makeup gave the band enough momentum to see themselves through the MTV years, the death of Eric Carr and into the new millennium with the reunion of the original lineup and the return of the makeup.

The background of the cover is a screenshot of the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary (Oblivion) from the Elder Scrolls video game. The archive also includes seven more covers for you to choose from. These include the original official cover, one alternate cover from a vinyl release and five more made by me. Take your pick.

Sources
Music from The Elder (1997 remaster)
Killers

John's Children - In The Perfumed Garden - 1967

It looks like Debbie was not as popular as I hoped, that seems to be her fate unfortunately. If you skipped that post you are missing out on a fine performance. Anyway, here is something a little more "hip".

John's Children were active for only two tears. During that short time they had several line up changes, released or nearly released three albums and numerous singles. In The Perfumed Garden could have been their third and final album and the only album to feature future glam pioneer Marc Bolan. Marc was only in the band for a fiery brief four months but during that time the band managed to record several singles and one album's worth of songs and was thrown off a tour for upstaging the headliners The Who who complained they were too loud and violent. Known as much for their outrageous stage performances as they were for their loud and raw musical style they foreshadowed both glam and punk long before either one was realized.

Marc Bolan was installed in the band by manager Simon Napier-Bell as a Pete Townsend type in-house writer and brooding intellectual figure. At the time Marc was a struggling unknown who modeled himself as a Dylan type folkie artist who had released several unsuccessful singles, the first under the name Toby Tyler before settling on the name Marc Bolan but he would not develop his distinctive vocal style until just before joining John's Children.

After leaving the band Marc would go on to form the underground hippie folk duo Tyrannosaurus Rex that would morph into T.Rex where Marc would hit it big everywhere but the United States. After replacing Marc John's Children continued on briefly before breaking up. Ellison and Townson would go on to form Jet and then Radio Stars during the punk/new wave era of the late 70s.

Side One
01 Desdemona (Bolan)
02 Come & Play With Me In The Garden (Ellison/Hewlett)
03 Sally Was an Angel (Bolan)
04 Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith (Bolan)
05 Hippy Gumbo (Bolan)
06 Mustang Ford (Bolan)

Side Two
01 Midsummer Night's Scene (Bolan)
02 Dan The Sniff (The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan) (Bolan)
03 Remember Thomas A'Becket (Ellison/Hewlett)
04 Sarah Crazy Child (Bolan)
05 Jagged Time Lapse (Hewlett/McClelland)
06 Hot Rod Mama (Bolan)

Andy Ellison: vocals
Marc Bolan: guitar
John Hewlett: bass guitar
Chris Townson: drums/guitar

Reality Notes

This is the next installment in my debut albums that never happened series. While this would have been John's Children's second or third album (with such a jumbled discography of reissues and compilations it's hard to be sure what's what) it would have been Marc's LP debut. Up to this point Marc had released two solo singles and two singles with the band. There was one solo single that was not released and one John's Children single that made it no further than the acetate stage, coincidentally they were the same song, Hippy Gumbo.

I discovered Marc Bolan and T.Rex in 1977 when I was 14. Here in the states Marc was not as popular as he was overseas. In his home country of England he was the next Beatles causing the equivalent of Beatlemania that was labeled TRexstasy. It took me a year to hear of his passing. He was killed in an auto accident in 1977, the same year we lost Elvis and Bing Crosby.

I was Rex obsessed and purchased everything I could find. Not everything was easy to find. It took until the CD era before I was able to find the Zinc Alloy and Zip Gun albums though I did have the bastardized American release Light of Love. While I had all the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums (Unicorn is still one of the most gorgeously recorded albums in my opinion) Marc's prehistory was mostly unknown to me. It took a trip out of the mid-west to Los Angeles where things were hipper where I came across a pile of CDs in a used music/comic book store that filled a lot of holes in my collection as well as not one but two books on Marc. I finally was able to learn the whole story. Still the only John's Children tracks I owned were the clean version of Desdemona and the half of the vocal version of Sally Was An Angel on the Beginning of Doves LP.

Once the internet happened and I found all of the nice people who share rare bootlegs and unreleased/out of print music I was able to finally fill my John's Children void. There was a lot to download but unfortunately it just confused things even more. Between six collections I had at least two copies of everything and several different versions of many of the songs. All of these songs covered the band's entire time of activity which meant that not everything was Marc related. I wanted to sort all of this out once an for all and see if it was possible to construct an album's worth of material that featured Marc's time with the band.

So, armed with a few meager resources that included the band's own website I loaded everything I had into my sequencer and chopped away. I compared multiple versions of each song choosing those I felt had the energy and best quality. Then I eliminated any song not from Marc's tenure. From the final song pool I ended up with twelve songs that I felt made a cohesive whole. I shuffled, rearranged and edited until I was happy. While not a long album. clocking in at just over 32 minutes, it does finally present what could have been a great album had the band been given a bit more time to mature.

Track by Track

Desdemona - The A side to the band's third single and their first to feature Marc there are two versions of the song. The original which appears here and a cleaned up version. The original version was banned by the BBC due to the lyric "lift up your skirt and fly". A new vocal was recorded replacing the line with "why do you have to lie". For our purposes we will call these the album version and the single version.

Come And Play With Me In The Garden - This song was released as a single. It uses the same backing track as the song Remember Thomas à Beckett with only slightly different lyrics and some additional overdubs. That backing track without vocals circulates as well.

Sally Was An Angel - This song exists in two different mixes. One with vocals and one without. Unfortunately only half of the vocal version circulates and that is tacked on to the end of Marc's solo demo version that is found on the Beginning of Doves LP. What I've done here is to edit the two versions into one by taking the first half of the instrumental mix and edited what we have of the vocal version (after removing the solo demo) onto the end to create one full version.

Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith - This is the first of several songs that exist only as performances from the BBC. While a non-vocal mix of a studio version circulates of this and a few other songs I tried to avoid using them as my goal here was to present as complete as an album as I could.

Hippy Gumbo - An earlier recording of this song by Marc was intended to be his third solo single. That single was never released. John's children rerecorded the song with Marc on lead vocal. Again this was intended to be Marc's third single with the band but it never made it passed the acetate stage. Luckily the band passed out copies to various DJs in advance of it's anticipated release.

Mustang Ford - One of two songs here that Marc would later rerecord for the debut LP by Tyrannosaurus Rex. This John's Children version was later reused after Marc's departure with new lyrics (not by Marc) titled Go Go Girl.

Midsummer Night's Scene - This was intended to be the band's second single with Marc and fourth single overall but never made it passed the pressing of 20-40 or more (no one is quite sure how many) test copies which the band distributed at their shows. The test copies have become prized collector's items with one copy selling for an astounding £3,700.

Dan The Sniff (The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan) - One of many songs Marc brought with him into the band. Originally titled The Lilac Hand Of Menthol Dan but rechristened Dan The Sniff by the band. They played it live but never had the chance to record it. After Marc left the group he recorded this version using John's Children as his backing band which is why we can use it here. The song was not released until the 80s and he never returned to the song after forming Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Remember Thomas à Beckett - Released as the B side to the Desdemona single it was slightly rewritten and released as Come and Play with me in the Garden. Neither this song nor Come and Play feature Marc but they were released on singles that featured Marc on the flipside of the disc so we can include them here.

Sara Crazy Child - The B-side of Come And Play With Me In The Garden. Marc would continue to play this song on occasion with Tyrannosaurus Rex but never recorded it for any albums proper. A BBC version by Tyrannosaurus Rex appears on the Across the Airwaves LP and other BBC collections.

Jagged Time Lapse - There are several different versions of this song that appear on many different compilations The final version appeared as the B side for the Go Go Girl single that was released after Marc's departure. Go Go Girl was Marc's Mustang Ford with different lyrics.

Hot Rod Mama - The final song in the set shows how much potential this group had. If Marc had stayed and taken the time to get to know his instrument more they could have been a tight knit group as this BBC recording shows. The original BBC recording has an announcer talking over some of the intro forcing me to rely on some creative editing to restore the intro to its full potential.

The cover uses a band promo pic and a logo found on a promo poster and an attempt at an homage to the pop art of the day that the Mod's seemed so fond of.

Debbie Gibson - Piano and Voice - 1991

As part of my efforts to keep this blog a little different here's something a bit out of left field. Debbie Gibson unplugged. Recorded in Japan a few months after the release of her third album Anything Is Possible this LP features Debbie alone at a piano. While recorded live in front of an audience the crowd is not heard except on the more upbeat numbers where they provide a rhythmic accompaniment by clapping along.

Debbie Gibson was different from the teen hit makers of the time. Not only could she play and sing well she wrote all of her songs and produced or co-produced her albums. Her stage shows at the time were large productions modeled after shows from Madonna and the like. It was only outside the U.S. and particularly in Japan where she was able to do shows like these.

Side One
01 One Hand, One Heart
02 Another Brick Falls
03 Sure
04 Will You Love Me Tomorrow
05 Without You

Side Two
01 Try
02 Foolish Beat
03 Lost In Your Eyes
04 So Close To Forever
05 Billy Joel Medley:
   a. Piano Man;
   b. New York State Of Mind;
   c. This Night;
   d. Only The Good Die Young;
   e. Leave A Tender Moment Alone;
   f. Prelude;
   g. Root Beer Rag
06 Crocodile Rock

Reality Notes

I found this bootleg on the Days of the Broken Arrows blog. If you really want to know what I did here check out the unedited version there. This came from a live solo performance that was broadcast on FM radio at the time. Being a live concert from the radio it included an announcer, an interview segment and stage banter. All of that was removed so all that is left is the music.

When Debbie broke through on the charts in 1987 I was impressed. While the music itself was not my thing she did write all of the songs and coproduced the album. She is also a classically trained pianist. I remember thinking at the time that this was someone to watch as they matured as an artist. Had she been allowed to grow on her own terms I really think she could have been the Cheryl Crow of her time.

At the time of this recording Debbie was spending more time in Japan while her popularity at home was on the decline. I encourage you to download this if only for the opportunity to see Miss Gibson from a different perspective. If anything this performance proves that she was more than a teen age idol and that she could play and sing as good if not better than all of the teen sensations of the time.

The man at The Broken Arrows blog did all the work on this. He split the original bootleg into separate tracks and did all of the work cleaning and mastering to make it listenable. All I did was edit out the crowd and stage banter before and after each song and reshuffled the tracks to make a better listen. I also included his original cover in the archive along with my own self made cover.

I was hoping that there would be enough songs on this so I could drop the cover songs but this is what we have. If someone could point me to another similar bootleg with more songs to fill the album up with, please do.