Friday, November 22, 2019

Bonnie Raitt - Philly 1972

This was my first and still my favorite Bonnie Raitt bootleg. But like many live documents there is a lot of dead space where the band is tuning or chatting among themselves which for me brings things to a crawl. So what I've done here is edit the between song sections to improve the overall flow. There is still some chatter but not enough to get in the way.
Paul over at Albums That Should Exist posted a version of this as well but we took different approaches.

Tracklist

01 Mighty Tight Woman
02 Rollin' & Tumblin'
03 Anyday Woman
04 Woman Be Wise
05 Thank You
06 Bluebird
07 Finest Lovin' Man
08 Big Road
09 Stayed Too Long At The Fair
10 Under The Falling Sky
11 Walkin' Blues
12 Can't Find My Way Home
13 Richland Woman Blues
14 Blender Blues
15 Since I Fell For You

Reality Notes

Like my Grateful Dead, Barton Hall edit my goal here was to fix the flow of the album. I'm sure live and in the moment this was an amazing show to be at but the between song chatter always takes me out of the recording. Also, when a song would pop up when the iPod was on shuffle you tend to get songs from live recordings that either start or end with a lot of dead space bringing the listening experience to a halt. For that reason alone I tend to leave live albums off my iPod but there are a few I love having around and this is one of them.

The cover is the original cover I received with my bootleg. This show has been "officially" released somewhat recently with a new cover but the contents are exactly the same as the bootleg.

Friday, November 8, 2019

KISS - Larger Than Life

[I finally cleared some space in my Mega account. I have a small handful of projects to post and one special project in the works but that won't be ready for some time yet. I'll try to space the new posts out in hopes the new one will be ready by then but I can't promise.]

In late 1977 KISS released their second live album, KISS Alive II, only 2 years and three studio albums after their previous live album Alive!. Because of the close release dates between the live albums they decided that the second album should only contain songs from the last three albums which led to not having enough songs for a full two vinyl disc set. To fix this they recorded five new songs and put those on side four making the album a three sides live one studio.

What if instead of the live album they just put out a new album. This is my answer to that question.

Side One
01 All American Man
02 Rockin' In The USA
03 Larger Than Life
04 Rocket Ride
05 Goodbye

Side Two
01 Burning Up With Fever
02 Wiped Out
03 Tossin' And Turnin'
04 Living In Sin
05 Wouldn't You Like Me To Know

Reality Notes

1977 saw KISS transform from the lean, hungry and mean underdog band from New York into the superstar household names often referred to as SuperKISS. After Alive II they released a best of package, the solo albums and two more studio albums before SuperKISS was brought down and humbled. During this time they relesed a disco single and the average age of their concert attendees went from 18-20 down to 12-16.

For this comp I took the studio songs from Alive II and fleshed them out with the leftovers from the solo albums. I did drop one song, a cover of The Dave Clark Five's Anyway You Want It. I replaced that with another cover, Tossin' and Turnin' which was a part of their setlist in 1979, from Peter's solo album to give him a vocal. KISS have done covers before but never more than one per album. It's for this reason I did not use New York Groove from Ace's solo album. We do have two Ace songs.

I tried to pick the most KISS sounding songs from what was left from the solo albums after my 1978 construction. What's left is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel. The final result is quite enjoyable and sits in nice between Love Gun and Radioactive.

For the cover I reconstructed the Alive II album cover with the new title.