Grateful Dead - Acoustic Dead 1971

"And you thought you were going to hear rock & roll..." JG 1970/02/07

Every time I think I'm done with the Dead something else punches me in the face demanding to be constructed.

In 1971 the Dead released a live album named Grateful Dead, AKA Skull and Roses. That album was compiled from a string of shows in April of 1971 but in 1969/70 they performed a series of acoustic sets, some planned and some impromptu. This live set is culled from those unplugged performances. A precursor to 1980's Reckoning which I feel they could have released in 1971 had these shows been recorded properly.

To be up front and clear, this is not a compendium of every song they played during the acoustic sets. Nor is it the best version of each song I chose to include (more on that below) or even the best songs they did. I did this to please myself first and foremost and I am happy with the results. This has been my pet project for a while vowing to myself to not share it until it was as perfect as I could make it. It goes without saying that if the band had planned ahead with the intention of releasing an album like this they would have recorded at least a few shows on 16 track tape and possibly even sweetened those up with new vocals.

Because this is suppose to be a vinyl release I sequenced and edited each side to have a continuous live flow. When two songs did not flow into each other well I used clips of audience noise from an audience tape to create the missing flow. In most cases it worked fantastic, in others you can hear the transition from one source to another but the applause feels like it belongs to one or the other song in the transition.

I used setlists to help with sequencing, putting songs where they would typically appear in an actual show. Though I used them to suggest rather than dictate. I tried to sequence each side to be independent yet contribute to the whole. I tried to create a balance between slow and somber songs and the more upbeat tunes. This comp has gone through several complete rebuilds and many subsequent overhauls and tweaks until I was happy with the tracklist and version selection.

Side One

01 Don't Ease Me In (Trad.)
- 1970-05-14 Meramec Community College - Kirkwood, MO
Right from the start when I first heard this take I knew it had to be the opener. If only for Pig on the harp. An amazing take. This song was often the acoustic set opener but this is one of only a few times Pigpen played harp on it. One of the few songs they played consistently from the very beginnings of the band up to the end. I used the Bill Graham intro from 1970-09-20 where he introduces the band as the Acoustic Dead.

02 The Rub (Hopkins)
- 70-05-15 Fillmore East, New York NY, [Early Show]
From Pigpen on harp to Pigpen on vocals and harp. This comp was almost subtitled "Hey Pig!" Pig would normally sit on the side during these sets but Jerry or Bobby would call him out to the stage with that phrase. I had initially planned to keep as many of those in but they ended up getting cut for time. An old Lightnin' Hopkns song actually titled Ain't It Crazy but the Dead always referred to it as The Rub.

03 I Know You Rider (Trad.)
- 1970-06-05 Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA
This song would normally follow Don't Ease but I felt it slowed things down too soon so I bumped it back one. A great rendition that almost takes it into Morning Dew territory. During electric sets they eventually pair this song with China Cat Sunflower that would become a standard until the end.

04 Friend of the Devil (Garcia/Hunter/Dawson)
- 1970-05-15 Fillmore East, New York NY, [Late show]
A nice early rendition. Jerry is still not sure of some of the lyrics but the song is there. I often chose early renditions of songs rather than later ones that sounded too much like the record. There was a show (9/20/70 ?) that had both David Nelson and David Grisman sitting in and they were able to recreate most of American Beauty very closely. Nice, but is it interesting?

05 Beat It On Down The Line (Fuller)
- 1970-05-02 Harpur College, Binghamton, New York
I don't know why but I really enjoy this song in all its incarnations. In this acoustic setting it still flies and has a nice charm about it.

Side Two

01 The Master's Bouquet (Baumgardner)
- 1969-12-26, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX
At the beginning of the acoustic sets they weren't sure what to play so they dug up a lot of old folk songs, spirituals, country and blues numbers, many they used to play in their pre-Dead days. This is an old Hank Williams song.

02 Sawmill (Whatley/Tillis)
- 1970-01-31 The Warehouse, New Orleans LA
I added this one at the last minute. Originally I had Seasons in this slot but I felt I needed something a little more lively. Jerry plays electric guitar for this one. This show started electric then ended acoustic, the reverse of how they normally happened. This is also the only time the Dead played this live acoustically.

03 Truckin' (Hunter/Garcia/Weir/Lesh)
- 1970-09-20 Fillmore East, New York, NY
From the show with David Grisman sitting in. I've been led to believe that that is David on piano. A nice rendition somewhat close to the record if not slightly laid back.

04 Little Sadie (Trad.)
- 1970-02-28 Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, CA
A nice little folk song about a man who takes the life of some poor woman, runs from the law, is captured by the law and gets what 's coming to him. Death and murder songs seemed plentiful throughout the run of acoustic sets starting with Dupree and Dire Wolf. I had to pass on some great songs simply because all of the darkness was bringing the mood down.

05 A Voice From On High (Monroe/Mauldin)+
- 1970-05-15 Fillmore East, New York NY, [Late show]
The first track to feature David Nelson from NRPS on mandolin and harmonies. An old bluegrass tune by Bill Monroe.

Side Three

01 Black Peter (Hunter/Garcia)
- 1970-02-14 Fillmore East, New York, NY [Late Show]
Another song about death and bad luck. From Workingman's Dead a nice somber yet moving performance.

02 Silver Threads and Golden Needles (Reynolds/Rhodes)
- 1970-06-07 Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA
An old country standard first recorded by Wanda Jackson in 1956. The Dead played this often from '66 on but this is one of the last times it was played.

03 Cold Jordon (Rich)+
- 1970-06-07 Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA
An old gospel number popular with bluegrass groups like The Stanely Brothers. More commonly titled "Jordan" the Dead added the "Cold" to the title and spelled Jordan wrong. NRPS members sit in to add mandolin and harmonies.

04 Cumberland Blues (Hunter/Garcia/Lesh)+
- 1970-09-20 Fillmore East, New York, NY
David Nelson moves to guitar while Jerry plugs in.

Side Four

01 Dupree's Diamond Blues (Hunter/Garcia)
- 1969-04-05 Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco CA
This was soon paired with Mountains during the early sets of '69 and continued through November even after they stopped playing Mountains. Once the 1970 sets started they played this during the electric sets.

02 Mountains of the Moon (Hunter/Garcia)
- 1969-01-18 Playboy After Dark
This is another song that was on the must have list from the very beginning. This is my one cheater song. While it is live it is live in a TV studio. This was part of a Playboy After Dark episode. I wanted this version over all the others because it features Tom Constanten on the harpsichord. For a TV broadcast this was very noisy no mater which copy I used. I cleaned it up as best I could.

03 Katie Mae (Hopkins)
- 1970-02-14 Fillmore East, New York, NY [Late Show]
Another Pigpen spot. This time he plays the guitar to accompany himself for a true solo spot. During all of the acoustic sets, if Pigpen sang, he usually sang this one. He would sometimes do more but this was his goto song for these sets.

04 Wake Up Little Susie (Bryant/Bryant)
- 1970-02-14 Fillmore East, New York, NY [Late Show]
I rejected this song at first, it seemed a bit hokey maybe but I put it in after removing another song in this slot, Long Black Limousine, when I realized the set was already overloaded with death and murder songs. This helps lighten the mood a bit.

05 Uncle John's Band (Hunter/Garcia)
- 1970-02-11 Fillmore East, New York, NY
By the end of the acoustic sets in 1970 this song was more often than not the closing number. I got lucky and the audience tape I used for applause links ended with this song. They were playing it with full harmonies by then and I was able to use the end harmonies from the aud tape to supplement the end of this take to smooth out the transition to the end applause.

+ Features David Nelson and/or John Dawson from New Riders of the Purple Sage

Reality Notes

This post is one of my longer ones and it could easily be longer. There is so much to say about this that it could fill a small booklet.  Because of the size and scope of this project it is possible that I may have mislabeled a song source or two though I did my best to keep everything straight. Feel free to correct me if I did. I’m a freshman Dead scholar at best. If you want a more detailed description of the acoustic sets this is a great place to start.

A brief history of the 1969/70 acoustic sets starts in early 1969 when they started performing Mountains of the Moon. The song would appear randomly during the shows and was quickly paired with unplugged versions of Dupree's Diamond Blues, always played before Mountains, and Dire Wolf which also appeared during a few of these spots. By the end of the year Mountains had disappeared and after '69 Dupree was played electric and the acoustic sets briefly stopped.

But in late December the sets returned and came back big with longer sets and more songs and continued on through the next year. The first couple happened out of necessity due to equipment troubles or late musicians. By the end of the run they were longer and a bit more planned on with a typical show opening with an acoustic set then a short break then an electric set sometimes with a NRPS set between them. The length of the sets varied from show to show and not every show featured an acoustic set in the same spot, if at all.

At the start the sets were mostly just Jerry and Bobby but by the end the full band was involved with the drummers alternating from show to show. Pigpen always had a spot, usually Katie Mae but sometimes he would switch things up and throw a different blues number in the mix. They even did Operator four times but unfortunately those shows only circulate as audience tapes which prevented their use here.

There is a string of shows that featured the New Riders of the Purple Sage playing after the acoustic set. New Riders at this time still had Jerry and Mickey in the lineup. Often David Nelson and John (Marmaduke) Dawson would join them during the acoustic set, usually for a sacred number or a deep country cover. David Nelson would often switch from mandolin to acoustic guitar for Cumberland Blues while Jerry switched to electric. Jerry also played electric on this version of Sawmill.

When I started this project I had a few simple goals. One, no tracks that would duplicate songs from Reckoning or the two roughly contemporary live sets Live/Dead and Skull and Roses. I was fine with songs also appearing on Dead Set which was released about the same time as Reckoning as those would be electric and 10 years later. Two, the final run time must be between 75 and 80 minutes, long enough to justify a double vinyl album but still fit on one CD. And three was to not overload with too many new songs from the recent 1970 albums Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. Overall I knew my biggest challenge was to create a balance between clean recordings and good and interesting performances. Even after removing the duplicate songs from Reckoning and the other live albums and what appears here, there is still at least another single album's worth of songs leftover for a volume 2. I could have easily made a three disc set but then it wouldn't fit on a single CD.

There was another live album that most fans tend to forget about (I did). History of the Grateful Dead Vol. 1, Bears Choice was a single disc live album released in 1973, it contained some of these songs, one side acoustic and one side electric taken from Feb. 13 and 14 1970. I had chosen the same version of Katie Mae but it had some tape artifacts in it. The version of Black Peter I originally used had some flaws as well. The version of Wake Up Little Susie I originally chose was from a different show but this one was marginally better so I used these cleaner versions from the album though they weren't that much cleaner. I'm going to pretend that Bear's Choice never happened or it had different song choices. That album was assembled for Warner Bros to fulfill their contract, owing one more album to the label. So let's just say that this album filled that slot instead but released two years earlier.

It wasn't easy but I think I achieved that balance between good, interesting performances and sound quality but I still had to make a few compromises. When I started digging I found that this was not a good time for soundboards. Due to legal troubles, Owsley was absent for much of the tours outside of California leaving us with a lot of shoddy recordings and missing shows. The mixes were often unbalanced with the bass, drums and keyboards (if present) slightly buried but they’re there if you listen close. While it is fortunate that there was enough good sounding shows to choose from, the best shows were not always captured well if at all. The last three sets in November exist as audience tapes only. While I passed on using those for quality reasons there are a couple aud tapes that almost sound as good as the soundboards (here's a nice one from 11/08 I used applause clips from this one to help smooth out the song transitions). So, while the final results here may not be as pristine and perfect as I'd hoped, I'm very happy with how it did turn out and feel lucky to be able to pass it along to you.

The cover was constructed from several elements but the main center image comes from a floor mosaic by Gianlorenzo Bernini in the Cornaro Chapel Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria. John Hilgart over at Save Your Face recently used the image for a post and I fell in love with it and extracted the center image for this cover. I had originally planned to name this after the working title of Aoxomoxoa with the cover to the left but when I changed the image the title didn't work for me anymore so I changed it to simply Acoustic Dead. There were vinyl bootlegs with the same name featuring one of the many acoustic sets from 1970 so it all felt proper to me. And before anyone points out the the working title of Aoxomoxoa was Earthquake Country not County I felt county rolled off the tongue and fit the image better.

Bob Weir Band [Grateful Dead] - Acoustic 1978

Another rare acoustic set for The Dead. This time from 1978. The Dead were in the middle of a three night run in Chicago when they did this impromptu performance earlier in the day. Billed as the Bob Weir Band but really the band minus Keith, Donna and Bill.

The show was a benefit for the college's Hunger Week and saw the band dig out some old favorites and a couple of new ones and one original and that was a Bobby song from his recent solo album, Heaven Help The Fool.

I love acoustic music in general but acoustic Dead always seems like something special. Enjoy.

Side One
01 Whinin' Boy Blues
02 Tom Dooley
03 This Time Forever
04 Deep Elem Blues
05 KC Moan

Side Two
01 Knockin' on Heaven's Door
02 Big Boy Pete
03 Jack-A-Roe
04 Dark Hollow
05 Oh Boy

Reality Notes

Not too much more I can say about this one. It's a fun listen and unlike other shows I've edited This one was pretty tight with very few long bits between songs. The recording is a clean and decent soundboard which required no touching up. The song choices are mostly old folk and blues songs with one original. Many are making their first and last appearances.

I wanted the cover to have a bootleg feel. This is pre-CD era and their label Arista was still pushing them to deliver slick production product so this would never see an official release making it perfect bootleg material. Even before doing my usual trimming of between song chatter this was barely over 45 minutes long and would split nicely between songs five and six on a vinyl disc. For this reason I did not try to smooth out every edit. I imagine the bootlegger had rudimentary tape editing skills and just chopped what he could to make it fit on the disc.

Phil & Friends [Grateful Dead] - Unplugged '94

To ring in the New Year for the next three weeks I'll be posting nothing but acoustic Dead. This is leading up to something special I've been working on for a while now that I'm really excited about.

My favorite part of the Dead is when they just get down to it and play songs. I love the jamming if I'm in the right mood but the songs will always lift me up when I'm feeling a bit low. And in an acoustic setting we get more songs than jamming. I'm also a big fan of acoustic music in general so acoustic Dead seems to be a natural fit for me.

On September 24th, 1994 the Dead played an acoustic set at Berkeley Community Theatre. Billed as a Phil & Friends show, it featured everyone except the drummers. The setlist was a nice mix of old and new songs. As a prelude to a future Dead post that is just about ready I thought I would share this.

Acoustic sets were rare occurrences for the band outside of 1970 and 1980. The latter giving us the wonderful Reckoning album. I'm working on 1970. There was also a 1978 set that I will be posting next week. I've seen some nice alternate Reckoning comps out there. I encourage you to seek those out if you're into this but I don't see them as essential, just more of a good thing.

Tracklist

01 Tuning & Bob Weir intro
02 Walking Blues
03 Lazy River Road
04 K.C. Moan
05 Dupree's Diamond Blues
06 Childhood's End
07 When I Paint My Masterpiece
08 Attics Of My Life
09 Cassidy>
10 Bird Song>
11 Throwing Stones

Reality Notes

A nice, tight, one hour set that is a treat to listen to. It's nice to hear Vince just playing piano with no midi stuff in sight. Everyone is in fine form. Some songs to note; Lazy River Road and Childhood's End are songs that were considered for the final album that never happened. For those that have/are constructing that album I recommend this Childhood's End as the version to use. Phil's voice is a bit more relaxed which makes him easier to listen to. Cassidy>Bird Song is just wonderful. And a beautiful version of Masterpiece as well. The whole set is just a great listen. If you like acoustic Dead then you need this.

As always with live shows I trimmed the between song tuning and chatter to help the overall flow. I'm visualizing this as a gray market CD rather than trying to pass it off as an official release. That gives me some wiggle room on overall quality and editing.

I threw the cover together featuring a pic from the event. There was a better, clearer version but it was cropped at the top so wouldn't fill the cover like I liked. I think it completes the gray market feel I was going for. Enjoy!

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.

Grateful Dead - Barton Hall May 8, 1977

Ah, Barton Hall '77. A general consensus puts this show at the top of the must hear list of Grateful Dead shows. Not so much for the performance, which is great but no more stellar than your average typical Dead show, but more for the atmosphere and the recordings themselves. There is a warm fuzzy feeling that surrounds this show. Much of that is most likely due to the fine soundboard recordings of Betty Cantor-Jackson.

This show has been officially released on May 5, 2017 as both as a stand alone package and as part of a four show, eleven disc box set. If I could make one complaint about live Dead it is the long gaps between songs and this show is no exception. If you are there in the audience and in the heat of performance this is fine but on playback the gaps just take me out of the show until the band kicks in again.

I'm all for archival preservation but when this show was released it takes up three discs due to those long pauses between songs. What I've done here is to remove those pauses to make a smoother listening experience. For those songs that do not run into each other I have made new transitions to reduce the gaps to no more than a few seconds. Each set should fit on a single 80 minute CD though set one is awfully close. Let me know if it works for you and make sure to burn the disc with no gaps. I did not use the official release for this edit. Instead I used a matrix recording from the Internet Archive.

Set One
01 Minglewood Blues
02 Loser
03 El Paso
04 They Love Each Other
05 Jack Straw
06 Deal
07 Lazy Lightning >
08 Supplication
09 Brown Eyed Women
10 Mama Tried
11 Row Jimmy
12 Dancin' In The Streets

Set Two
01 Take A Step Back
02 Scarlet Begonias >
03 Fire On The Mountain
04 Estimated Prophet
05 Saint Stephen >
06 Not Fade Away >
07 Saint Stephen >
08 Morning Dew
09 Saturday Night(Encore)

For the cover I utilized elements from a tour poster.

Michael Hedges - Dreaming Out Loud

"I play the guitar because it lets me dream out loud."

~ Michael Hedges ~

Here's the follow up to my previous Michael Hedges post. This one has a similar history but I took a different approach to the tracklist. This is a covers only album. Michael always put a personal stamp on his covers and always performed at least a few during each show.

I had the pleasure of seeing Michael perform four times over the years before he passed and each show was better than the last. I'm still saddened when I think of what we lost but take great joy whenever I listen to what he left us.

01 Let's Get It Up
02 Buffalo Stance [90.winter]
03 Where Do the Children Play (with Don Record) [95.07.23]
04 Comfortably Numb [harp guitar 97.11.12]
05 Gimme Shelter [Strings of Steel]
06 Watermelon Man [85.02.16]
07 I Misunderstood [91.10.08]
08 She Drives Me Crazy [91.10.08]
09 Lucky Star [94.10.29]
10 Almost Cut My Hair [95.09.30]
11 Come Talk To Me [96.10.25]
12 Rock'n'Roll Part 2 [97.09.21]
13 Blackbird [81.03.20]
14 I'm Into Something Good
15 Head and Heart
16 While my Guitar Gently Weeps [97.07.06]
17 A Love Bizarre/Aquarius (with Michael Manring) [94.10.29]

Reality Notes

The overall quality of these tracks were on average a little better than the last Hedges comp so I did very little to this one. There are still some dodgy sounding tracks but the music comes through and makes it all better. Mostly I trimmed the beginnings and endings and a bit of volume matching. If I could, I removed audience noise as much as possible if only to tighten up song transitions.

All of the tracks are unofficial live recordings with the exception of Gimmie Shelter. That track comes from the out of print 1993 South American only release Strings Of Steel. A version of She Drives Me Crazy also appeared on that album which is of better sound quality than the one here but at the time I compiled this Gimme Shelter was all I had. And like the last project, my intention here is to present the comp as it is with only some editing to improve the flow.

A version of Love Bizarre appeared on Live on the Double Planet but by the time of this recording Michael was adding bits of Age of Aquarius in the middle which is why I have included it here.

If I knew the date of the recording I made a note of it but beyond that I have no other information about the sources. I also made no mention of the original artists. Most of them you will know but there are a few I had never heard until I came across these.

The cover was one of the first covers I made where I was very happy with how it turned out. Plain and simple but nice to look at. It does show its age to me and looks a bit primitive when compared to some of my more recent works but I still like it.

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.

Michael Hedges - Live on Planet X

In an effort to keep things fresh and different here I give you Michael Hedges. This comp was created at a time when the internet was mostly dial-up, Napster was still a pirate file sharing app, hard drives were measured in megabytes and CD burners were a brand new technology. Michael had only been gone for about a year or two. I was and still am a big fan. My very first CD I purchased (before I even owned a CD player) was Michael's Live on a Double Planet so it seems fitting that my first CD compilation was a Michael Hedges project that was meant to emulate that CD.

Michael Hedges was one of those rare breed of artists. Not content to play within the accepted boundaries of contemporary music Michael pushed the envelope of composition and acoustic guitar technique. He was an early pioneer of two-handed tapping most likely inspired by Eddie Van Halen and Stanely Jordan. He also employed endless alternate turnings, percussive and harmonic slaps and both fingerstyle and strumming with a pick to achieve his visions. He was a classically trained multi instrumentalist and deeply immersed in music theory yet there was a spiritual force the came through everything he did. And, he had the voice of an angel with a powerful set of lungs to boot. Michael was the real deal. Michael was only 43 when he passed away but he left a legacy that few can match.

If there is a what-if question attached to this comp it would be "What if Windham Hill released a posthumous follow up to Live on the Double Planet?" To emulate that album I tried to strike a balance between vocal and instrumental tracks and between originals and covers. I kept pre and post song chatter to a minimum and removed any gaps between songs. There are several songs here that have never appeared on any official Hedges CD in any form.

01 Eminence Front
02 Fusion of the Five Elements (10/25/96)
03 Follow Through (with Michael Manring)
04 Free Swinging Soul (07/06/97)
05 Rickover's Dream (10/25/81)
06 No Expectations (on harp guitar)
07 Sofa #1 (10/25/96)
08 India (winter 1990)
09 Ragamuffin (Kent State 1985)
10 Wondering Where the Lions Are (1981)
11 Point A » Point B (on TransTrem guitar - winter 1990)
12 Face Yourself
13 Aerial Boundaries (1996)
14 Like a Rolling Stone (07/05/97)

Reality Notes

**WARNING - NOT EVEN CLOSE TO STUDIO QUALITY!**

This was my first "mix tape" CD made on a computer. All of the tracks were downloaded through Napster or another file sharing app while working as a tutor at my college's computer lab and are all from unofficial, bootleg recordings. The disc was burned in a classroom that taught emerging technologies where the instructor's computer had an early CD burner. Because I did not have any other music production software at the time and the source material was less than ideal the finished product was a bit on the raw side. But hey, beggars can't be choosers and this was new Hedges. This was the best of what I could find at the time. Luckily I never delete anything.

Once this blog started rolling I started to think about what other projects I could do or have done that I could share. I wanted to avoid just doing my takes on the same things everyone else was doing. I had almost forgotten about this one since it has been in my digital library from the beginning but I have been wanting to clean it up a bit for some time. I took all of the original files and dumped them into my sequencer and proceeded to give this project the polish it sorely lacked.

Because these tracks came from file sharing channels there was very little info about where they were from. I included what little data was there. I could have done some research to track down more information and maybe find better sources but I wanted the project to stand on its own as it was. I wanted to improve it, not redo it.

This is more of a nostalgia piece for me so I made very little changes to the original. I kept the original running order. I trimmed the beginnings and endings to make a better flow from track to track. I cleaned, EQ'd and volume matched as best I could but with the quality of some of the source material I can only do so much. The final result is still a great improvement over the original and still a great listen. I do have a follow up to this comp which I will also post eventually. It too has a similar history and is in need of some editing and cleaning.

The cover is one of the first covers I ever made. To show its age I believe it was done with Microsoft Word for Windows 3.1.