BOB DYLAN - Theme Time Radio with your host... *Special Post* #3

Originally I began this blog with a famous Dylan bootleg 'A Tree With Roots' and an associated email. During the blog life some of those posts have been officially released and were subsequently removed. I then included some additional posts to allow some leeway and ensure that the listing will be relevant for some time to come. 

For this special post #3 we return to Dylan but with a difference, Dylan is the disc jockey, this promo item was compiled by me some years ago. A celebration of Bob Dylan's DJ career on Theme Time Radio. It selects some of the best stories, guest spots, email replies and of course music that Bob played on his first series of the show.

THEME TIME RADIO WITH YOUR HOST BOB DYLAN

Best of Volume 1

The Theme Time Radio shows have all been made available on the Internet.

This post is a promotional compilation of shows that I recorded from the BBC 6 music digital channel using a Sony minidisk separates deck. That means like the other circulating shows these are also lossy but at present this is the only audio format these shows are available in.

It gives you an idea of why these programmes were so well received and unlike the official compilation releases that spectacularly seem to have missed the point of the original shows; this compilation includes ALL of Bob’s comments and links between songs, including the show’s introduction by Ellen Barkin.

If you want to hear what is so special about these shows, download and listen to the in-between song links for Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem’s “Whiskey You’re The Devil”

Best Of Volume 1 is compiled from some of the early shows from series one:

#1 Weather

#2 Mother

#3 Drinking

#5 Coffee

 

VOLUME ONE

 1.  MUDDY WATERS - Blow Wind Blow

 2.  JOE JONES - California Sun

 3.  JIMI HENDRIX - The Wind Cries Mary

 4.  IRMA THOMAS - It’s Raining

 5.  SLIM HARPO - Rainin’ In My Heart

 6.  FATS DOMINO - Let The Four Winds Blow

 7.  STEVIE WONDER - A Place In The Sun

 8.  FRANK SINATRA - Summer Wind 

 9.  JAN BRADLEY - Mama Didn’t Lie

 10. MEMPHIS SLIM - Mother Earth

 11. LL COOL J - Mama Said Knock You Out

 12. ROLLING STONES - Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The   

      Shadows?

 13. MARY GAUTHIER - I Drink

 14. JIMMY ROGERS - Sloppy Drunk

 15. JOHN LEE HOOKER - One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

 16. CLANCY BROS. & TOMMY MAKEM - Whiskey You’re The Devil

 17. SQUEEZE - Black Coffee In Bed

 18. OTIS REDDING - Cigarettes And Coffee

 19. LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS - Coffee Blues

 20. BOBBY DARIN - Black Coffee

 21. ELLA MAE MORSE - Forty Cups Of Coffee

The first episode of Theme Time Radio hour was broadcast May 3, 2006 on of XM Satellite Radio, a subscription-based satellite radio service. From 2006 to 2008 AOL Radio offered the show on broadband Internet connection.

Season 3 finished with the 100th show appropriately “Goodbye”, on April 15, 2009.

There were 101 shows, but 'Kiss' was an unbroadcast programme.

The original versions circulating on the Internet are from these satellite or streaming web broadcasts. Series one of the programmes aired in the UK from Christmas 2006 on through 2007. The first three series are still available on the Pirate Bay.

The shows are streamed frequently on the net see:

http://www.themetimeradio.com/cat/themetime/season1/

or hear the first five episodes of series one here via a stream or download link:

https://archive.org/details/bdthemetime1

If you just want to get a taste of what all the fuss was about, try my promo compilation here:

LINK

Below is a review of the first programme:

DJ Bob Dylan Plays Sinatra, Garland, Hendrix on XM Radio Show

By Rick Warner May 4, 2006

May 4 -- Growing up in the remote Iron Range of northern Minnesota, Bob Dylan was an avid radio listener. The songs, stories and news he heard from faraway places gave him a vital connection to the outside world.

"I was always fishing for something on the radio,'' he recalled in "Chronicles: Volume One,'' a memoir published in 2004. "Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life.''

Dylan is now contributing to that soundtrack with his own weekly show on XM Satellite Radio. Called "Theme Time Radio Hour,'' it features an eclectic mix of music from Dylan's personal collection that revolves around a theme like cars, mothers or whiskey.

Yesterday's promising premiere focused on songs about weather, from Muddy Water’s "Blow Wind Blow'' and Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary'' to Judy Garland's "Come Rain or Come Shine'' and Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind.'' The 18-song play list also included lesser-known performers like the Consolers ("After the Clouds Roll Away''), Sister Rosetta Tharpe ("Didn't It Rain''), Lord Beginner ("Jamaica Hurricane'') and Slim Harpo ("Rainin' in My Heart'').

Dylan must be the only disc jockey in the universe to play Dean Martin, the Prisonaires, Irma Thomas, Stevie Wonder (singing in Italian) and the Carter Family on the same show. Cousin Brucie, he's not. The show reflects Dylan's heterogeneous tastes; blues and jazz, country and gospel, folk and soul -- Dylan has assimilated almost every type of music and fused them into one of the most distinct and influential sounds of the rock era.

I'm sure lots of folks laughed when they heard Dylan was going to do a radio show. But this is no David Lee Roth gimmick, no washed-up rocker desperately trying to revive his career by becoming a DJ. (Roth was a flop as Howard Stern's replacement on CBS Radio, lasting only three months before getting fired.)

Dylan's passion for old-time radio, combined with his reverence toward American musical traditions, make this just the kind of niche program that fee-based satellite radio is made for. Sirius has Stern, Martha Stewart and Jimmy Buffett; XM's got Dylan, Oprah (coming in September) and Tom Petty.

The debut show opens with the sound of pouring rain, followed by a woman's film-noirish narration: "It's nighttime in the big city. Rain is falling. Fog rolls in from the waterfront. A night-shift nurse smokes the last cigarette in her pack.''

Dylan, in his gravelly, three-pack-a-day voice, describes the program as a conglomeration of "dreams, schemes and themes'' before introducing the first song by "the great Muddy Waters -- one of the ancients by now, whom all moderns prize.''

Before and after each song, Dylan offers tidbits and trivia that put the tunes in historical perspective. We're told that "You Are My Sunshine'' was written by former Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, that Elvis really wanted to be Dean Martin, that Judy Garland was from Minnesota, that Hendrix was "trying to write a Curtis Mayfield song'' when he composed "The Wind Cries Mary,'' and "Just Walkin' in the Rain'' was written by a Tennessee prisoner serving a 99-year sentence for rape.

"But, you know, for a black man in Tennessee in the '40s, rape could have meant just looking at a wrong white woman in a wrong way,'' Dylan reminds us.

Adding to the old-fashioned flavor are vintage radio jingles and sound effects. In future shows, Dylan will answer e-mails from fans and get contributions from guests like Elvis Costello, Charlie Sheen and Penn Jillette. I can't wait to hear what Sheen thinks of "Subterranean Homesick Blues.''

While the music alone is enough reason to listen, I'd like to hear more personal anecdotes and commentary from Dylan. Though he's notoriously inarticulate in interviews, Dylan can be a wonderful storyteller when he wants to be, as he proved in his memoir and the recent Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home.''

How many DJs, after all, can pull off an introduction like one Dylan gives to Sinatra's "Summer Wind'' ? Backed by the sound of a whipping wind, Dylan paints a graphic picture of those "hot, dry Santa Anas'' that fuel raging wildfires in Southern California.

"It's hard for people who've not lived on the West Coast to realize how radical the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination,'' he growls. "West Coast weather is the weather of catastrophe. The Santa Ana winds are like the winds of the apocalypse. But the summer wind that Frank is singing about may be a little lighter. Come on in, Frank.''

And welcome, Bob, to the magical world of radio.

BOB HARRIS - Country Show: June 3, 2021 (Flac)

I previously mentioned at the end of the Waterboys post that I would include some of my FM recordings, celebrating some of the greatest disc jockeys that the UK has produced. I've posted a Rodigan show, albeit one with a special guest and will return to his Reggae & Dancehall show in a future post. John Peel & Andy Kershaw will also feature but for now I would like to concentrate on one of the greatest DJ & TV hosts that I first listened to as a youth.

Bob Harris has been around since the early 70's and his career began in parallel with my growing interest in music. As a pre-teen that interest grew into a passion through early glam rock bands and artists like, David Bowie, Marc Bolan & T-Rex, Roxy Music, Slade and Mott The Hoople etc. whose singles were played daily on BBC Radio 1. The only two music TV shows at the time were 'Top Of The Pops' - and as the name implies, it played the chart hits of the time.

Much more interesting was the alternative 'The Old Grey Whistle Test' presented by 'Whispering' Bob Harris. On his show I discovered many of the classic artists (as they are now known) that a big brother or sister would pass down (via their albums) to their younger siblings. Bob became a de-facto substitute big brother, as I had no one older to shape my musical outlook.

British radio was a bit provincial in those days (apart from John Peel) and Bob Harris spread the word about many of the exciting new bands that existed far across the Atlantic ocean. 

On the OGWT I discovered the likes of Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Southside Johnny & The Asbury Dukes, The Steve Miller Band as well as Britain's very own Queen and a band that would become renowned throughout the world, from Jamaica - The Wailers.

When a new radio show was proposed for broadcast on BBC Radio 2 FM, to play Country, roots and Americana, including archive classics and modern recordings, Bob Harris was the perfect choice to begin presenting the new show on Thursday 5 January, 2006. The show continues to this day, now at a later time of 9pm. This posted show was broadcast on Thursday 3 June, 2021. Lineage details are included below and it's likely that the show is being made available world-wide for the first time in FM Stereo.

Much of the new music played echoes that of the past and Bob reels off a list of influences that Blackberry Smoke & The Steel Woods for example, invoke.
Some radio shows have a flow and feel to them that just work perfectly. This is one such programme. Turn it up loud and revel in the glory of American roots music. It's a wonderful show and though the internet has enabled new ways of finding music, never forget your radio has some of the most knowledgeable influencers in music. Bob Harris has an unerring ability to select a track from an album that inevitably turns out to be the best or one of the very best on that particular release.

The Country Show with Bob Harris
BBC Radio 2 FM Stereo
Thursday 3 June, 2021 / 9-10pm (complete show + bonus tracks)

Brand new exclusive live music from Blackberry Smoke, new songs, old songs and a whole lot more!
With a new album in the Top 10 in the UK and a tour just announced for 2022, Georgian country rockers Blackberry Smoke contribute three exclusive live songs to this week's show, alongside great new tracks from the Steel Woods, Brothers Osborne and Lukas Nelson! Plus classics from Little Big Town and Florida Georgia Line, the reissue of the week is from Hank Williams.

01. Florida Georgia Line - Round Here | Here's To The Good Times (Republic Nashville) 2012
02. Bobbie Gentry - Ode to Billie Joe | Greatest Hits (Classic Cuts) 1990
03. Blackberry Smoke - Ain't The Same (Country Show exclusive)
04. Little Big Town - Girl Crush | Pain Killer (Capital Records Nashville) 2014
05. Lori McKenna - The Way Back Home | The Tree (CN /Thirty Tigers) 2018
06. The Steel Woods - All Of Your Stones | All Of Your Stones (Thirty Tigers) 2021
07. Hank Williams - Tennessee Border | Pictures From Life's Other Side, Volume 2 (BMG) 2021
08. Blackberry Smoke - Hey Delilah (Country Show exclusive)
09. Gabby Barrett - The Good Ones | Goldmine (Warner Music Nashville) 2020
10. Brothers Osborne - Younger Me | Digital Single (EMI Nashville) 2021
11. Blackberry Smoke - You Hear Georgia (Country Show exclusive)
12. Lukas Nelson - Leave 'Em Behind | A Few Stars Apart (Fantasy) 2021

bonus tracks: 10 June (t13-14) & 17 June (t15-17)
13. Gretchen Peters - The Secret of Life | The Secret of Life 1996
14. Valerie June - Colors | The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers 2021
15. Kezia Gill - Country Song | The Mess I Made EP 2021
16. Son Volt - Reverie | Electro Melodier 2021  
17. Jakob Dylan - Nothing But The Whole Wide World | Women + Country 2010

Lineage: BBC Radio 2 FM Stereo broadcast > Denon Tuner TU-260L > Audacity 2.1.3 > WAV > FLAC 8

 LINK

#125 JANE'S ADDICTION - The Pyramid Club, L.A. 1986 (Flac)

The Pyramid Club,
Los Angeles, CA
November 13, 1986

SBD > bootleg CD "Live and Profane"
silver boot CD>EAC>FLAC

01. My Time
02. Whores
03. Pigs in Zen
04. Ain't No Right
05. I Would for You
06. Idiots Rule
07. Trip Away
08. Mountain Song
09. Filler: Then She Did (unknown date/location)

EAC & compression by terrapinstation 01/26/2001

In the early '80s, the insular Los Angeles underground music scene, made up largely of over-educated misfits and art-school dropouts, exploded from the violent impact of suburban hard-core punk and scattered into a thousand fragments. Some of the fragments-the American-roots thing embraced by bands such as X and the Blasters, the neo-sixties scene that spawned the Bangles-became quite popular both inside and outside L.A.

The self-described 'art' scene-depressed, black-clad musicians playing music almost as performance art, usually as an, ironic comment on the state of pop culture-produced a lot of bands and venues but not many fans. Basically, all but the most popular of L.A. art bands played to each other, to the 26 people on the guest list at the Anticlub on a Thursday night.

One of these bands, and by no means the best, was Psi-Com, whose lead singer Perry Farrell, was king of the ring nose dreads. Psi-Com broke up out of ennui after half the members left to join a religous cult, but not before Eric Avery auditioned for the band in 1986, playing one bass riff 45 minutes while Farrell improvised vocals. Psi-Com would never play another gig, but a few months later Stephen Perkins and Dave Navarro, the high-school-age drummer and guitarist for a local glam-metal band, joined the group, which named itself Jane's Addiction after the habit of a junkie friend of Avery's and Farrell's. (Jane, now clean, works as a secretary in Hollywood-her idealized portrait, as the Virgin Mary, is on the inside cover of the lyric booklet that comes with the Ritual de lo Habitual CD.)

By the end of 1986, the thrashings of Hollywood postpunk had all but withered away; what rose up in its place was plain old heavy metal again, and the heat that had surrounded local alternative music cleaved onto the retro-seventies hard-rock grooves you now hear on MTV. Guns N' Roses came out of the scene that formed at the club Scream, which happened a couple of times a week in a big, empty room under the Embassy Hotel in downtown L.A. Jane's Addiction, which by this time had acquired a heavy, metallic sheen to underpin Farrell's arty meanderings, was also wildly popular at Scream, where the kids didn't care how left-field a band was as long as it had loud guitars. The standard comparison in those days put them as Led Zeppelin to Guns N' Roses' Aerosmith, because Farrell's voice was shrill, the song structures powerful and abstract.

Jane's Addiction stood out as art music that metal kids could like too-"neometal" as easy to bang a head to as to contemplate to on headphones-and the success of the non-genre genre made it possible for other West Coast bands like Faith No More, Primus and Soundgarden to cross over without confining themselves to a genre either. Where the record industry tends to peg bands as pop, rock, metal or alternative, Jane's Addiction was all of the above.

In 1987, the band was signed by Warner Bros. Records for a sum large enough to stun the underground; in early 1988, it released a live album on local Triple X Records that included the classic "Whores"; in late 1988 it released its first major-label album, Nothing's Shocking, which included a song about Ted Bundy, a pile of metaphors for heroin addiction (a problem that has plagued all members of the band except for drummer Perkins) and an album cover that pictured Casey as naked Siamese twins with their heads ablaze. The nude videos accompanying the album were banned by MTV. Nothing's Shocking was nominated for a Grammy but lost out to Jethro Tull! 

In 1990 Ritual went gold in less than a month, and the band went from playing small theatres to selling out Madison Square Garden. The band was speaking to somebody.

Jane's rehearse as the Smiths, U2 and the Jesus & The Mary Chain look on

'Sweet Jane'

 LINK

Below is an edited version of one of the finest pieces I have read about a particular bootleg. This is the edited 'short read' you can find the original 'long read' here:
https://longreads.com/2017/11/13/bootlegging-janes-addiction/

"On November 13, 1986, two months before recording Triple X, Jane’s Addiction recorded themselves through the soundboard at The Pyramid Club in Hollywood. Located at 1743 N. Cahuenga, east of the famous Mann’s Chinese Theater, The Pyramid was one of many small venues where L.A.’s underground bands performed in the 1980s. Goth, post-punk, and art rock thrived at little holes in the wall like Raji’s, Club Lingerie, and Black Radio Club, and Jane’s Addiction taped themselves playing at many of them. It took a a few years for copies of their other 1986 soundboard recordings to stray far from the band’s personal collection. Once copies of the Pyramid show leaked, bootleggers released it in the early 1990s on unauthorized CDs like Live and Profane and Addicted, where it circulated widely and remained, for a while, the earliest live recording that most Jane’s fans had. For people like me, who hadn’t experienced the band in all their pre-fame glory, the bootlegs were a windfall.

The Pyramid show is searing. It’s the kind of unhinged rock and roll that built Jane’s Addiction’s reputation as one of Los Angeles’ best bands, and whose fame helped Nirvana and Pearl Jam make alternative music mainstream in the early 1990s. Now that Jane’s Addiction plays arenas and everyone from your surgeon to your grandma has tattoos, it’s hard to imagine these familiar things being limited to the subculture. But back in the late 1980s, before singer Perry Farrell embraced the true dark side of Los Angeles - namely, reality television and cosmetic surgery - and guitarist Dave Navarro leveraged his musical fame for that comfortable TV show money, the band was revolutionary.

Designing their own album covers and sharing clothes, generating buzz without generating much profit, shooting heroin and fighting on stage, Jane’s Addiction’s spooky mix of dark art and forceful deviance was enthralling, and the sense of its inevitable implosion only heightened the appeal. Back when the band handed a blank tape to The Pyramid’s soundman, Jane’s Addiction was L.A.’s own Iggy and The Stooges, and their recording of “Whores” that night is one the grittiest rock songs ever captured on tape.

The band had been referred to as “feeling’ man’s metal.” That seemed to fit. It was Jane’s Addiction’s cover songs that introduced me to the music of The Velvet Underground, Stooges, and X before I knew these were covers. And like an older sibling who lends you his favorite records and winks, You’re not a virgin anymore, it was Jane’s Addiction who showed me what L.A. bands like Dream Syndicate and Suburban Lawns already knew: that no matter how many of us Arizonans treated L.A. as one big beach and discounted its interior as a cultureless silicone implant sewed onto the movie industry’s chest, this city had a fertile musical underbelly that many of us had been missing, and it was thriving just six hours west of my Phoenix home. “Whores” changed me permanently.

Like most great rock songs, “Whores” isn’t complicated. It’s a simple metal guitar riff chugging over a dirty baseline in the key of B. Between guitar solos, Perry howls about a marginalized existence, “way down low where the streets are littered.” The popular rock songs from 1986, like Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” build themselves around clichés and sappy sing-alongs that encourage mindlessness and nostalgia. “Whores” has no glitter, no pretense. Instead of numbing you, it shocks you awake, taking listeners where few straight-laced, tax-paying citizens ever visit: the places you go to cop dope, and where prostitutes ply their trade. Although “Whores” isn’t sui generis, with no predecessor and no equal, it’s a unique artistic vision that resulted when a group of young musicians with different styles and ideas first started jamming together, and their recreational drugs were still working.

Unfortunately, the more I read about the band, the clearer the role drugs played in the rise and fall of their creative output became. All the songs they wrote during their first few months resulted from a unique combination of talent, vision and drugs - heroin specifically. And during the second half of their life as a band, heroin was the reason they wrote nothing new.

Jane’s Addiction’s early iterations performed “Whores” and songs like “Ain’t No Right” in 1985 and ’86 with a different guitarist named Ed Dobrydnio, and Matt Chaikin on drums. Their versions established many songs’ basic structures. When Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins joined in early ’86, Dave wrote stronger, more imaginative guitar parts and the band turned “Whores” into what it is today.

The new lineup fleshed out their songs at the Wilton House, the beautiful, run-down, 1910s Craftsman that Perry rented from two cops at 369 N. Wilton. Many artists lived there, including Eric, photographer Karyn Cantor, and the band’s namesake. “It was one of those houses where everyone in the music scene in the mid-80s seems to have done a lot of time,” Eric said, “where every single closet was rented out.”

“I remember showing up when everyone got off work,” Stephen said, “going into the garage, and writing all those songs - ‘Whores,’ ‘Pigs In Zen.’ It’s like that moment when you fall in love.” Residents kept guitars in the living room and beat bongos on the wraparound porch. People like Angelo Moore from Fishbone and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers came over to jam and hang out. “The first song Perry, Eric and I ever played with Dave together as a four-piece was ‘Whores,'” Stephen said, “and at that moment, for me, the sound of Jane’s Addiction was born. And it hasn’t changed since.”

After that, Jane’s Addiction wrote most of their first three albums before they even released their first one. Bootleg recordings reveal the truth about the band in ways that all the early magazine interviews and TV spots did not: That they experienced an extremely fertile period of creativity during the first few months of collaborating on that porch and in that living room.

Live and Profane surprised me. Its fidelity was excellent, and the band played with unbelievable fire. To me, this was rock and roll. No second thoughts. No overdubs to correct mistakes and make improvements. They played each song in one take, feeling their way through with their guts with the energy of a local band free to experiment with their sound before anyone expected anything from them.

I hunted for more Jane’s Addiction recordings. Before the internet let fans trade digital files from the comfort of their bedrooms, you had to search for hardcopy bootlegs. Because they’re illegal, not every store stocked bootlegs, but I gradually found more soundboard shows mixed in with the legitimate releases: from L.A.’s Variety Arts Theatre in 1987, and the John Anson Ford Theater in 1989. I loved the then-unreleased song “Kettle Whistle” from the Variety Arts show. That and another vinyl bootleg I had were the only recordings on which that song was available. Perry had conceived it with his previous band in 1985 and didn’t release a version until 1997. By then it had hypnotized me for seven years, and the bootleg performances were better than the official. Whoever this bootleg company named Totonka was, I felt indebted to them.

To me, live recordings frequently has immediacy that studio albums do not. Although soundboard cassette recordings lack the lush dimensions caught on a multi-track studio console and good microphones, live performances often have more fire. There’s power in a first take, and over-thinking can diminish it.

Before Jane’s Addiction played their songs enough for them to become rote, the band was still exploring their sound. On stage, Stephen experimented with different drums and rhythms. Dave soloed wildly and tried different guitar effects. Live, Perry experimented the most. He put more echo on his vocals, adding layers of lysergic reverberations to his already psychedelic lyrics. Lots of bands add reverb to their guitars and voices. Few singers used as much as Perry did in the early days.

At shows like The Pyramid, Perry went crazy with the echoes, turning knobs on his electronic processor to warp their frequency high and low and cranking the volume so high that he sometimes drowned out Dave’s solo. These hypnotic, pulsing frequencies drifted through the club, filling the space between verses and laying an eerie texture underneath the instruments that started loud and trailed away. “Pigs in zen, zen, zen, zen,” Perry sang, “Talking ’bout the pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs. Ooow!” Back when I took acid, I loved this effect. Even after I quit tripping, the effect enchanted me. It’s a defining part of Jane’s Addiction’s sound. You hear it on the best board tapes.

The bootlegs let us hear Jane’s Addiction at the peak of their power, a band not yet locked into their musical or destructive habits, a band unafraid to take chances. And if some weasel black market capitalists hadn’t leaked these performances, fans would never have been able to enjoy them. Which is to say: sometimes bootlegs perform a cultural service. As one classical music bootlegger told Stereo Review in 1970, “We ‘pirates’ - if you must call us that - are the custodians of vocal history and we’re doing a damn good job of it - a job you can’t expect record companies to do because they’re not in business for that.”

Board tapes made me a lifelong fan of live recordings. When you hear the crowd yell, you feel the electricity between band and audience. Of all the early recordings I’ve collected, The Pyramid show, thirty-one years after Jane’s Addiction made it, still sounds fresh and strange.

Located in a nondescript building between Yucca Street and Hollywood Boulevard, the owners called the venue The Pyramid Club on some nights and The Continental Club on others, presumably to draw different musical crowds.

Stephen Perkins remembered playing there in 1986. “At the time,” Stephen said, “Dave and I weren’t twenty-one, so we weren’t allowed into the club until the band was announced. Perry went and got us a six-pack of beer, and we went and drank it in a car outside the club, waiting to get on stage. Then the guy said ‘Jane’s Addiction!’, and the back door opened and we came running onstage. We had to vacate the premises right after the show.”

For reasons that remain unclear, Jane’s Addiction constantly taped shows. Maybe they treated live recordings as demos to circulate to labels. Maybe they wanted to capture their best takes for possible releases, or capture new ideas as they generated them: a bass line Eric came up with on stage, a melody they spontaneously jammed between songs.

The Pyramid show’s sound quality isn’t as three-dimensional as Triple X, but it’s equally inspired. As Jane’s Addiction often did in those days, they opened with acoustic songs, with bassist Eric playing rhythm guitar on “Slow Divers,” “Jane Says” and “My Time.” Before “Jane Says” Perry tells the crowd, “Here’s one we haven’t done in a long time.” Although they’d played it before, this is the earliest known live recording of what became their “Stairway to Heaven.” Perry delivers it with feeling, drenched in effects. Afterwards he says, “Alright, let’s get down into it now.” Meaning: play electric. Dave tunes his guitar. Someone burps near a microphone, and Stephen rolls his sticks across his drum heads, sending a cascade of trippy echoes through the air. Then they tear into “Whores,” “Ain’t No Right,” “Idiots Rule,” “Mountain Song,” and “Summertime Rolls.”

Still excited by these new songs, probably loosened by beer, Dave solos with a spirit you don’t expect from a 19-year-old. Perry screams “Owooo!” and grunts whenever it feels right, punctuating the space between verses the way his idol Iggy did in Stooges songs like “Down on the Street,” letting his voice trail into the distance.

Like me, Stephen Perkins recognized the magic of their early sets. This explains why, when the band reunited in 1997, they released this version of “Whores” on their miscellany, Kettle Whistle. And to think that teenagers chugging beer in a parking lot delivered such a furious performance.

1743 N. Cahuenga became many different clubs after The Pyramid. Last time I checked, the building sat deserted, as vacant as my youthful attempts at poetry. Fronted by a lone palm tree, cigarette butts collected below its white walls where the landscaping had gone feral. Cars pass on nearby Hollywood Boulevard 24 hours a day. Some transport their drivers to work. Others are filled with tourists going to photograph themselves on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2013, Jane’s Addiction finally got a star on the Walk. It’s number 2,509, located three blocks from The Pyramid."

If you have made it this far, well done. This boot marks the first quarter of the alternate 100 posted. The listing is as follows:

#01. JOE STRUMMER & THE MESCALEROS - Key Arena, Seattle, WA. 17 October, 2001
#02. BROADCAST - BBC Radio & TV Sessions (1996-2000)
#03. FELT - BBC Sessions
#04. NEW ORDER - Central London Polytechnic 1985
#05. TINARIWEN - The Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool 2017
#06. PRIMAL SCREAM - XTRMNTR Live, BBC Maida Vale Studios, London. 20 March, 2000
#07. The VERVE - Unreleased Urban Hymns
#08. TOM PETTY & the Heartbreakers - Capitol Records Tower, Hollywood. 11 November, 1977
#09. STEELY DAN - The 'Lost' Gaucho
#10. JOHNNY CASH & The Tennessee Two - Radio Broadcasts 1956-59
#11. RICKIE-LEE JONES - Theatre Carré, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 3 September, 1979
#12. CAT POWER - Black Sessions 2008
#13. The CLASH - Last Gang In Town (Rarities 1976-84)
#14. PJ HARVEY - State Theatre, Sydney, Australia. 19 January, 2012
#15. LED ZEPPELIN - MSG, New York, NY. (Matrix Version) 12 February, 1975
#16. BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE - Entering a New Ride (1997)
#17. ARCTIC MONKEYS - Earls Court 26 October, 2013
#18. LED ZEPPELIN - How The East Was Won 1971 (EVSD) Tokyo, Japan. 29 September, 1971
#19. The CRAMPS - Club 57, Irving Plaza, New York, NY. 18 August, 1979
#20. JEFF BUCKLEY - Knitting Factory, New York, NY. 4 February, 1997
#21. The CURE - Rock Werchter Festival, Werchter, Belgium. 5 July, 1981
#22. The VERVE - Hultsfred Festival, Sweden. 13 August, 1994
#23. The SMITHS - Demos & Outtakes (Mixed Locations)
#24. LINTON KWESI JOHNSON - Bersee Museum, Bremen, Germany. 27 June, 1980
#25. JANE'S ADDICTION - The Pyramid Club, LA. 13 November, 1986