Monday 10 August 2015

#43 BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - Boarding House, San Francisco 1975 (Flac)

Bob Marley and the Wailers
Boarding House,
San Francisco, CA.
July 7, 1975

KSAN reel #354 1/2 track @ 7.5 ips

 
After a warm up show in Miami, the Natty Dread tour began with a trip over the border to Toronto in Canada on June 8th; these early dates in June then covered the North Eastern states of the USA. After a seven day consecutive run at Paul's Mall in Boston, the tour broke for a few days with some much neeeded rest and the inevitable travelling time for the remaining dates on the West coast. Ten dates in California followed, beginning on July 4th with a four night stand at the Boarding House in San Francisco. One night at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland followed before finishing this North American leg with a five night run at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles. Four days later the group were in London for two dates at the Lyceum Ballroom, a show in Birmingham followed, before this short visit to England concluded in Manchester on July 20th.

This tour is notable for the significant change in group members, only Bob Marley (guitar and vocals), Aston 'Familyman' Barrett (bass) and Carlton Barrett (drums) appeared on the 1973 tour. Drafted in to take the places of Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer (Joe Higgs) and Earl Lindo were the I Threes consisting of Bob's wife Rita and Judy Mowatt formerly of the Gaylets (renowned Studio One singer Marcia Griffiths missed this tour because of pregnancy. Al Anderson took over on lead guitar, Alvin 'Seeco' Pattterson added percussion with Tyrone Downie on keyboard duties.

The only official release to date from this tour is the 'Live' album recorded at the Lyceum in London, this being it's 40th anniversary, yet another opportunity is being squandered by the record company in not releasing a deluxe edition of such a classic album.
Fortunately there are a further ten unreleased live recordings circulating from the tour. One of these is in quite desperate sound quality; the Roxy in LA, but the other nine recordings split between five audience and four sbd/fm sources are all worth collecting if you are a keen Marley fan.

This is the best sounding of those unreleased shows, from the last night of the four dates performed at the Boarding House in San Francisco. This is the latest upgrade, it has the best PreFM lineage and is the most complete. - thebasement67


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the original notes - edited: (with thanks to musigny23 for his work and upload)

In September 1989 I had the opportunity to copy a bunch of KSAN reels over a weekend. I had just bought my first DAT portable so I was able to do it digitally. In the 90s I traded a few DAT clones, circa 2000 CDr versions were mastered (the 48k resampled to 44.1k), and eventually, others circulated flac files via bit torrent. Over the years, as one would expect and I intended, this spread far and wide.
While digital formats make essentially perfect copies, as items pass through various hands, alterations of various sorts accumulate. Some can improve but most degrade the original data. Now that HD and dvd archiving have supplanted CD as have music servers and flac players for listening I can circulate the most direct possible version of this recording in its original sample rate.
In 2009 Sidewindersf circulated a pitch corrected version derived from a CDr source. If you have that version you could feel set and pass on this. However I noticed that version had each track normalized to 100%. It plays with maximum gain but it also reduces the dynamic range the analog master had. No Woman No Cry and Get Up Stand Up are the same volume that way, but NWNC is actually a much lower volume song live. This version preserves the original dynamic differences. It also wasn't normalized up to 100& because I think doing so can add an element of harshness to the sound. So, it won't play as loud as other versions, which some perceive as lesser quality. Also I reduced a slight hum at two frequencies, eliminating that particular coloration.

Revox A77 > Panasonic SV-250 DAT 48/16 (Maxell R120DM) September 1989
Panasonic 3800 > Weiss firewire I/O > OSX Peak 7 (editing, pitch, hum) > xACT

01. Trenchtown Rock
02. Burnin' and Lootin'
03. Midnight Ravers
04. Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)
05. Rebel Music
06. No Woman, No Cry
07. Kinky Reggae
08. Stir It Up
09. Lively Up Yourself
10. Get Up, Stand Up

Notes:
This is direct from the DAT made off the KSAN reel
Original 48k 16 bit
Pitch adjusted -28 cents
Hum reduced @ 60, 180 HZ
15.63 second patch track 1 start
Audible flaw (not diginoise) @ 01:30 of track 2
Slight flaw (tape dropout?) @ 01:25 of track 6

Patch info:
FM Recording & Editing by Jay Abrams (jra-sm)
Teac 4300 Reel to Reel 7" - 3 3/4 IPS > MacBook Pro - Audacity > CDWav > xACT

It isn't !00% certain this was a master reel although it's more likely than not. It is possible this is mixed from a multitrack master which did happen with some KSAN broadcasts, however most were live mixes straight to two track. It appeared that a new leader had been spliced on to the station reel. Possibly at some point some damage occurred and it was repaired in that way. The tape box noted a rebroadcast on 6/10/79.

LINK


Bob Marley & the I-Two's at Massey Hall in Toronto

10 comments:

  1. This is absolutely delightful. Thank you.

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  2. Documents from those mid-seventies tours are priceless! Thank you!

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  3. Thanks so much for this, thebasement67 - really enjoy your blog!

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  4. First of all, this is GREAT. I had the album at the time and listened to KSAN, but missed the live broadcast. I tried to check the .wav files with Trader's Little Helper, and got a message that the file "is not CD quality." EAC wouldn't let me open 'em to manually check for SBEs...but it burned to a disc just fine, and plays (and sounds great). And sure enough, I get a "tick" sound when the track transitions from one track to another. Not a big deal, but I figured I'd ask if anyone else had the same issue. So....anyone? Did you run across the same issue? This sounds great and I sure as hell can live with a "click" between tracks...but I figure there's a solution out there, somewhere. Thanks!

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  5. Okay...I may have figured it out and wanted to come back and share in case anyone else ran into the same issue with the files. I originally converted from .flac to .wav with Switch Sound Converter Plus. The default Encoder Option setting is "Auto (Preserves Original Format). I changed that to "High Quality (CD/DVD Quality)" and the .wav files it generated were recognized by Trader's Little Helper and EAC. I fixed the SBEs and burned a CD-R, and it played without the "clicks" between tracks. And again, thanks for this great show!

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  6. Thanks for your feedback draftervoi. I wondered why you converted the files to WAV before burning. I just burn the flac's to disc using Nero. I can't say I heard any clicks between tracks. I must listen to my cdr that I burned to check.
    The files I uploaded are straight from my HD so are exactly as I downloaded.

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  7. I use EAC to both rip and burn, and it doesn't convert the flac files for you, so I use Switch. Does your CD player play flac files? I've never tried it with my current set-up; the old one didn't play 'em and it never occurred to me to try it on my player. I'm not sure what was happening there with Switch, except that "Auto (Preserves Original Format)" produced a .wav that two other programs had issues with. I could burn it to disc but not manipulate the file to check for SBEs. Weird, but changing the setting fixed eliminated the issue. I listened to the show last night and I'm burning a copy for my brother right now...love this early Marley period!

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  8. Thanks very much for the post..

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