Barry Melton
Demo recordings from 1973/1974 for the album 'The Fish'

Soundboard recordings
Source: Liberated bootleg FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN (Planet Records 1995)
Lineage: CD > Plextor tool extractor pro > wav > flac

01 - Jessie James
02 - Mountains In Dreamland
03 - Looking For A World
04 - Babylon
05 - Love Is A Mystery
06 - Harbinger
07 - Sunshine
08 - Stranger
09 - Karma
10 - Could You Drive Forever?

Total time 33:37

This material usually circulates as part of the Mickey Hart & Friends bootleg 'Fire On The Mountain' which was originally uploaded by 38f back in 2005 and reseeded by mjcrossuk in 2009. Many thanks go out to both of them - also for a wealth of other amazing contributions here!

For this upload I Have chosen the liberty to present this part of Barry Melton demo recordings separately for those who may have overlooked them previously.

These songs are all from sessions for Barry Melton's first solo LP 'The Fish'. However, these versions were all abandoned and re-recorded several months later for the album release. These are also recorded with the same pool of musicians around the same time as Mickey's sessions, which is why all this stuff tends to circulate together. Among the musicians involved in these recording sessions were J. Garcia, B. Melton, R. Hunter, D. Freiberg, P. Lesh, M. Bloomfield, P.J. Creach, J. Cipollina - but not all of them are necessarily present here.

The recordings took place at Mickey Hart's barn in Novato, CA - supposedly overseen by Betty Cantor.

Different versions of these songs eventually ended up on the 1975 official release, except for Love Is A Mystery and Sunshine that did not make it on this record. Most of the finally released versions were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales with different musicians.

During my research for this upload I stumbled across this online article
http://hooterollin.blogspot.de/2011/10/fish-barry-melton-produced-by-bob-and.html
which I recommend reading for a lot of interesting background information. Parts appear to be anyone's guess as it seems to me the author never heard the original recordings presented here.

http://www.counterculture.net/thefish/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Barry-Melton/162745911009

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Trade freely! Do not buy or sell! Keep it lossless!

Uploaded to DIME by propylaen in March 2014.

Enjoy!

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