John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana
Love Devotion Surrender Sessions
Unknown Studio (supposedly in California)
1973-??-??

Source-Liberated bootleg cd "Love Devotion Surrender Sessions"> EAC disc extraction> TLH WAV to Flac conversion>TLH torrent creation> DIME

John Mclaughlin-Guitars
Carlos Santana-guitars
Doug Rauch-bass
Larry Young-organ
Armando Peraza-congas
Billy Cobham-drums
Jan Hammer-drums
Mike Shrieve-drums
Don Alias-drums

Trk 1- The Life Divine Instrumental Jam
Trk 2- A Love Supreme (not included-seemed same as official release on LDS)
Trk 3-(2)- Naima
Trk 4 (3)-The Life Divine #1
Trk 5 (4)-The Life Divine #2
Trk 6 (5)- Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord
Trk 7- Mantra
Trk 8- Flame Sky
Trk 9- Unknown Song #1
Trk 10- Unknown Song #2
Trk 11- Acoustic Jam #1
Trk 12- Acoustic Jam #2
Trk 13- Acoustic Jam #3
Trk 14- Samba de Sausalito #1
Trk 15- Samba de Sausalito #2
Trk 16- Samba de Sausalito #3
Trk 17- Samba de Sausalito #4


I seeded this in 2014, and according to the dimebot archive davmar had upped his version in 2006. It doesn't appear that this was here other than those 2 times.
I purchased this many years ago in a record store (remember them??) in New York's East Village. It's supposed to be outtakes from the sessions that produced the LDS album, and indeed there are different versions and works in progress from that project here. The version of A Love Supreme on this was virtually identical to the one on the official release, so I didn't include that for the sake of not having this banned.
What you'll hear doesn't sound pristine-as in lovingly curated "mixed and mastered re-release extras", but it is pretty good quality, given the time period that this emerged from. My guess is that this was dubbed a couple of times from the original studio tapes. There's very little documentation on the boot case, so I guessed at the personnel as being the same people that were on the official release. Some of these songs also appeared on the Santana Welcome album of the same time period (Mantra was a bonus on a few remaster versions of the Welcome cd). It's difficult to know if these tracks were really being considered for LDS, or if the original bootlegger had access to some of the Welcome outtakes too. I'd guess that the Samba de Sausalito tracks and Flame Sky are from the Welcome sessions, so that would remove Larry Young, Jan Hammer, and Don Alias from playing on them. That would then mean adding in Tom Coster and Richard Kermode on keys, along with Chepito Arias on percussion for those tracks.
The Samba tracks are actually parts of one lengthy run through of that song. You'll hear studio voices giving ideas and basically learning the tune. There's no guitar on the track as it appears on the Welcome album, so whether this is Santana or McLaughlin playing the guitar heard here is up in the air. There's not enough distinctive guitar to really make that determination. That's also true of tracks 9-13. These are acoustic tracks, and it's hard to tell if there's more than one guitar or if that guitar is McLaughlin or Santana. Each, of course, is a very distinctive player who is usually pretty easy to identify, but that is not the case on these tracks.
Finally, the info file here is basically an edited version of the one I used in the 2014 seed, but you'll see that I've renamed the actual files for tracks 9-13 to more accurately reflect that they're Acoustic Ideas, rather than "Jams" which might normally involve more than one performer; and Untitled Fragments instead of "Unknown Songs"
Hope this proves to be an interesting listen. Remarkable to think that there was a time almost 50 years ago when a project like this would have been awarded a Gold Record for sales, which the original Love Devotion Surrender did actually receive.
Please support all of these great artists (many of whom are still with us) by purchasing their commercially released music and by going to see them live.
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