David Lindley & El Rayo X
September 18, 1985
Wolfgang's, San Francisco, CA

stealth audience recording by Easy Ed

Audio Technica AT853 > Sony TCD6C (mono channels, Dolby C on) > Maxell MX 90 metal cassettes

transfer by Easy Ed: Sony TC-K71 (Dolby B on) > Sek'd Prodif Plus > Sound Forge 8 (24 bit, normalize, fades, track splits, bit depth conversion, export to .wav files) > 16 bit .wav files > FLAC level 8 encoding align on sector boundaries. No EAC, not burned to cdr.

01 Hands Like A Man 11:10
02 Follow Your Heart 05:45
03 El Rayo X 05:24
04 She Took Off My Romeos 04:52
05 She Doin' Something Wrong 06:21
06 Quarter Of A Man 05:20
07 Brother John 08:54 [tape flip tr07 6m16s]
08 "I'm high as a motherfucker" 03:55
09 Alien Invasion 05:22
10 Your Old Lady 09:06
11 Papa Was A Rolling Stone 10:49
12 Don't Look Back 07:26
[tape flip]
13 Pretty Girl Rules The World 04:15
14 Mercury Blues 05:50
15 Twist And Shout 06:01
16 Rock It With I 08:54
17 Ram a Lamb a Man 06:16

TRT 1h55m47s

Tape flip towards the end of Brother John resulted in missing a bit of the music - I did quick fades to made to cuts less abrupt.
For burning to cdrs I put tracks 1-7 on the first disc, the balance on the second - you're free to do as you like.

A scan of my ticket for the show is included in the torrent.

Wolfgang's was located at 901 Columbus Ave. in San Francisco, California. Almost immediately after opening in 1983, this 600 seat location called Wolfgang's (Bill Graham's middle name) was a hit. It's easier to list who did not play there then who did, but here is a brief list of those that did: U2, Midnight Oil, Randy Newman, Todd Rundgren, Jerry Garcia and Spinal Tap. In July of 1987, a fire broke out in the hotel above the club; the combination of smoke and water damage closed the doors on a Bay Area institution forever.

I recorded from the center of the balcony, quite far from the stage, maybe 150-200 feet, with my mike taped very near the ceiling on a column going from the balcony to the ceiling. The good thing about that position is that there wasn't anybody right in front of the mike screaming, clapping or chatting. The bad thing is that it was kinda far from the sound source, ie., the speakers. The guitar and drums come out clearly, the vocals are a little echo-ey but quite discernable. Compared to the entire universe of audience recordings, I would rate this a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. I offer it here because because we must have recordings of every note Mr. Dave ever played.

Since the original recording was made with Dolby C on, which adds a boost to the middle and high frequencies, yet the playback was done with only Dolby B on (which cuts high but not middle frequencies) you will find this transfer has a bit of boost in the mid and high frequencies.

I am very glad that in the 1980's I gravitated to using metal bias cassettes and recorded with Dolby C (or B) on. I could record a hotter signal, got greater dynamic range, and my recordings are brighter (NOT duller) than recordings made with Dolby off.

Read about Dolby B and C at Dolby's website:
http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/English_(US)/Professional/Technical_Library/Technologies/Dolby_A-type_NR/212_Dolby_B,_C_and_S_Noise_Reduction_Systems.pdf

from that webpage: "Dolby noise reduction is a two-step process:
Step 1.
When music is being recorded, it is encoded just before reaching the tape. The purpose of encoding is to raise the level of soft, high-frequency passages so they become louder than the tape's noise. During the trip through the Dolby encoder, loud passages (that hide tape hiss) are not altered. Soft, high-frequency passages (that tape hiss affects) are made louder than normal as they are recorded on the tape.
Step 2.
When playing back the tape, the sound is decoded by a precise mirror-image process of the encoding in Step 1. The loud sounds are left unaltered, while the soft, high-frequency sounds are lowered back down to their original levels. (You may have noticed that Dolby B tapes sound brighter when played without any Noise Reduction decoding. Now you know why! You are hearing the encoded sound, not the original. NOISE REDUCTION TAKES PLACE DURING DECODING. Tape Hiss is added to the recording during the recording process. In step 1 we learned that the Dolby encoder boosted (made louder) the soft, highfrequency passages before the signal reached the tape and before tape hiss was mixed in. During Step 2, the Dolby decoder doesn't "know," as it scans the signal coming off the tape, that tape noise has been added to the music–it just goes about the business of reducing the encoded sounds to their original levels, with the noise automatically getting the same treatment. The result? Completely restored musical balance but with less hiss in the reproduced sound (see figure 1).

You might want to apply some processing yourself to boost the bass - I find it disappointingly lacking. For myself, I used WAVES L3 Ultramaximizer and also boosted the bass as much as I could without wrecking it, but that is not the version I'm circulating. I am usually against offering original recordings with any processing. Just because you have some nice WAVES plug ins means you should use them on recordings before you circulate them, even if they make them sound better (hear me Bill Koucky?). That kind of processing is very difficult to reverse and I believe original source tape/transfers should be kept as unaltered as possible.