Eric Burdon & The Animals
Lowell Summer Music Series
Boarding House Park
Lowell, Massachusetts
USA
July 22, 2016 [2016-07-22]


PERSONNEL
Eric Burdon
Johnzo West (guitar / backing vocals)
Davey Allen (keyboards / backing vocals)
Justin Andres (bass / backing vocals)
Dustin Koester (drums / backing vocals)
Rubin Salinas (saxophone)
Evan Mackey (trombone)
(plus guest: see TRACKLISTING)

thanks to VIP member FREE_forever for pointing me in the right direction as far as the current "Animals" lineup is concerned

TRACKLISTING
01 - Spill The Wine
02 - See See Rider
03 - When I Was Young >
04 - Inside Looking Out
05 - Monterey
06 - Don't Bring Me Down *
07 - Bo Diddley Special
08 - In The Pines [Leadbelly]
09 - Mama Told Me Not To Come
10 - Space Oddity/Sky Pilot [David Bowie/]
11 - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
12 - House Of The Rising Sun
13 - We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
encore:
14 - It's My Life
15 - Hold On, I'm Comin' [Sam & Dave]

* with special guest Edgar Winter: saxophone solo

total duration = 81m:17s (2 CDs, for you oldtimers)

PERFORMANCE NOTES
As the first song is starting, EB can be heard (before he appears onstage) saying "Pretty good." He then starts the song, stops, and starts it again. It feels as if he weren't sure whether the mike was on. [If he'd started talking about grabbing women by the crotch, he coulda become president!]

Bowie seemed like a strange choice as an artiste for EB to cover - - - Leadbelly and Sam & Dave seem much more apposite. But in tandem with Sky Pilot, it seems to work. Maybe EB isn't all that in touch with the Bowie oeuvre: he reverses the titles of the song and movie, referring to the Kubrick film as Space Oddity and the Bowie record as Space Odyssey (!!)

There are a couple of lengthy quotes of (Hendrix) 3rd Stone From The Sun [including some EB scatsinging] during the extended instrumental break of We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.

RECORDING NOTES
source: audience

recording gear: Sony ECM907 one-point stereo microphone (X/Y array) > Canon ZR960 videocamera

recording location: about halfway back in the middle of the park - - - there really aren't any 'rows' to speak of (people just plop down picnic-style), but roughly in-line with the mixing board

recorded by: Isotope Feeney

AUDIO NOTES
imaging: stereo

sound quality: good (8 out of 10?)
(mp3 samples in comments)

TECHNICAL NOTES
generation: mixdown from MASTER recording

transfer lineage:
48 kHz / 16 bit stereo linear PCM files > HD >
Sony Sound Forge v. 11.0 (edits) >
SHEPPi Spatial Enhancer (split less echo-laden channel into L/R pair) >
Cool Edit Pro 2 (mix 3 tracks down to stereo) >
Steinberg WaveLab v. LE7 (EQ, reverb reduction) >
Sound Forge v. 4.5 (H2N insert piece)
Sony SpectraLayers Pro v. 3.0 (some 'woo-hoo's, louder whistling reduced) >
Audacity v. 2.0.6 (track splits) >
Traders Little Helper v. 2.7.0 (align SBEs, create level 8 FLAC files) >
bitTorrent >
DIME >
those willing to be Burdon-ed

format: 44.1 kHz / 16 bit [CD compliant]
For any recidivists wishing to go the CD route, there are alternate edits of tracks 08 (last track of CD1: fadeout and bumper) and 09 (first track of CD2: fadein) in a separate containing folder. They are numbered identically to the corresponding tracks in the continuous fileset, so if simply substituted they should enqueue properly.

file size: 441 MB

MIXING/EDITING NOTES
As I've discussed at greater length in previous uploads, I am not an adherent to the philosophy that recordings should persevere virgin throughout their lifespan. This raw material underwent a pretty good amount of mixing and a few iterations before I thought it sounded good enough to share. Every commercial release gets mixed down after it is [professionally] recorded; all the more rationale (IMO) for tweaking amateur (or at least non-authorized) recordings.

Plus: what�s wrong with trying to make something sound better??

sound design: Isotope Feeney:
The PA at this venue is very good. However, there is a big mill building at a right angle to the stage, and a school across the street. These reflective brick surfaces produced a kind of 'slap-back' echo, which I thought was kinda cool (and sonically appropriate for this artiste), but a bit overwhelming when it sat right in the middle of the stereo panorama. Not wanting to lose the warmth of such a 'natural' (as opposed to electronically created) echo effect, but neither wanting it to predominate the recording's sound, I sought to sequester it to one side of the stereo mixdown. My solution was to pan the L channel (the one WITH the echo) off to one side, and pan the other channel (WITHOUT echo) towards the middle. This I tried, but the resulting mixdown sounded weird (basically no independent R channel: just a mono mix w. echo and some extra audience applause to the L). My next strategy was to split the [echo-free mono] R channel into artificial stereo w. SHEPPi Spatial Enhancer

http://dallashodgson.info/articles/OpenAmbienceProject/

in order to synthetically create an ersatz discrete R channel for the stereo mixdown. May seem a bizarre approach, but (IMO) it worked: I inserted those 2 channels plus the original L channel into Cool Edit Pro and mixed them down to stereo. After I f*<#ed around for awhile, I came up what I thought was the desired result: acoustic echo audible (but not TOO audible) off to one side of a natural-sounding stereo mix - - - which is what we have here. (For anyone interested in a more detailed breakdown, PDF of mixing steps included in torrent.)

Due to the necessity of a miniDV tape swop (some of you older folks might remember) the beginning of one song (House Of The Rising Sun) was lost at c. the 55 minute point. (It can seem especially annoying when the compromised section is the artiste's signature song --- the one everyone will want to hear --- but rest assured, it's even more exasperating when what's lost = some rare, once-in-a-lifetime, never-done-before & never-to-be-repeated piece of music. Believe me, it's happened!!). In any event, the missing portion (c. 45 seconds) was reconstructed by inserting the matching section of a recording made with Zoom H2N from the same taping location. It's a pretty undetectable stitch: the head of the insert piece is crossfaded with the applause from the preceding song, and the audio of the H2N capture is heavily level-matched, EQed and compressed such that the timbre of The Singer's voice matches pretty well. The biggest giveaway is that the sound of the acoustic guitar gets 'fatter' at the point where the insert piece is folded into the videocamera audio.

There was quite a bit of what I ruefully like to call "audience participation." My 'favourite' was Laughingboy, who sat just to the left of me and who greeted the first recognized notes of each of his fave songs with a knowing, self-satisfied chuckle. Yikes! I edited him out as best I could, but he's still there somewhat. Ditto for the more egregious clapping, whistling and 'woo-hoo'-ing: I sliced out or (in SpectraLayers) reduced in volume as much detritus as I could, but some events were either too loud to be completely obliterated, or were in places where removing or reducing them too much would cut into the meat of the performance underneath. I've found that while you CAN completely remove loud crowd noises with SpectraLayers, what sometimes remains from that which was underneath sounds really 'hollow': swirly and metallic, more distracting than that which was eradicated! What often sounds more natural is to leave in a little bit of the offending sound, such that it seems as if it's coming from across the room (well, this = outdoors, but you know what I mean) rather than from right up on the microphone. Also, because this was recorded on a videocamera, built-in ALC (limiter) on audio levels - - - so if you take out too much of what's on top, what's left = really low in volume and needs to be boosted to match its surroundings. I did what I felt made sense. It's easy to get annoyed at people who are clapping or singing along [loudly!], but I have to remind myself that --- despite how much they interfere with MY special agenda --- they're probably more within their rights as audiencemembers (enjoying themselves at a rockshow) than I am (mercilessly exploiting the unsuspecting). [I exclude from this absolution people who are just rudely talking all the way through the music. Artists onstage are probably happy to see people in the crowd clapping along or singing, NOT happy to see them completely ignoring their performance!!]

Steinberg StudioEQ applied to bring vocals up.

Accusonus ERA-D lightly applied to take out some reverb, bring listener 'closer' to the stage.

Usual fades: up @ beginning and down @ end.

ARTWORK
in comments

YOUTUBE CLIPS (NOT mine: only a coupla songs, but better than what I was able to get from halfway back [I forgot that Eric Burdon = pretty short, hard to get a bead on over a sea of people's heads])

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QLtM9RbUA8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhBAlAj-gU

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPT.
A freezeframe (w. Edgar Winter) from one of the above clips was used as the raw material for the frontcover artwork. The undoctored screencapture is included in comments.

COMPANION PIECE DEPT.
For anyone who may have missed it --- but might nevertheless be interested --- Edgar Winter's opening set for this date can be found here:

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?returnto=%2Faccount-cp.php&id=577918

DON'T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD
Please don't splatter this anywhere else. If & when the spirit moves me, I'll TCB. Thanks.


Yours in the service of Audio [& other] Liberation
- IF -
January 2017