GRAHAM PARKER & THE FIGGS

personnel:
GP
Mike Gent - guitar, backing vox
Guy Lyons - guitar, backing vox
Pete Donnelly - bass
Pete Hayes - drums

venue: Paradise
location: Boston MA
date: 1996-10-13 [October 13, 1996]

source: audience MASTER
recording location: ??? (see notes below)
recording gear: ??? (see notes below)
lineage: ??? ( " " " )
total running time: 92' 56"
file size: 579 MB
sample rate: 16 bit / 44.1 kHz [CD compliant]
imaging: stereo
sound quality: 7 (out of 10)
recorded and mastered: Isotope Feeney


Promoting his then-latest release Acid Bubblegum.

(Audio was extracted from 'listening' CDRs, so there are fades out & in between disk breaks)

01 Turn It Into Hate
02 Don't Let It Break You Down
03 Soul On Ice
04 Weeping Statues
05 Fool's Gold
06 Local Girls
07 Daddy's A Postman >
08 Impenetrable
09 Sharpening Axes

10 Girl At The End Of The Pier
- - - band introductions
11 Back Door Love
12 She Never Let Me Down
13 Obsessed With Aretha
14 Take Everything
15 Stupefaction
16 Soul Shoes
17 Saturday Nite Is Dead
18 Get Over It And Move On
19 Cream [Prince]
20 Passion Is No Ordinary Word
21 Don't Get Excited
22 Around And Around [Chuck Berry]


PERFORMANCE NOTES
A goodly chunk of the offering is songs from his then-current album Acid Bubblegum - - - seasoned with some older favourites and a couple of interesting covers (from Chuck Berry to Prince: the gamut). Luckily the fresh material is really good.

RECORDING NOTES
I saw Graham Parker at the Paradise a number of times over the years, and it's hard to remember the exact circumstances of this particular recording. IIRC, I was in the upper deck (or second level or balcony or perch) on the lefthand side of the room, up at the railing. The upper decks on either side were my preferred taping positions. You could set up and lean on the rail, the PA was flown right in front of you thus you could just point microphones straight forward, and there was nobody between you and the soundsources (PA, stage). It wasn't always easy (or possible) to secure a spot there. These were preferred locations for earlycomers, and sometimes were roped off as reserved for VIPs: aaaarrrgh!!

So, based on intuition and whatever clues are provided by a careful listen, I'm going to say that this recording was accomplished with 2 Nakamichi 300 mikes (cardioid capsules) plugged into videocamera (specific make & model unknown at this time). Based on the wide stereo separation of audience applause and chitchat, I'm going to guess that at least one of the mikes was snaked down the length of the balcony ledge (one of my favourite procedures when I could get away with it) or else tossed over the railing to point straight down into the room below, to minimize the annoyance/distraction of audience blab being situated right on top of the music in a capture's stereo pan.

MIXDOWN NOTES
Neither do I have any specific recollection of this recording's translation to digital audio. A lot of times, while I had the equipment set up for such-and-such a raw material's transfer, I would grab whatever other videotapes were handy to run off listening copies of them, too. My typical setup would have been:

videocassette MASTER (pb on same camera used for shooting) > Pioneer SG-9500 10 band equalizer) > dbx 117 dynamic range processor (adjustments made 'on the fly' to compensate for auto-compression inflicted by videocamera's ALC limiter circuitry) > Sound Forge 4.5 on desktop Mac > CDR [unknown make & model outboard burner]

It was from these 'listening' CDs that the wav files used here were extracted.

Thus PROBABLE lineage for this upload =

audience MASTER > EQ > dbx 117 [dynamic range restoration] > Sound Forge 4.5 [digital conversion] > CDR > Exact Audio Copy [wav files extracted uncompressed] > De-Glitch frontend [glitches detected & repaired] > Sound Forge 11.0 [dropouts removed, other minor edits] > Traders' Little Helper [flac files level 8 created] > TLH [SBEs (caused by Sound Forge edits) fixed, checksums created] > torrent creation > www

WARTS (GRIT HAPPENS!)
Overall sound = slightly crunchy (maybe too loud for camera, even w. ALC?). GP's voice = a bit overdriven, as if the house PA were struggling to push his vocals past the band's loud stage volume. But (for me anyway) the somewhat 'down & dirty' mix seems appropriate for an artiste who got his start in the pub rock scene. GRIT ROOLS, OK...

Some distracting audience chitchat present, mostly between songs.

Sound gets suddenly muffled for about 3 minutes spanning the tail of track 07 and head of track 08. It sounds as if somebody unknowingly tossed something (jacket, sweater) over the camouflaged microphones on the ledge. I can't remember if that's what happened or how it got resolved, but luckily it = short-lived.

INSIDE PETITION
Please do not post this anywhere else. I'll make such decisions myself, when and 'IF' . . .

- IF -

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