Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones
Steve Weber & The Holy Modal Rounders
December 17, 1977 (1977-12-17)
Mountain Charley's
Los Gatos, California, USA

EX matrix mix from 1 channel soundboard and 1 channel AKG D1000 microphone reel master.
These recordings were shared here circa 2005 in their original unmixed form. This new 2018 version is a very much improved matrix mix. Many minor problem spots were smoothed over seamlessly and the tracking and titles have been improved with FLAC tags now added too.

There's a story that goes with this series of four shows from the San Francisco Bay Area in December, 1977. I did not own a working portable recorder when this show happened but I REALLY wanted to get a recording so I packed my very heavy Tandberg reel deck in my car trunk (for the record, the car was a 1963 Rambler Classic) to this storefront club on Haight Street in San Francisco, arrived during the afternoon soundcheck and politely asked if I could tape. The venue's sound guy directed me to bass player, road manager and defacto soundman Dave Riesch. He gave me permission to record, but did complain that they had allowed a lot of recordings over the years but never seemed to ever get copies later from anybody. I assured him that I would give him copies, though I had no idea of how long it would take to get them to him in a good enough version. To best assure that I got a full mix, I did one channel soundboard with the other channel a microphone. The tape did come out very well except that there was a very noticeable time delay between the two channels because the microphone was back at the front of house soundboard rather than close to the stage. Anyway, I became friends with them all throughout that long evening and Dave was nice enough to offer to put me on the guest list for three more nights later that same week at another small club, Mountain Charley's in Los Gatos with similar taping privileges.

I did not have any available time alignment capabilities during those pre-digital years other than running one channel through a second recorder to get the 2 channels better time-aligned and did not do any analog remixing either. It was just hard pans of each mix in the separate channels. I didn't do anything more with these recordings until the digital age when I saw Dave Reisch many years later (in 1998 when he came to my area backing Michael Hurley). I got his contact info and soon after that finally sent him digitally time-aligned but still un-remixed recordings of the shows. A few years after that I saw Dave again backing the Holy Modal Rounders on their 2001 "Bound To Lose" tour. He told me how much he loved these recordings because they included quite a few songs that he had completely forgotten about and was now doing again with his current band (The Freak Brothers). So then fast forward another 10 years and I finally made a new attempt to remix, retrack and better title all four shows. I had them all done except for the info files a couple of years ago so I called up Dave Reisch on the same phone number that I had from circa 2000 and he answered! I sent him the new version. It's taken another year for me to call him back again but I finally did. He said that hardly any recordings from that era sound any good but these are the exception. He had no song title corrections and had no problems with me sharing them here, although he was quick to say that he didn't have the rights to any of it. Anyway some of the song titles were "my best guesses" so any additional corrections will be much appreciated! (grner1 - www.dimeadozen.org - 2018-01-01)

CD1 - 70:59
101 [00:29] tuning
102 [09:04] Rotten Lettuce
103 [06:37] Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta
104 [04:59] Juanita [soundboard channel drops out for a couple of minutes of this song]
105 [04:57] In The Frying Pan, In The Bathtub
106 [05:28] Holy Shit I Don't Know… >
107 [07:09] Buddy Brown
108 [04:56] The Country Bump
109 [05:04] Fooey, Fooey
110 [05:07] What Made My Hamburger Disappear?
111 [01:55] Starlet
112 [06:29] I Hope You Don't
113 [03:50] Singing To The Dentist
114 [05:03] Toilet

CD2 - 58:19
201 [04:59] The Slurf Song >
202 [05:00] Robbin' Banks
203 [00:12] Clamtones set outro talk

The Holy Modal Rounders:
204 [07:04] Euphoria
205 [05:06] Cheetum County Blues
206 [00:25] talk
207 [06:37] Soldier's Joy
208 [05:49] Sea Of Love (with Jeffrey Frederick)
209 [00:24] talk
210 [03:51] Varsity Drag
211 [00:55] talk
212 [02:39] Cocaine Blues
213 [00:48] talk
214 [06:09] Blues In The Bottle
215 [00:49] talk
216 [07:32] Ringer - Stinger

CD3 - 63:17
301 [00:39] talk
302 [10:31] Boobs A Lot
303 [07:20] Pink Underwear
304 [01:18] talk
305 [03:46] Bird Song
306 [06:52] Lowdown Dog
307 [02:18] encore break fades immediately on applause // tuning before encores

Clamtones encores:
308 [07:09] Whiskey Willy
309 [05:36] Debbie Delight (Sugar In, Sugar On the Rim)
310 [11:23] Saturday Night
311 [06:01] When The Lord Come To Gather Me (Come Gather Me)
312 [00:24] end of show talk

Jeff Frederick - guitar, vocals (Clamtones tracks and one Holy Modal Rounders song noted above)
Jill Gross - vocals (Clamtones tracks)
Steve Weber - guitar, vocals (Holy Modal Rounders tracks only)
Robin Remailly - fiddle, mandolin, guitar, vocals
David Reisch - bass, vocals
Ted Deane - sax, flute
Roger North - drums
Richard Tyler - piano

Lineage: 1 channel Sbd + 1 channel AKG D1000 microphone > Maxell UD 35-90 reel > Tandberg 9241XD (3.75 ips, Dolby B encoded)
Transfer: Tandberg 9241XD (3.75 ips, Dolby B decoded) > Macintosh with Digidesign Audiomedia III sound card > Pro Tools (time alignment, matrix mix, minor "nip & tuck" edits, normalization & tracking - no DNR or EQ) > AIFF > Xact (Flac level 8 files, tagged with sector boundaries verified).
Enjoy and SHARE!