Jefferson Airplane
Fillmore West?
San Francisco, CA
uncertain date, perhaps 30 August 1969
G audience recording

filler: unknown venue, San Francisco, CA, 1970

Lineage: audience master > wav > flac

Mastering: None except indexing of tracks.

Track listing:

Disc 1 (32:41)

01. Wooden Ships 5:46
02. Eskimo Blue Day 6:15
03. Crown of Creation 2:48
04. Plastic Fantastic Lover 3:36
05. Instrumental Jam [end cut] 6:25

filler:
06. We Can Be Together 5:20

The above timings are song timings, not CD track timings.

Background:
Some years ago i received a box of master reels to transfer, all recorded in the S.F. area
in 1969 and 1970, and including a variety of artists. I think most of these are in
circulation, how widely i don't know. They were all recorded by the same taper, and these
were the original reels.


Quality:
This is a decent recording with full sound, but the vocals are low, so they are hard to
hear at times. Jorma's guitar in particular seems overpowering in the mix, and when he
takes off the vocals nearly disappear. There are some speed problems during the first
track, slight pitch changes that are noticeable and annoying, but they get better as
the track proceeds. I can hear a few final minor variations during the second track
also but they aren't nearly as noticeable. I've worked on speed issues like this
before and it's time-consuming to correct them properly, so i left these unfixed.
They may not be as distracting to some people as they might seem to be from this
description.

The recording of "Plastic Fantastic Lover" suffers from the overdriven guitar and
there's distortion during much of that song.

There are cuts between several of the tracks, and several songs have the first few notes
missing. With these small reels the taper was probably trying to save tape by cutting
between-song tuning and chat.

Venue/date:
This one is problematic to date. It resides on a 3 1/4" reel that contains part of an
Oakland Coliseum show from 14 August 1969, but the Airplane recording wasn't part of
that concert. It occupies one complete side of that tape, and there's no way to know
a priori whether it was recorded before or after the Oakland date. My guess is that
it was after. I've suggested that it could be from the 30 August 1969 Fillmore West
show, but there's no evidence for this besides the fact that it's around the same time
as the other recording on the tape, and most of these tapes were recorded at that venue.

The filler track is from another reel, and as far as i know it's all that survives of
that recording. It sounds like the start of the show, and is at the end of a tape
that contains a different recording that seems to be from mid-to-late 1970. At any
rate, i have no idea where and when it's from, but it's reasonable filler for the
other short recording. There is better vocal/instrument balance on this one; it
sounds pretty good.

Further speculation on the dates of either of these would be very welcome.

We don't have many versions of "Eskimo Blue Day" in circulation, and it's one of my
favorite Airplane songs, so i really enjoy this recording despite its drawbacks.

***Disclaimer***
Because of the uncertainty in dating these, i should point out that none of these
tracks are released officially. By my count, the band has officially released zero
audio live tracks from San Francisco venues in 1969-1970. The video "A Night at the
Family Dog" contains two Airplane tracks from early 1970, neither of which is on this
tape. If anyone knows differently about official occurrences of this material,
please let me know.