Jerry Lee Lewis/Freddie Hart/Bruce Mullen Live in Portland, October 27, 1972 Portland Civic Auditorium master reels>soundforge>flac>you audience recording On what was apparently a hard, raining night in Portland, a man named Leon Mach recorded the Jerry Lee Lewis/Freddie Hart show on a portable reel recorder. It's also Mach you will hear occasionally making comments on the tape. Mach was then a d.j. for station KOHU in Hermiston, Oregon and had often interviewed country stars for his station. On this night, his station had nothing to with the show-this was presented by KWJJ in Portland-but in a documenting mood, brought his machine and recorded not only the show but got the Killer backstage as well. Mach had recorded the killer rockabilly tune "You Hurt Me So" back in 1961 among others, and that song has been anthologized many times, most recently by Norton Records. Jerry Lee may have been the headliner, but Freddie Hart was riding pretty high at this point. "Easy Lovin'" was the #1 country song for 1971 & 1972-quite a feat. He had several other hits as well, including the terrific "Keys In The Mailbox". His backing band The Heartbeats are heard opening the show; they also back Bruce Mullen and Jerry Lee Lewis. Bruce Mullen's story is a lot more obscure, but he had a hit in 1968 with "Auctioneer's Love" (and again in 1974). "Heart" was his latest Capitol single in 1972; he was soon dropped afterwards. In researching this show, I contacted Mullen who remembered the gig-he had been asked to join the tour literally at the last minute and played several dates, including this one. He remembers Hart playing him a new song in the car on the way to the show, which he didn't think much of, but didn't offer that opinion. That song, "Trip To Heaven", wound up being a #1 song in much of the country. The Jerry Lee set is typically brief, covers country and rock territory, and is actually pretty engaging. A highlight is "Chantilly Lace", which was his current single. Although this is a somewhat distant audience recording, I consider it a miracle it even exists. I had acquired a box of Mach's tapes 20 years ago at a garage sale in which I discovered two reel boxes listing this show. Reel one was the Hart portion; the other box with Jerry Lee's set was empty. At that time I looked through all the tapes but never did locate the reel; I hung onto the box distressed but hopefully it would somehow turn up. Then in 2007 I tackled all the tapes again. It still didn't turn up, and I decided it was lost to the ages. However, a solitary reel was found in another box with other items, and I put it on. There it was! So, I'm happy I didn't give up... Technical notes: This took a long time to prepare. I used Soundforge Professional to split the show into the many tracks; there was a number of tape stops & starts and tape flips, and I eased those transistions; also some moderate eq to take off some of the high end harshness and give some low end as well. There was a 16 db drop during "Keys" that I had to rectify. Also, to facilitate a 80 minute cd, I dropped two songs from the opening Heartbeats set- "Delta Dawn" and ""Nice To Be With You". Finally, this was a one channel recording so it was copied to create a two channel mono.