John Lee Hooker (1917-2001)
February 27, 1970
Reed College Community Center, Portland, Oregon


Lineage: SBD -> Master reel > cassette (1985, mono)

Transfer (2019 by grner1 & zuma11): Cassette > Nakamichi Dragon > Protools 12 (at 24bit/48kHz), tracking & trimming (no EQ or compression) > 16/44.1 > xACT 2.48 > flac

Cassettes courtesy of Steve Halpern
Thanks to grner1 for the transfer help


Length: 86:46

1. Letter To My Baby
2. "My Baby's Gone"
3. Serves Me Right To Suffer
4. Maudie, I Miss You So Bad Baby
5. "It's Alright"
6. Dimples
7. Night Time Is The Right Time
8. Boom Boom
9. "Come On Home"
10. Money
11. Crawling King Snake
12. Boogie Chillin'

intermission

13. Country Boy
14. Hobo Blues
15. "Five Long Years/I've Got The Blues"
16. I Feel Good
17. Sinner's Prayer
18. "Hey Hey - It's Alright"
19. Come Back Baby
20. "Talk To Me - It's Alright"


Notes: The songs in quotes are unknown titles to me. Songs 5, 9, 18 & 20 might be improvised.

A little background on these recordings:

In late 2019, fellow Neil Young fan and Reed College alumnus, Jim B contacted me. He said that Reed College alum Steve Halpern had a group of late 60's/early 70's Reed College recordings of Reverend Gary Davis, John Lee Hooker, John Fahey & Robbie Basho that needed transferring.

In 1985, Steve found the recordings among a cache of reels in a Reed College library backroom while researching poet Lew Welch. It appeared that most of the reels were of official college business - board meetings etc, but others were student run campus events including lectures and music. He borrowed a few of the music related reels and transferred them using a reel to reel player from the library's AV dept, to a radio shack "y" cable plugged the reel to reel's RCA jacks into one of those ubiquitous, small, portable Panasonic cassette player/recorders. He doesn't know if the originals were mono or stereo.

The library was remodeled in 2008. As Steve was later told, most of the miscellaneous contents of the library was stored in bins in another building while the remodeling occurred. Steve thinks the reels, many of which had no labels, may have been discarded afterwords.