LOU REED
April 7th, 1979
Basel, Festsaal Mustermesse


LINEAGE
Sanyo "red" mono recorder with internal microphone --> AIWA Excelia XD-009 (no NR) --> iMac (Audacity) --> Adobe Audition (slight eq, small repairs, track separation) --> xACT (FLAC conversion, SBE fix, md5 checksum)


TRACKS:
Sweet Jane
Coney Island Baby
I'm Waiting for the Man
I'll Be Your Mirror
Perfect Day
Looking for Love
Berlin
Men Of Good Fortune
Caroline Says I
The Kids
The Bed
Street Hassle
Walk on the Wild Side
The Bells


MEMORIES FROM THE CONCERT
It was my third ever trip abroad to see a concert after Genesis on September 9th, 1978, in Paris, and then Peter Gabriel on December 17th, 1978, in Geneva.
Let me remind you again that nobody played in Italy any more in those years, because of the troubles we had in the first half of the Seventies with a bunch of politicized dickheads which wanted "free music" and created havoc by breaking into shows, throcing all sort of crap to the performers on stage, overturning and burning cars outside the venues, and so on...
So it was, once again, a coach trip with the "Medianova Spettacoli" company, departing in the late morning from Milan and supposedy taking 6 or 7 hours to reach the gig. In fact, of the two available buses at departure time, I ended up not only with the possibly slowest ever one, but also the one which broke down somewhere past the border between Italy and Switzerland, leaving about 50 or 60 people stranded on the motorway.
Needless to say, everybody else managed to get a lift and soon departed but me and a couple of friends, who instead got hassled by a police car because hitchiking was obviously forbidden there... So we had to wait for an hour till the cops left and resumed hitchiking.
We were lucky. Almost. As one car finally stopped and the Italians aboard were also aiming for Lou's concert in Basel. Problem was, the three of them were so stoned they didn't have a clue where they were or where exactly they were going! Obviously, we missed the junction for Basel and ended up - unknowingly - in Zurich, looking for a theatre that was not there...
I don't remember the details, as by then - though i didn't smoke - I was stoned as eveybody else in the car. But we managed to arrive at the right hall and sit on the floor in a corridor between seats in the middle of the hall about 2 minutes before the lights went off and Lou hit the stage!
What can I say except it was a bloody brillant show, filled with Berlin's songs (one of my favourite albums at the time), a superb version of Street Hassle, a handful of eternal classics and even the as yet unreleased at the time epic and majestic "The Bells". The only major drawback I can remember is the asshole repeatedly and insistently shouting for "Vicious" at every possible break - and if you'll make it all the way through the tape you'll end up hating him just as much as I did!

THE RECORDING
One of my first attempts ever at taping a show, with a borrowed deck and its internal mic. The recorder was obviously mono, though for some weird reason when I transferred the tape (over 2 years ago), Left and Right channels levels were everything but fixed and the same, as there were bits were sound disappeared on just one of the channels. Also, the cassette (a TDK SD 90) was probably used or it did get slightly mangled by the sheer amount of listening I did after the show - at least for a few weeks/months - and there are moments were the sound is screwed up.
I managed to switch cassette side (right after "Berlin") without missing any music there, but unfortunately the tape ran out just on the last reverb of the final chord in "The Bells", which I have tried to mask by quickly fading it out: it sounds a bit naked with no applause at the end, but I prefer this solution to the alternative of leaving it abruptly cut.
I did my best to repair what I could, and in the end I decided to discard the sligthly worse right channel in favour of the Left one (which had far less problems). What you're getting, thus, is definitely a Mono recording.
Also, since the capture has been on my Mac for over 2 years, and I occasionally did some equalizing and filtering - but I can't really remember exactly what was done.
Alas, the quality is far from brilliant - actually it's even far from being plain good - but it's such a great memory for me that I'm able to overcome the aural crappiness and enjoy it all the same. I hope you'll manage too!

the intruder
©2017