Oysterhead
October 23, 2001
Vancouver, B.C., Canada

source 3: Condor's Sharp MiniDisc with Sony headphones as mics, front and center balcony

101 Army's On Ecstacy
102 Owner Of The World
103 Little Faces
104 Shadow Of A Man
105 Pseudo Suicide
106 Radon Balloon
107 Ruberneck Lions
108 interludes
109 Birthday Boys
110 Oz Is Ever Floating

201 Mr. Oysterhead
202 encore break
203 Wield The Spade
204 My Generation
205 outtro

My old taper friend Condor recorded this show on his portable Sharp MiniDisc recorder from the front of the center of the balcony. I don't remember the model number of the recorder. The minidiscs were played back line out stereo 3.5mm male to male cord into a line input on his vintage Toshiba Sattelite laptop back when you could find a laptop built with a semi-decent internal sound card with a stereo line input. Re-recorded in the computer and edited with Wavelab 4.0 and burned to audio-cdr. Original wav files deleted.

Yes, the mics used for this recording were actually a pair of Sony behind the neck over the ear folding headphones, placed on the rail of the balcony. The way the neckband of the headphones folded up placed the earpads facing outwards at a 90 degree angle, making them point directly at each PA stack from Condor's sweet spot center seats... They were pretty good headphones, but, wow, they worked great as microphones! I almost bought a pair of them after I heard how well they worked to record.

I really wanted to go to this show (and tape it) but I couldn't make it over to Vancouver. When I found out there was a DeadHead taper guy living a few blocks away from me here in Victoria, I waited for hours at his place until his orange VW bus pulled up so I could introduce myself! We started to make some tape trades until we just decided to raid each other's vaults until our hearts were content! hahaha. He taught me a lot about audio editing (I still use a version of Wavelab because he did). He was an official bootlegger for an artist from Nanaimo, and invited me to help him record some of her live shows. When Condor moved halfway around the world for work, I took over recording several dozen of Allison Crowe's shows. She's since gone on to record several albums and was recently singing in a Superman movie. One of her albums actuall features 2 live tracks that Condor and I recorded together.

I was great to hang out with Condor, and I kinda miss the dude. He's still around somewhere in the world, and I hear from him once in a while. He's recorded a lot of cool stuff, and I wonder where it all is right now. He's a big MMW fan among other things - I think he told me he followed them on a Japanese tour and recorded it all, plus more. I can't find Condor anymore, but I *know* he's out there, somewhere... If you know him, tell him I said "Hey now!"...