The Shirts
July 21, 1977
CBGB
315 Bowery
New York, NY
Tenth Floor Clown Tapes Volume 18
Setlist:
01 Reduced to a Whisper
02 Angel With a Mask
03 Operetico
04 Tenth Floor Clown
05 Milton at the Savoy
06 Looking at a Postcard
07 Our First Love Song
08 The Story Goes
09 Teenage Crutch (cut off)
Runtime: 42:28
Band line-up:
Annie Golden - vocals
Artie Lamonica - guitar, vocals
Bob Racioppo - bass, vocals
Ronnie Ardito - guitar, vocals
John Picollo - keyboards, guitar, vocals
John "Zeeek" Criscione - drums, vocals
Known faults: Teenage Crutch cut off at the end of tape
Source: master audience recording
Taper: Hans de Vente
Lineage: unknown portable cassette recorder > Sony C-90HF tape > Technics M225 > Tascam DR-05 (16 bit) > Audition 3.0 (tracks, normalize levels) > TLH (FLAC 6)
Notes:
I first saw The Shirts on February 25, 1978 at CBGB. I was blown away by their energy, great vocal harmonies, and diverse musical styles. They featured four lead vocalists, and were equally at ease playing the jazzy swing of “Milton at the Savoy” to the driving rock anthems of “Poe” and “Teenage Crutch”, and then changing gears to ballads like “Overdose” and “Our First Love Song”. Their main lead vocalist was Annie Golden, an energetic pixie dynamo with a powerful voice. Annie later became an actress, and has appeared on Broadway, TV shows and films. I wound up seeing The Shirts 60 times in concert. Sadly their studio albums didn’t capture their live energy and they received no support from Capitol Records. Here’s the YouTube playlist of my entire Shirts video archive: http://bit.ly/3HjCX1P
Knowing that Hans de Vente made several recordings at CBGBs back in the 70's, I set out on a quest to find out if he had ever recorded The Shirts. With some difficulty I was finally able to track down Hans via Facebook. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Hans had recorded The Shirts in both the USA and The Netherlands. What's more, he was happy to send me his six master recordings of those shows. However, he wasn't willing to mail the tapes overseas, so I had a Dutch friend act as an intermediary to receive the tapes for me. When I visited Amsterdam in late 2023 the tapes were handed over to me. The earliest tape I received was this one, with The Shirts on one side, and Dead Boys and Rubber City Rebels on the other side.
On July 21, a press conference was held for the inauguration of a new sound system at CBGB. Later that night The Shirts, Dead Boys and Rubber City Rebels debuted that new sound system. Hans recorded all 3 bands, and The Shirts and Dead Boys setlists appear to be complete. The Shirts played the longest, so I think they were the headliners that night.
About me:
I've been going to concerts since 1975, starting with Lou Reed at the Felt Forum, 1975-04-26. I started taping on 1978-03-26 with Renaissance at City Center. From 1978 to 1982 I used a portable Panasonic RQ-2309 mono cassette recorder with built-in condenser microphone, as it's all I could afford. I mostly recorded my favorite band at the time, The Shirts, but there were some other new wave and punk bands from that era also. In mid-1982 I upgraded to the Aiwa HS-J2 walkman style recorder with the CM-2 stereo mic. Some of those recordings have already appeared on DIME as I used to trade tapes. Most of my master recordings are indexed on etreedb.org ( https://etreedb.org/10thFloorClown ), and I welcome requests on what I should upload to DIME next. I'd love to connect with some of the other NYC tapers from back then; please feel free to send me a PM. If anyone has any live recordings by The Shirts or Deaf School please contact me!
Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.
Images for this show:
