Carole King
Navarro
Seattle Center Arena
Seattle, WA
August 19, 1977
JEMS Full-Track Tandberg Mono Master

Recording Gear: Sony ECM-22P Microphone > Tandberg Model 11 Portable Reel to Reel

JEMS Transfer: Master reel > Tandberg Model 11 > Wavelab 24/96 mono .wav capture > iZotope MBIT+ resample to 16/44.1 > iZotope RX 5 and Ozone 5 mastering > Audacity > TLH > FLAC


Navarro
01 Newborn Highway
02 What It Is
03 Listen
04 One of These Days
05 About You
06 Laying My Life

Carole King
07 Beautiful
08 (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman
09 It's Too Late
10 Home Again
11 Been to Canaan
12 Sweet Seasons
13 Jazzman
14 Simple Things
15 Hard Rock Cafe
16 Corazon
17 Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? >
18 Locomotion
19 In The Name of Love
20 To Know That I Love You
21 Hold On
22 Smackwater Jack
23 One
24 God Only Knows
25 Way Over Yonder > I Feel The Earth Move
26 Encore Break
27 You've Got A Friend

Tale of the Tapes and the Tandberg

With Jared�s passing in October 2016, the complete JEMS Archive was moved south from his home up north. That move, sad impetus aside, presented the daunting opportunity to organize the collection. With the help of some amazing friends and experts (among them Slowburn, SS, RD and slipkid68), JEMS tapes are now accessible in ways they have never been before. Stan, the S in JEMS, was also on hand to help and fill in our taping history as he always does.

When the task was done and loaded into the truck, one box in particular captured my attention: master reels recorded by Stan on his Tandberg portable reel to reel. We�ve posted some 30 or more of these on DIME over the years, but there were several that had yet to be transferred, and still more that Jared had transferred in the last five years but had seemingly never circulated or uploaded. Carole King is one of the latter.

If you don�t know about the Tandberg, it was a remarkable piece of gear in its day, not only capable of recording at 3-3/4 and 7-1/2 IPS, but in full-track mono. I won�t do the math, but compared to a cassette, the surface area of tape capturing the music is orders of magnitude higher, which is why so many of Stan�s Tandberg masters from the likes of David Bowie, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen are considered by some as audience-recording classics. The Tandberg required 10(!) D-cel batteries to operate, is roughly the size of a compact typewriter and weighs more than ten pounds. Imagine sneaking that into a show and your respect for what Stan accomplished only grows.

This is the eleventh in a series of Tandberg master reels digitized for the first time. Happily, the original Tandberg deck is still fully functioning, so these transfers offer full-track mono playback on the original tape recorder to maximize quality. Jared handled this transfer himself; it is one of several that were preserved on hard drives I received after his passing.

Carole King and Navarro

Once again Stan delivers the goods for this appealing set which captures King on tour behind her 1977 album Simple Things. The backing band on the album was Navarro, a group of Colorado-based musicians led by Mark Hallman. For the tour that followed, Navarro served as both the opening and backing band for King. Stan captured both sets and in doing so may have preserved the only known live recording of Navarro in circulation. The sound quality is on par with his other Tandberg recordings of this era: rich, clear, glorious mono with no up-close audience noise.

King�s performance mixes piano tracks with full-band songs as she revisits her incredible catalog, including hits she wrote in her Brill Building days with Gerry Goffin like �Locomotion� and �Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?� It is a richly satisfying set, made more poignant as King acknowledges the passing of the other King, Elvis Presley, three days prior.

Huge thanks to Stan for another amazing Tandberg recording, to Jared for taking the time and care to transfer the master tape, and to Frogster for stepping up to take this one over the finish line yet again.

BK for JEMS