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The Rolling Stones
07-25-72 (1st show) - Madison Square Garden, New York City, NY - New York Garden (Darthdisc) 1CD Sound Quality: 7.25 (AUD) - Length: 78min
07-25-72 (2nd show) - Madison Square Garden, New York City, NY - New York Garden (Darthdisc) 2CD Sound Quality: 8.0 (AUD) - Length: 98min
Brought to you by the International Federation of Cultural Heroes.
Memo: The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, July 25, 1972, twice. From: Neo To: Darthdisc staff, and friends.
As you may know, there has lately been a flurry of interest in one of the very first Darthdisc titles -- Led Zeppelin's "One More for the Road," which turns out to be the only known recording of the group's tour-ending evening show at Madison Square Garden, on September 19, 1970. In late January and early February, a copy provided by way of the internet was downloaded by nearly 800 people from one site, and was widely treed elsewhere. The spirit of the International Federation of Cultural Heroes is alive and well!
In the course of a discussion with TornAndFrayed, a Stones collector who had also acquired the Zeppelin recording, it emerged that two other concert tapes that had been sitting quietly in the Darthdisc archives -- the two Rolling Stones shows from Madison Square Garden on July 25, 1972 (at 2:30 and 8 pm) -- were also high on collectors' want lists. All these years, and only a handful of songs from these concerts have traded around: no complete recordings have yet come to light.
And that, of course, made it a Darthdisc priority. The evening show -- not bad. Recorded from the 25th row, it has its muddy moments, particularly at the beginning, before the levels settled down (and especially in "Bitch," where there's a bit of distortion here and there). But it was a great show, and includes the single best performance of "Love In Vain" I've ever heard. Elsewhere too, the band stretched out in ways it didn't that same afternoon: the evening show is nearly 20 minutes longer, a difference only partly accounted for by the inclusion of an encore, a medley of "Uptight (Everything's Alright" and "Satisfaction," with Stevie Wonder.
The afternoon show was recorded from a greater distance, and -- well, it's for devoted collectors only. A bit of gentle EQ helped bring out the vocals and guitars, but there is also a bit of overmodulation (okay, distortion) about which nothing could be done. Let's face it: these are early 70's audience tapes, and they were taped without even the vaguest notion that 30-years on people would be listening to them. That isn't to say that the nascent Darthdisc staff was unaware of bootlegs: the archives are packed with early examples of the form, but still, we kind of figured that someone with better equipment would have recorded the shows as well, and gotten them out.
These were recorded on a Bell and Howell cassette recorder with a not-especially-great microphone, and no VU meters. You didn't know what you were going to get til the concert was over and you hit the play button. (That's probably why the evening show was an improvement: it was clear the levels had to come down a bit.) The tapes were then transferred to open reel, and the original cassettes are long gone. For those who track such things, the signal path on these shows is: cassette master>open reel>HD (SoundForge 7.0)>CDR.
TornAndFrayed -- this is for you. -- Neo, Feb.2004
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