American Music Club
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Uptown Bar
30 April 1989
original soundboard recording
(00:52:10)
Live Mix by Kim Bromm
Recorded by J.Free / Digitized in 2007
[01] Ballad Of A Good Sport (4:57)
[02] Blue And Grey Shirt (4:04)
[03] Lonely (3:46)
[04] Pale Skinny Girl (5:13)
[05] Heavenly Smile (3:42)
[06] Firefly (2:45)
[07] Room Above The Club (4:05)
[08] Highway 5 (5:09)
[09] Bad Liquor (2:03)
[10] Gary’s Song (3:07)
[11] Outside This Bar (4:16)
[12] Electric Light (4:23)
[13] Last Harbour (4:35)
split soundboard recording from original master cassette
left channel: vocal only
right channel: all instrument mix
master cassette > Azimuth-optimized analog transfer to HD via CDWav (DC offset applied, tracking) > SoundForge (patch at end of 011) > flac conversion via Traders Little Helper
2007 digitizing notes:
This is one of my favorite recordings, as well as one of my favorite AMC recordings. I had recorded the band a few times in the past with various low-end decks; this was the first time I tried a soundboard recording, as I often had the opportunity to assist with mixing at this venue. I was pretty pleased with the way this turned out, even more pleased that the tape is still in such good condition after all this time, as it’s gotten a lot of play over the years.
The band stayed in town for a couple days, and the following evening, we got together, and I recorded a conversation with the band, in the hopes of creating a ready-to-air radio program for a local station. Mark did most of the talking, although Vudi and Danny chipped in a bit; and the conversation includes some good stories about the origins of songs like “Room Above The Club”, Outside This Bar”, and “Gary’s Song”, along with some commentary from Mark about what he feels he does as an entertainer. I made a rough mix on cassette, mixing together snippets of comments from the “interview”, as it were, and mixed version of songs from this performance. Unfortunately, the radio station balked at the idea, suggesting there wasn’t any relevant interest in the band (i.e., no one knew who they were, which was exactly the reason I was trying to create a means of helping to promote them…)
I haven’t listened to the interview tape in years, but I’ll digitize that all the same, even though I’m not sure it meets the criteria for posting on DIME [a bit-torrent tracker I once frequented – hey, we all make bad choices!]. I had published the interview at one point, in an old ‘zine I used to put out, called The New Puritan ReView, but a lot of those print masters have been destroyed over the years, so this cassette is the only artifact still left intact.
During “Last Harbour”, Mark walked out into the audience about halfway through the song, I tried to increase the vocal mic level as much as possible, in order to pick up the ambient sound from the room; right channel was pulled down to avoid feedback.
I’ll mix the channels together at some point and most likely share a mixed version, but in the interests of finally getting this out there, it seemed like a good idea just to share the original tracks as they were recorded. Enjoy!
This one is for richbraz.
2021 addendum:
Not much to add here, other than that I think my impetus for digitizing this in 2007 was seriously misguided, as this fileset was prepared for sharing with other fans on a bit-torrent tracker, which I have come to regard as the bottom feeders of music fandom. Pearls before swine. Thankfully, I did not discard the cassette after this 16/44.1 transfer was completed, as I think it would benefit greatly from a 24/48 transfer, and then some proper mixing of the channels. We’ll see what management thinks before we proceed.
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