Paul says: I've very excited to be posting this. I've posted over 70 Ebbets Field radio broadcasts, until I couldn't find any more to post. But there are credible reports of at least 100 other radio broadcasts from this venue. I'm eager to find more, since they all have excellent sound quality, and usually were of talented performers. I'm glad to say that I got a couple of responses to my plea for more of these recordings. Here's one, from Paul Newton. It's a set by singer-songwriter Wendy Waldman.Chances are pretty good that you've never heard of Wendy Waldman before. That was the case for me before I started working on these Ebbets Field shows. But sometimes finding success in the music business is more about lucky breaks than musical talent. That seems to be the case here. She put out a bunch of albums in the 1970s and after, but never made a commercial mark. Yet after listening to this, I realized Waldman is a talented songwriter and also a very good singer.
One way you can tell she's a good songwriter is the fact that her songs have been covered by over 70 musical acts. Those include: Garth Brooks, Aaron Neville, Kenny Rogers, Alison Krauss, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Smith of The Cure, Kathy Mattea, Maria Muldaur, Kim Carnes, Melissa Manchester, Vanessa Williams, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Percy Sledge, and many more. Yet, she got so little exposure as a performer that I couldn't find any decent TV performances or even photographs of her in concert in the 1970s. To make the cover, I had to take a screenshot of a TV performance where she was back-up singer in a Linda Ronstadt concert.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Waldman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Waldman
In 1970, Waldman was a founding member of the band Bryndle. Unfortunately, they only released a single and then broke up, since they couldn't get a record company to release a full album from them. But the other band members were Andrew Gold, Karla Bonoff, and Kenny Edwards. Gold and Bonoff in particular went on to have a lot of success in the 1970s. Much later, Byrndle reunited and finally released albums in 1995 and 2001.
At the time of this concert, Waldman had just released her third album, cleverly titled "Wendy Waldman." It never bothered the record charts, like her other albums, sadly.
This bootleg recording generally sounds very good. However, there was a problem: the song "Wild Bird" got cut off halfway through, and the first half of the next song, "Train Song" was also missing. I managed to patch this, though the results weren't great. For "Wild Bird," I couldn't find any live versions. So I took the studio album version, used the MVSEP program to strip it down to solo acoustic, and then used that to fill in the missing part. For "Train Song," I was surprised to find another live version, from another rare bootleg, from 1974. So I used the banter from before that song, edited somewhat, and then the live version for that missing part. Unfortunately, both of these edits aren't that good, due to the lack of material to work from. I think it's extremely obvious when the edits happen, especially for "Train Song," which suddenly goes from an acoustic performance to a full-band one. But I figure it's better to have these patches than only partial versions of these songs.
Thanks again to Paul Newton for digging this up and sharing it. If you have other Ebbets Field broadcasts I haven't posted, please share them! Hopefully, by sharing this, hundreds of people will finally start to appreciate Waldman's music after not knowing about her for all these years.
This album is 47 minutes long.
01 Listen to Your Own Heart
02 Cold Back on Me
03 talk
04 North Woods Man
05 talk
06 Green Rocky Road
07 talk
08 Come On Down
09 Explain It
10 talk
11 Baby Don't You Go
12 Secrets
13 Wild Bird [Edit]
14 talk
15 Train Song [Edit]
16 talk by emcee
17 talk
18 Western Lullaby
19 talk by emcee
