Love - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 11-23-1970
In my opinion, "Forever Changes" by Love is easily one of the top 100 albums of all time. Many music critics have said the same. Unfortunately though, Love didn't play live much when the concert came out in 1967, actually never leaving the Los Angeles area, and when the did, it seems nobody was there to record it. As far as I can tell, it's not until 1970 that there are concert bootlegs. So I tried to find the best one from that year in order to post it here.
In 2015, an official live box set was released, called "Coming Through to You: The Live Recordings 1970-2004." But three out of the four CDs are from the 1990s or 2000s. The first CD is all from 1970, but it's two or three songs each from five different concerts. I wanted to hear a single concert all the way through. This Fillmore West concert was the best sounding one I could find. There's no overlap with the official box set, although it includes three songs recorded at that venue a couple of days prior to this concert.
This is a soundboard recording, but not the greatest in terms of sound quality. The main issue is the vocals were very low in the mix. That probably explains why this hasn't gotten around much on bootleg trading sites. But that's something that can be easily fixed these days, so I fixed it (using the UVR5 audio editing program). I also cleaned things up, like extra low volume of banter, and song titles being wrong. It's a much better listen now, in my opinion.
One song, "Find Somebody," has "[Edit]" in its title. It was split into two files, with a gap in between. However, I managed to patch it back together in a way that hopefully should make the split totally unnoticeable.
I assume the people who made the live box set mentioned above looked for live material prior to 1970, and didn't find any. So this is probably as close as we're going to get, chronologically, to hearing Love in 1967. (Along with the 1970 disc of the official box set.) Mostly, the band was playing different songs. In fact, there are only two "Forever Changes" songs here ("Andmoreagain" and "Bummer in the Summer"). But Love was still making very good music at least through 1970. All the songs here are solid.
By the way, three of the songs repeat between the early and late shows: "Product of the Times," "Stand Out," and "Singing Cowboy." I decided to keep both versions in each case.
This album is an hour and seven minutes long.
01 Product of the Times
02 talk
03 Stand Out
04 Keep On Shining
05 talk
06 Andmoreagain
07 Singing Cowboy
08 talk
09 Good Times
10 talk by emcee
11 Stand Out
12 Product of the Times
13 Bummer in the Summer
14 Find Somebody [Edit]
15 Signed D.C.
16 Slick Dick
17 Always See Your Face
18 talk
19 Singing Cowboy
Decent live Love in their prime is rare as . . . so this . . . .
