Joni Mitchell - Newport Folk Festival 1969 | Zero G Sound

Despite my recent criticisms and distress over Joni and her position today pro-smoking nicotine addict and Maggellons proponent! I will always have a soft spot for early Joni and of course we bought Songs to Seagull, Clouds and everything since . . . . . . here’s an interesting one from Zero. Really good quality!

Joni Mitchell - Newport Folk Festival 1969

Zero hat gesacht: Here´s a recording from Joni Mitchells evening concert at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, July 19, 1969. Sounds like a good soundboard stereo recording, except track 9 which is of lesser quality from a different source.

Joni Mitchell also participated in an afternoon songwriters workshop at the Newport Festival,  along with Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Janis Ian, David Blue, Mike Settle, Tom Paxton, and Eric Andersen.

"THE LADY IN NEWPORT  By Lachlan MacLearn

In the summer of 1966 [sic, should be 1967] a relative unknown walked onto the stage at the Newport, Rhode Island Folk Festival, after being introduced by Judy Collins. It was a breezy summer's evening and the crowd was restless. I remember thinking that this newcomer, whoever she was, was stepping into some serious company. I can't recall the exact lineup. Probably Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Odetta, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and the like. As I said, `serious company...' She appeared to be carrying a tiny Martin Triple-0, but I couldn't be sure. She wore a long dress. I was too far back to decipher the face.
There was a round of light applause when she was introduced. A tentative strum rolled from the huge PA, then another, and she was beginning her opening number. 
The song was 'Michael from Mountains'. And by the end of the first verse, the crowd had gone from bordering-rude to pin-drop silence. I was riveted. 
When the song ended, the strangest thing occurred. For at least five seconds (look at your watch...try to imagine it) the place was dead-silent - ten or fifteen thousand people - dead silent - and then a huge release of cheers and applause. 
The short set included `Chelsea Morning', and I think she played `The Circle Game' before leaving the stage to a tumultuous and prolonged standing ovation. 
I remember feeling so grateful for this amazing new talent and feeling equally sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to be going onstage after her." 

Tracklist:

01 Chelsea Morning

02 Cactus Tree

03 Night In The City

04 For Free

05 Willy

06 The Fiddle and the Drum

07 Both Sides Now

08 Get Together

09 The Circle Game

Zero G Sound

 

Melanie Debut Album 1968 - Zero G Sound

 

Melanie - Born To Be (1968)

Zero hat gesaght "Born to Be", Melanie Safka's 1968 debut, is an intriguing curate's egg. Neither Melanie, nor her producer-husband Peter Schekeryk, seem sure exactly where her strengths lie, so she is cast in a number of roles: Piaf-imitating chanteuse ("In the Hour"), soul-searching, angst-heavy troubadour ("Momma Momma"), giggling novelty figure ("Animal Crackers") and children's entertainer ("Christopher Robin Is Saying His Prayers").

Stranger still, half the time the experiment works; the small ensemble, led by her own enthusiastic (if thoroughly inexpert) guitar playing creates an arty, coffeehouse ambience in which Melanie's idiot-savant act flourishes. But the less said about her attack at "Merry Christmas" the better.    

"Born to Be" was  Melanie's debut album, released on Buddah Records in 1968.
Following Melanie's success at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 Buddha repackaged and reissued the album as "My First Album."

From the Clancy Brothers to . . . .er, . . . . . . NICO : THE END

Nico - The End... (1974)

Zero hat gesagt "The End..." is the fifth studio album by German musician Nico. It was recorded in summer 1974 at Sound Techniques studio in London and produced by John Cale. It was released in November 1974, on record label Island.

It is one of the most entrenched visions in the rock critic's vocabulary; Nico as doomed valkyrie, droning death-like through a harsh gothic monotone, a drained beauty pumping dirges from her harmonium while a voice as old as dirt hangs cobwebs round the chords. In fact she only made one album which remotely fit that bill -- this one -- and it's a symbol of its significance that even the cliché emerges as a thing of stunning beauty. Her first album following three years of rumor and speculation, 

"The End" was consciously designed to highlight the Nico of already pertinent myth. Stark, dark, bare, and frightening, the harmonium dominant even amid the splendor of Eno's synthesized menace, John Cale's childlike piano, and Phil Manzanera's scratchy, effects-whipped guitar, it is the howling wind upon wuthering heights, deathless secrets in airless dungeons, ancient mysteries in the guise of modern icons. 

Live, Nico took to dedicating the final cut, a sparse but heartstoppingly beautiful interpretation of the former German national anthem, to terrorist Andreas Baader, even as the song itself conjured demons of its own from an impressionable Anglo-American audience. Nico later admitted she intended the performance in the same spirit as Jimi Hendrix rendered "Star Spangled Banner." But "Das Lied der Deutschen" -- "Deutschland Uber Alles" -- has connotations which neither tribute nor parody could ever undermine. It is only in the '90s that even Germany has reclaimed the anthem for its own. In 1974, it was positively leperous. Listen without prejudice, though, and you catch Nico's meaning regardless, even as her voice tiptoes on the edge of childlike, all but duetting with the little girl she once was, on a song which she'd been singing since the cradle. The ghosts pack in. Former lover Jim Morrison haunts the stately "You Forgot to Answer," a song written about the last time Nico saw him, in a hired limousine on the day of his death; of course he reappears in the title track, an epic recounting of the Doors' own "The End," but blacker than even they envisioned it, an echoing maze of torchlit corridors and spectral children, and so intense that, by the time Nico reaches the "mother...father" passage, she is too weary even to scream. The cracked groan which emerges instead is all the more chilling for its understatement, and the musicians were as affected as the listener. The mutant funk coda with which the performance concludes is more than an incongruous bridge. It is the sound of the universe cracking under the pressure. 

But to dwell on the fear is to overlook the beauty -- "The End", first and foremost, is an album of intimate simplicity and deceptive depths. Nico's voice stuns, soaring and swooping into unimagined corners. No less than "Das Lied der Deutschen," both "Valley of the Kings" and "It Has Not Taken Long" make a mockery of the lazy critical complaints that she simply grumbled along in a one-note wail, while the arrangements (most of which were Nico's own; producer Cale admits he spent most of his time in the studio simply marveling) utterly rewrote even the most generous interpretation of what "rock music" should sound like. "The End" doesn't simply subvert categorization. It defies time itself.

Tracklist:

It Has Not Taken Long 4:11
Secret Side 4:08
You Forget To Answer 5:07
Innocent And Vain 3:51
Valley Of The Kings 3:57
We've Got The Gold 5:44
The End 9:36
Das Lied der Deutschen 5:28

John Cale produced to The Doors cover . . .what more d’ya want!?? 

Nico performing Secret Side & Valley of the Kings 

[Promoting the album on OGWT with Bob Harris 1974]