The infamous last song from the infamous ‘Royal Albert Hall’ concert, Manchester Free Trade Hall, 5/17/66.
O MY SOUL
HOW DOES IT FEEL?!
“Back when I thought that every man that I met would be the one to say
‘Oh, honey, it’s okay, I’ve been lonely, but I can wait.’
Well, I’ll be lonely
But I can wait.”
The Rising Sons - Ash Grove, Los Angeles, CA, 5-30-1965
Given this band was only in existence from 1965 to 1966, and never achieved any commercial success, it's a miracle we have any live music from them at all. But it turns out there are multiple bootlegs with stellar sound quality, due to the fact that the often performed at the Ash Grove, a small club in Los Angeles, and the people running that venue often made soundboard recordings of the concerts there.
However, there was one big problem: these in-house recordings were often done in a sloppy manner, probably someone just turning the recording device on and walking away. As a result, the balances were usually off. For instance, with the Rising Sons concert I previously posted, the prominent harmonica playing by Taj Mahal was buried in the mix. That was the same problem here, with the harmonica sounded like it was recorded several rooms away from everything else. That's why, even though I had these recordings, I only posted the 1966 one.
Happily, now it's 2026, and audio editing technology has improved by leaps and bounds since 2021. The bad mix of that 1966 concert bugged me. So I went back and fixed the buried harmonica problem. Here's a link where you can get the fixed version:
https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-rising-sons-ash-grove-los-angeles.html
Then I did the same thing here: I used the MVSEP program to separate out just the harmonica from everything else. Then I boosted that volume relative to everything else. While I was at it, I made some other fixes. For instance, Taj Mahal did most of the singing, but sometimes he would sing little asides with his mouth away from the microphone. In many cases, I was able to fix those so you could clearly hear those bits. Now, in my opinion, the sound quality here is really impressive, especially for 1965, when bootleg recording was rare and usually poorly done.
This recording is actually a combination of four different concerts. Most of it, tracks 1 through 20, is from May 30, 1965. But I had a few extra bits from partially recorded sets on other nights, so I added those in at the end. Tracks 21 through 24 are from May 29th. Tracks 25 to 30 are from May 31st. And the last two tracks, 31 to 32, are from June 29th.
All the studio recordings by this band were finally released an album in 1992, with the title "Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder." But quite a few of the songs here were not recorded for that album, including an original by band member Jesse Lee Kincad, called "I'll Always Be There." (There actually were two versions of that song in these recordings, but I only included one. It was the only case of there being a duplicate.)
These concerts used to be available at Wolfgang's Vault. But that site stopped working a few months ago. And they never spread very far. For instance, none of this music can be found at SoulseekQT as a type this, and SoulseekQT has an amazing amount of stuff. So hopefully this post will put this music into wider public circulation.
If you aren't familiar with this band, you should check this out. Their sound doesn't seem that unique today, but that's because so many other bands went on to make music in a similar vein in later years. According to AllMusic, Rising Sons' "languid, bluesy, folksy sort of sound anticipated future recordings by outfits like Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead, and even the southern rock Allman Brothers, and the country-rock Byrds."
This album is an hour and 21 minutes long.
01 Crawling King Snake
02 talk
03 It's All Over Now
04 talk
05 Statesboro Blues
06 talk
07 Walking the Dog
08 talk
09 Hambone - Band Introductions
10 Meet Me in the Bottom
11 talk
12 Baby, What Do You Want Me to Do
13 talk
14 I'm a King Bee
15 talk
16 I'll Always Be There
17 Fanny Mae
18 Corrina, Corrina
19 talk
20 Dust My Blues
21 talk
22 Too High to Fall
23 talk
24 Hush Hush
25 Who Do You Think You Is
26 talk
27 Blues in Three-Four Time [Instrumental]
28 talk
29 So Fine
30 Little Red Rooster
31 talk
32 Grown So Ugly
On March 20 1979, BBC Radio 1 invited David Bowie to be the DJ for their show Star Special.Bowie spent two hours playing some of his favorite songs (and 2 tracks from the new album, Lodger). An eclectic mix including The Doors, Iggy Pop, John Lennon, Philip Glass, Talking Heads, Jeff Beck, The Rolling Stones, etc.This recording comes from a re-broadcast on March 25, 2013 on BBC Radio I Player.
Well this is weird and having been in touch with AtticRock himself he doesn’t have the same problem at his HQ so I have had to lift the Bowie progs directly from Internet Archive so here they are to stream alnong your day! They are really worth it!
The Sealyman dropped by to comment on the Leo Kottke track ‘Stealin’ t’other day from ‘Mudlark’ and here it all is on YouTube plus a download on The Internet Archive as it is now long out of print . . . .thanks Sealyman for the idea
I posted Kottke’s Stealin’ here . . .click
Thanks to Robbie Mendelson for the following:
Collection of Mudlark Reviews here on Facebook’s Leo Kottke Fans page click
Leo Kottke - Mudlark (on YouTube) click
