portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Monday, April 29, 2024

Albums That Should Exist | Donovan Live in New York 1976 | resolving download issues notes!

 

Donovan - The Bottom Line, New York City, 4-10-1976

Paul says : "This is one of my favorite Donovan concert recordings, if not the favorite. It's unreleased, but the sound quality is excellent, due to the fact that it was professionally recorded for live broadcast on the radio at the time. It's a solo acoustic concert, which allows one to hear many of his songs in a different way. And it came at an interesting point in his career, resulting in some lessen known but still very good songs to get played.

Donovan is very closely associated with the 1960s. As a cultural phenomenon, the 60's actually started a few years into the 1960s, maybe around 1963 or 1964, and ended a few years into the 1970s. By 1976, Donovan's hippie image seemed increasingly out of step with cultural trends at the time. Then 1977 came along, with punk and disco, and his popular declined even more. So 1976 was the tail end of his most popular and creative era. For instance, note the archival retrospective album for him, "Troubadour," deals with that whole period, 1964 to 1976. After 1976, Donovan found it hard to even get record contracts to make new albums. But he was still going pretty strong up through 1976. I think a lot of his 1970s output is underappreciated.

So this turns out to be a really good time for a concert recording. He was still writing and performing excellent new songs, such as "Dark Eyed Blue Jean Angel," while also doing his older hits.

There were a few problems with the bootleg recording though. One of them was that the DJ for the radio station broadcasting the concert often cut in for station identification between songs. With some audio editing, I was able to remove all of that DJ talk while still keeping the appropriate amount of cheering after each song. The songs with "[Edit]" in their names are all cases where I had to make significant edits to get rid of the DJ chatter. Also, on a few songs, but only a few, the lead vocals were low in the mix. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to fix that.

After those changes, this is a really top notch recording. If you're a Donovan fan at all, you should give it a listen."

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long.


01 Sunshine Superman
02 There Is a Mountain
03 talk
04 Dark Eyed Blue Jean Angel [Edit]
05 talk
06 Laughing River
07 talk 
08 Take Your Time
09 talk 
10 Friends 
11 Woman's Work [Edit] 
12 talk
13 Catch the Wind 
14 talk 
15 My My They Sigh
16 Season of the Witch [Edit]
17 Black Widow [Edit] 
18 Happiness Runs 
19 talk
20 Lalena [Edit]
21 talk
22 Atlantis
23 I Love My Shirt 
24 Mellow Yellow 
25 Saturday Night
26 Hurdy Gurdy Man 


Now regular and old friend & blogging pal Sealy dropped by and reminded me that I had been meaning to address a workaround for those of us trying to download from ATSE as I had been struggling and he asked for any tips!

All I can say applies to Mac users I guess but if you have any difficulty and keep getting sent to other pages that you don’t want and it doesn’t download try this workaround

1. Copy the address for the volume you want but stopping at the zip. That is not featuring the html bit of the link.

2. when arrived at the UploadEE page click on the download button 

https://www.upload.ee

3. if ( I say IF- it always has done this for yours truly but) if the clicking of the button leads to the opening of another page, click it off and try again

4. Now it usually does the same thing again but just persevere and click off the unwelcome page again and click the download button a third time and it SHOULD start downloading immediately (it has only once down this a fourth time but again persistence is key)

I have tried to contact Paul at ATSE to discuss this and even having mentioned it before wondered if anyone else was having similar problems but his page does not accept my enquiry and I cannot ‘comment’ or contact him. 

A final note is that I use Safari by preference but have Firefox and others too and Opera is my last port of call if all else fails for browser applications I would recommend trying others 


1 comment:

Kostas said...

Great! Thank you.