Van Morrison - Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, TX, 1-12-1974 | Albums That Should Exist

 

Van Morrison - Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, TX, 1-12-1974

Paul says: Here's something pretty awesome: a previously unknown Van Morrison bootleg from 1974, with pristine soundboard sound quality! It's pretty amazing these sorts of things keep popping up, even more than 50 years after the original performance. This one showed up at a prominent bootleg sharing site a couple of days ago (posted by BK for JEMS) as I write this in May 2026. I grabbed it there and made some edits to make it sound even better.

Sometimes, a soundboard recording captures the music on stage so very well that little audience noise is recorded. That was the case here. It almost sounded like Van and his band was performing to an empty room. I used the MVSEP program to separate the crowd noise from everything else, for every song. I found there was some crowd noise there, just very quiet. Because the sound quality is so excellent, I was able to drastically boost the volume of just the cheering at the ends of songs without having a lot of hiss too. Now, this sounds much better with the cheering at the usual expected volume, in my opinion.

There were a couple of sonic flaws. The first song (which is called "4 O'Clock in the Morning" on an official live album and "Try for Sleep" on an official studio album) is missing a bit of the very beginning. There was nothing I could do to fix this, since this song was performed extremely rarely until the 1990s and after. In "Don't Look Back," there was a burst of static that lasted a couple of seconds in the middle of the song. I was able to get rid of most of it, though not all of it, by using an MVSEP filter that reduces unwanted noise. Finally, the first minute or so of "Cyprus Avenue" was missing. So I found a similar version from the same era (specifically, a concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, on May 26, 1973), and used that to patch in the missing section. That's why two of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

Most of the songs were pretty standard in Morrison's concerts at the time. But the first song was rarely performed, as mentioned above. Ditto with "Don't Look Back," a John Lee Hooker song he originally did with Them in the 1960s. He'd only performed it once in concert prior to this. That's the same with "The Wild Side of Life." But while Morrison occasionally performed "Don't Look Back" in later years, this seems to be the second and last time he ever did it in concert. He probably played it because this was his first concert in Texas, and Hank Thompson, who had the original hit with that song, was from rural Texas.

This album is an hour and 26 minutes long. 

01 4 O'Clock in the Morning [Try for Sleep] 
02 Come Running
03 Moondance 

04 Don't Look Back [Edit] 
05 Ain't Nothin' You Can Do 
06 Into the Mystic 
07 I Just Want to Make Love to You 
08 Warm Love 
09 Listen to the Lion 
10 I've Been Working 
11 Domino 
12 Caravan 
13 Cyprus Avenue [Edit] (
14 talk by emcee 
15 Gloria 
16 The Wild Side of Life 

(all tracks Van Morrison)