Al Stewart - Medicine Ball Caravan, Charlton Park, Bishopsbourn, Britain, 8-31-1970
Last week (as I write this in mid-September 2026), I posted a 1970 Jefferson Airplane concert, which had never been publicly available with that sound quality before. I mentioned that it sounded like that could be the start of a really big leak of hundreds of high quality bootlegs from long ago. Since then, I've learned a lot more about this. I want to share this with you, because it has the potential to be the best news when it comes to bootlegs in decades!
The key to all this is a person named Bob Matthews. He was a key member of the support staff for the Grateful Dead. He went to high school with band member Bob Weir, and because the band's first roadie, back in 1966. From all the way back then, he got involved with recording the band. He stayed associated with the Dead in various roles all the way through the mid-1980s. I guess around that time he drifted away and got involved with some telecommunications job. He died in 2021.
But he was not just involved with the Dead; he had musical links to many other bands. For instance, he was a sound engineer on various Dead albums from "Aoxomoxoa" in 1969 to "Go to Heaven" in 1980, but he also worked on albums by New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Stoneground, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Barry Melton, and others. He even was a bass player in New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1969. He also had a key role in a company called Alembic, which started in 1969 and made high-end electronic equipment and musical instruments for many famous musicians. In short, this is someone who was a very connected insider in the music industry.
Recently, another person with many long-time links to the Dead, Charlie Miller, was given custody of Matthews' bootleg recordings, which Miller says number about 1,000 concerts. A lot of those are of the Dead, but apparently a majority are not. Miller is working with some other people to release all of this material to the public for free. He started a few weeks ago, and so far he has released about 20 recordings. If you want to see these as they come out, he has a Facebook page where he is posting download links called "Charlie Miller's Google Drive Links." I've noticed not everything he releases comes out there, actually, but most do. Some others are getting posted at the Guitars101 bootleg sharing site.
So far, here are the musical acts that he has released bootlegs for: the Grateful Dead, the Joy of Cooking, Jefferson Airplane, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Mickey Hart, the Faces, Al Stewart (this recording), Stoneground, Mott the Hoople, and the Youngbloods. Most of them so far are from 1970, and a lot of them are from a small Bay Area concert venue called the Family Dog on the Great Highway, which was only in existence from 1969 to 1970. We don't know what else Miller has and plans on releasing. He's only dropped a few hints. But I've looked at the musical acts that played at the Family Dog on the Great Highway at that time, and it's an intriguing list that includes multiple shows by the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, the Steve Miller Band, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), It's a Beautiful Day, Elvin Bishop, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody, Albert Collins, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and many, many more. The idea of getting pristine, previously unknown soundboard concert recordings from the likes of these bands after all this time boggles my mind!
And that's just one possible lead. Probably, most of the music is related to the Dead and the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. But a lot of bands from all over the world passed through there. One thing I found out is that Matthews was involved in the recording of the infamous Altamont festival in 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others. He is said to have had soundboard recordings of that entire festival, which he would sometimes play for visitors to his house. A few years ago, a soundboard of the Flying Burritos Bros. set from that festival somehow became available. Perhaps it was an early leak from the Matthews trove?
So if you like music from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the time Matthews was involved in the music industry, hold on to your hats. Hopefully, there will be a steady release of hundreds of recordings in the months and years to come. I'm going to try to select the ones that interest me the most, make further edits if need be, and post them here. Normally, previously unknown recordings of this sound quality from this era are made public once in a blue moon. But so far, Charlie Miller seems to be releasing something new every couple of days!
This Al Stewart concert was part of a 1970 rock festival in England called the "Medicine Ball Caravan." In fact, there was an entire tour by that name that year. There's a long, tangled story about the tour and this concert in it, so I'll save that for the write-up of the next album from it.
Since this write-up is getting too long already, let me finally focus on this recording. The sound quality is fantastic, which is mind-blowing for its era. I'm pretty sure this now becomes the earliest publicly available concert recording by Stewart period, unless you count short radio and TV performances. In 2022, Stewart released a massive box set called "The Admiralty Lights," which was over 50 CDs in size. I'm sure this would have been included had Stewart had access to it back in 2022. That indicates to me that Matthews sat on his trove of recordings until his death, so nobody really knows what other treasures may be hidden in there, other than maybe Charlie Miller and a few people working with him now to get them to the public.
But this recording had a noticeable flaw, which was that there was almost no audible crowd noise. As I've said in other write-ups, this is a common problem for soundboards when they record everything on stage very well, but at the expense of capturing cheering from the crowd. Luckily, there was a little crowd noise. So I used the MVSEP program on all the songs to bring it up to a reasonable level.
This album is 33 minutes long.
01 Electric Los Angeles Sunset (Al Stewart)
02 talk (Al Stewart)
03 Old Compton Street Blues (Al Stewart)
04 talk (Al Stewart)
05 In Brooklyn (Al Stewart)
06 talk (Al Stewart)
07 Zero She Flies (Al Stewart)
08 talk (Al Stewart)
09 Small Fruit Song (Al Stewart)
10 talk (Al Stewart)
11 Maybe Someday She Will Come Along (Al Stewart)
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