Cat Stevens - Boston Music Hall, Boston, MA, 4-26-1974 | Albums That Should Exist

 

Cat Stevens - Boston Music Hall, Boston, MA, 4-26-1974

Paul says: Here is a full-length bootleg Cat Stevens concert from 1974. He was backed by a full band.

There are tons of great Cat Stevens concert recordings from 1970 and 1971, both officially released and unofficial. Then there's a pretty obscure official live album from 1974, called "Saturnight." I don't like that one though, because it's far short of a full-length concert, and the song order is mixed up. It was only released in Japan (where the concert took place) until 2024, and still has only a limited release since then. Also in 2024, an official concert album from 1976 was released, called "Majikat." That one is very nice, but there's a lot of years between 1971 and 1976, considering that was the prime of his music career.

When it comes to concert bootlegs for him, it's very slim pickings between 1971 and 1976. The best full-length one I could find is this one, from Boston in 1974. It's an audience boot, which is disappointing, but it's a particularly good one. It occurred to me that, thanks to the advances in audio editing technology in recent years, I could bring this up to nearly soundboard level. So that's what I tried to do. I used the MVSEP program to clean up crowd noise during songs, boost the lead vocals that were low in the mix, and so forth. I think it sounds a lot better. It's not as good as the "Majikat" or "Saturnight" official live albums, but it sounds plenty worthy to my ears.

This concert took place a month after the release of his 1974 studio album "Buddha and the Chocolate Box." That's one of my favorite albums from him. (I've posted an alternate version of it at this blog that makes it even better.) So naturally he played some songs from that. This also contains an except from his long "Foreigner Suite" called "Sunnyside Road" that makes a nice song when all on its own.

One song here, "Sitting" has "[Edit]" in its title. That's because there was a particularly difficult section of the song near the beginning. You can probably hear it. I tried all I could to make that sound better, but I could only do so much. 

This album is an hour and twenty minutes long.

01 talk 
02 Wild World 
03 talk 
04 Longer Boats 
05 Oh Very Young 
06 Sitting [Edit] 
07 talk 
08 Foreigner Suite- Sunnyside Road 
09 talk 
10 Where Do the Children Play 
11 talk 
12 Moonshadow 
13 How Can I Tell You 
14 Bad Penny 
15 Later 
16 Lady D'Arbanville 
17 talk 
18 Peace Train 
19 Father and Son 
20 Music 
21 18th Avenue 
22 Bitterblue
23 Hard Headed Woman 
24 talk 
25 King of Trees
26 Sun-C79
27 Sad Lisa

 (all tracks Cat Stevens)

Not entirely sure why I have posted links to this one as I feel a tad ‘Meh!’ about Cat Stevens now despite enjoying his work up until Catchbull At Four at the time and introduced to him via my wife and now can take or leave his rather over worked, tired and sentimental schtick but hey . . . he was important once