Max Romeo - Ginal Ship (1971)
Superb reggae tune produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry. In Jamaican patois, a ginal is a con man or hustler. Seems sort of appropriate for things in the U.S. today.
Ginalship mash up the country
Most of the cover albums I've posted by Hitchcock so far were performed at the Three Kings club in London, with a full band. But this one took place in San Francisco, and is in solo acoustic format. Dylan's original album was with a band, but the backing was pretty sparse, mostly just Dylan on acoustic guitar, harmonica, and/or piano, plus bass and drums. So Hitchcock, also on acoustic guitar, harmonica, and/or piano, wasn't that different.
The original Dylan album is only 38 minutes long. This concert, however, is almost two hours long. In addition to performing the entire album, he warmed up with three other Dylan covers.
Strangely, he also did two more covers during the album, "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles and "Dear Doctor" by the Rolling Stones, after playing "Dear Landlord" by Dylan. (He thought the Beatles and Stones were inspired to write songs in the "Dear..." format. I don't know if that's true, but the timing lines up, since the other two were written within a year of the release of Dylan's song.)
Then, after the album finished, he did still more Dylan covers ("I Threw It All Away" and "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)"), but also songs by the Band ("Caledonia Mission") and John Lennon ("God"), plus two songs he'd recently written himself ("Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom" and "Those Guys Are All Dead Now"). On top of all that, there's plenty of banter between songs, in his usual entertaining stream-of-consciousness style.
This originally was an audience bootleg. It was a pretty good one though, helped by the fact that it's easier to record a solo acoustic show, especially with a small, polite audience. But I improved the sound of every single track, so much so that this sounds as good as a soundboard or FM radio broadcast. For all the talking tracks, I ran them through the Adobe speech enhancer, and improved the clarity a long. Then, for all the songs, I ran them through MVSEP's "Reverb Removal" filter. That made a big difference as well.
This sounds really excellent now, even though everything here is unreleased. These filters are steadily improving with updates. Writing this in August 2026, this wouldn't have sounded this good if I had done these same audio edits even two years ago.
This album is an hour and 58 minutes long.
01 talk
02 Mr. Tambourine Man
03 Visions of Johanna
04 talk
05 Clothes Line Saga
06 talk
07 John Wesley Harding
08 talk
09 As I Went Out One Morning
10 I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
11 talk
12 All Along the Watchtower
13 talk
14 The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
15 talk
16 Drifter's Escape
17 Dear Landlord
18 talk
19 Dear Prudence
20 talk
21 Dear Doctor
22 talk
23 I Am a Lonesome Hobo
24 talk
25 I Pity the Poor Immigrant
26 talk
27 Wicked Messenger
28 talk
29 Down Along the Cove
30 talk
31 I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
32 talk
33 I Threw It All Away
34 talk
35 Caledonia Mission
36 talk
37 Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom
38 talk
39 Senor [Tales of Yankee Power]
40 talk
41 Those Guys Are All Dead Now
42 talk
43 God
. . . . . . . . I think I prefer this one to the album version!!
For some reason this made me howl! Somehow Frank doesn’t come out of this well despite it being apparently pro the moustachioed freak hisself . . . .what thinks thou? A dig at Zappa?
“Frank Zappa’s house in the canyon, which I visited several times, looked exactly like a troll’s kingdom. Fuzzy haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippie rock music.”
Grace Slick’s name will always be synonymous with the San Francisco scene as the lead singer of psychedelic pioneers, Jefferson Airplane. But like many musicians of her era, she also spent time living on and off in Laurel Canyon during its heyday in the late 1960s. In Slick’s 2008 memoir “Somebody to Love” she relays tales of her unrequited crush on Graham Nash, hanging with Frank Zappa and consoling a broken-hearted Stephen Stills after his break up with Judy Collins. But it was also Laurel Canyon where she moved after retiring from music and taking up art in the late 1980s saying, “This was a place where I knew the screwballs of the rock industry were at least accepted, if not welcomed.”
📷 Baron Woman
