Dwight Yoakam - Fillmore Auditorium - San Francisco, CA 31 DEC 1985 | Guitars.101

Dwight Yoakam - Guitars Cadillacs 1985

Now I haven’t featured Guitars one-oh-one for a while they are SO big and have such a lot of stuff it is not really in need of my support and so here I share the link (below) which regulars will know I rarely do . . . . . . this is about the time I discovered Dwight through my old pal John Northcote who bought me the album on import Guitars, Cadillacs etc and for the longest time I had a life size cardboard cut out sales promo of Dwight from John that sat behind the TeeVee! (yes really!)

NOW I don’t find much Dwight Yoakam and this early set from '85 is REALLY worth it and whilst still a bit bright and hot for my taste it is FLAC format and the guys have done a lot of work on it, so it seemed right to share directly. If the guys at Guitars101 want me to remove the link please get in touch and I will do the usual [I live for sharing posts from the respective music sites I check on a daily basis to guide folks in their direction usually, so this is a bit of a change - feel free to challenge me if sometimes I make the mistake of sharing the link - it is all in the interests of sharing live music and if anyone objects I am always willing to take times down! 

P.S. there are also various version of this concert available on YouTube but if you want a much better quality download try this one!

Andy 😉 

Dwight Yoakam

Fillmore Auditorium

San Francisco, CA

31 DEC 1985

Tech spec:

SOURCE: SBD audio in 16/44 FLAC. The source was troubled with several problems, including a narrow and left-tilted binaural field, a hot snare hit, high mid-range harsh resonances, distracting hum and a buried fiddle.

BACKGROUND: Dwight performed at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, CA in December 1985, the year following his release of the six-song EP titled Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. on Oak Records in 1984. Three months after this performance, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. would be released as a full-length album on Reprise Records.

SETLIST:

01. emcee introduction

02. Can't You Hear Me Calling

03. Guitars, Cadillacs

04. Down The Road

05. 1,000 Miles

06. Rocky Road Blues

07. Readin', Rightin', Rt. 23

08. Heartaches By The Number

09. I'll Be Gone

10. It Won't Hurt

11. My Bucket's Got A Hole In It

12. Miner's Prayer

13. Grand Tour

14. Long Black Train

15. Ring Of Fire

16. band intros/Jambalaya (On The Bayou)

17. Since I Started Drinkin' Again

18. Always Late (With Your Kisses)

19. This Drinkin' Will Kill Me

LINEUP:

Dwight Yoakam - vocals, acoustic guitar

Pete Anderson - electric guitar

Jeff Donavan - drums

J.D. Foster - bass

Brantley Kearns - fiddle

CORRECTIONS: Each track underwent clip repair (occasional digital clipping in most tracks), DC offset/hum removal (60Hz plus harmonics), phase correction, azimuth correction and initial gain setting. I had 2 sources for this show. The first, labelled a "soundboard," had distortions for the first 3/4 of Can't You Hear Me Calling. The second source apparently sought to solve this by deleting the first 3/4 of the song and applying a fade in. I decided to solve this by patching with another SBD version of Can't You Hear Me Calling from another show in the 1980s, around the same timeframe. The source used as the patch, to replace the first 3/4 of the song, had a much wider stereo field than the Fillmore West performance. This made for a noticeable transition at the start of the last 1/4 of the song, which was so stark as to sound as if the audio had been collapsed to mono. To soften this transition, I went back and narrowed the stereo field of the patch segment. There wasn't a terrific way to fix this track, but I felt that this was a better option than offering the last 1 minute and 19 seconds of the song.

REMASTERING: The harsh resonances were mitigated using a dynamic resonance suppressor. This was followed by a dynamics processor. EQ was then applied, using a small dynamic low shelf, a small dynamic high shelf and a spectral EQ bell to enhance the vocal range and help revive the fiddle. Stereo field optimization was done, collapsing the lowest bass frequencies to mono and keeping a watchful eye on the correlation meter. A bus compressor was used to help tame the mighty snare whacks. Gentle plate reverb was applied. Saturation was then added to help camouflage some of the remaining resonances. Finally, the final level was set with true peak and 8x oversampling to achieve a target integrated LUFS of ~ -15.0.

NOTES: This is a fantastic performance which highlights Dwight's songwriting and his re-interpretation of country classics made famous by the likes of George Jones, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Johnny Horton and Lefty Frizzell. It also showcases the musicianship of the Babylonian Cowboys, including Pete Anderson's fiery handling of the Fender Telecaster.

DOWNLOAD here 

https://drive.proton.me/urls/S47EZ5FC40#OjP6haxbajO9

The Forgotten Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 | Dangerous Minds (Will Howard)

 Speaking of Interesting !! 😳

German American Bund: the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden

Will Howard

Thu 19 February 2026 21:00, UK For the past decade, a certain breed of dewey-eyed American liberal has been wailing that the current descent into fascism their country is trying to fight back against “isn’t what my country stands for!” 

It may sound like I’m being a little unfair to someone who is broadly speaking on the right side of history, and you might not be far off the mark. One need only take a look at both sides of the Atlantic and see that in this moment, people really don’t have much of a problem with the rise of fascism. While it’s a low bar to clear, speaking out against the evils being committed by governments against their people is one that a worrying number of people are failing to do.

Yet the people handwringing about this “not being the country they recognise” are naive at best and ignorant at worst. Especially in America, this is nothing new, and I’m not just talking about the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan being a repurposed Ronald Reagan catchphrase.

No, America as it currently is, with a dictator in the White House and a Gestapo on the streets murdering with impunity as a way of keeping the public too terrified to act against them, is one that a much larger contingent of Americans have always wanted.

This goes back a lot further than the 1980s, as well, and back to a time when most Americans considered their country to have been at its peak. After all, the tide of the Second World War was turned by the USA joining the war (fucking eventually) and fighting for freedom against tyranny, right? We’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for Uncle Sam socking Hitler right in his stupid fucking moustache, right? Everyone agreed that what was happening in Europe was a bad thing…right?

Nope, and there were a lot more of these fascists around than you’d think.

( Dangerous Minds / U.S. Military – Department of Defense)

So, who organised the Nazi rally in New York City?

The truth is that there was a small, yet incredibly vocal minority of people who weren’t just opposed to joining the Second World War because of an aversion to joining foreign wars, but because they believed in what Hitler was doing.

The most vocal group with these beliefs were the German American Bund, an organisation dedicated to spreading the word of Nazism in the United States. They spent years trying to get their tendrils into all facets of German-American society.

They strong-armed German-American news outlets into publishing pro-Hitler news articles. They pressured elected representatives against the 1933 anti-German boycott. After electing the German-born American Fritz Julius Kuhn as their leader, they began expanding their membership until the peak of their powers came in 1939, when they were able to fill Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for their “Pro-America Rally”. A vehemently antisemitic rally that saw a stage set consisting of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by two swastikas.

The German American Bund fell apart quickly after that. It was disbanded officially when the US joined the war, but years before that, Kuhn was found to be embezzling funds from the organisation for himself. Which goes to show just how much the whole crusade really meant to him. However, just because that specific organisation fell apart and the US fought against the Nazis in World War II doesn’t mean that one terrifying fact isn’t true today.

They would love the direction their country is going in today.

AI Music is on a Collision Course - Cherie Hu | Water & Music Newsletter

 Speaking of Interesting!

AI music is on a collision course

Cherie Hu

Cherie Hu

Published Feb 5, 2026

+ Follow

This article was originally published in the

 free Water & Music newsletter.

---

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.”
So reads the title of one of my favorite pieces of tech commentary from last fall, published by the team at Euclid Ventures. Analyzing investment data from several sources including Carta, Pitchbook, and AngelList, the authors came to the conclusion that venture capital — an industry that, in their words, “has long celebrated itself as the business of contrarianism” — is actually becoming more consensus-driven than ever before. Investors are increasingly “outsourcing conviction” to a narrow set of proxies, like elite credentials, co-signs from incumbent accelerators, and the perception that a given market might be winner-take-all. As a result, capital is consolidating into “the same handful of themes, founders, and even funds.”
I’m afraid we’re reaching a similar point with AI music.
Since last summer, I’ve noticed that AI music activity has started converging on the same, narrow set of bets. The convergence is happening from multiple directions. AI music products are starting to look the same, in the race to own the entire music creation workflow from start to finish. The same rights holders are licensing their catalogs to AI companies, primarily for the purpose of remixing existing IP. And a crowded market of detection and attribution tools is emerging to define what counts as AI music, and who gets paid for it. (In a poetic way, the last few months alone have seen the launch of more AI music detection tools than creation tools!)
The market is incredibly competitive right now. Water & Music's free AI music database now lists over 300 apps. Against this backdrop, every stakeholder in the ecosystem faces their own distinct pressure. AI music companies need more defensible moats against the hundreds of others; labels and rights holders need to protect their catalog value; and platforms are trying to manage the integrity of their user experience amidst an influx of AI-generated content.
In nascent markets like this where the winning model is unclear, rational actors often hedge by converging on what appears to be working. The irony, of course, is that differentiation would theoretically serve these actors better.
Below, I break down three main convergences that have emerged across more than 40 AI music developments since late June 2025, and what they mean about where the market might be headed. If you care about a healthy future for the music business, you should see this AI convergence as a huge risk — of homogenization, of power concentration, and of a narrowing of what music culture could become.
(A note on scope: I’ve mostly excluded ongoing lawsuits from this analysis. My focus instead is on concrete market movements like deals being signed, partnerships being announced, and products being shipped.)

Cherie Hu

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SONGWRITERS: Billy Steinberg dies (75) Feb 16th 26 | ALBUMS THAT SHOULD EXIST : Billy Steinberg & Tom Kelly: 1980-2019

 This is interesting and I didn’t think it would be!

Covered: Billy Steinberg & Tom Kelly: 1980-2019

Paul notes and we share his feelings too I think : I don't keep a close eye on music news, but yesterday I happened to hear that songwriter Billy Steinberg died. Specifically, he died on February 16, 2026, at the age of 75. That probably doesn't mean anything to most people, because I don't think he's very well known as far as songwriters go. But it meant something to me, because I had already made a "Covered" album of the songs he and songwriting partner Tom Kelly made. (It's one of several dozen "Covered" albums I've made but haven't gotten around to posting yet.) Due to his death, I decided to post this sooner rather than later.

Steinberg and Kelly wrote a lot of hits from the 1980s to the 2000s that you probably know without ever knowing who wrote them. Even though they were male, somehow they had the most success with females covering their songs. They had five Number One hits in the U.S., all sung by women: "Like a Virgin" by Madonna (1984), "True Colors" by Cyndi Lauper (1986), "Eternal Flame" (co-written with Susanna Hoffs and recorded by the Bangles in 1989), "So Emotional" by Whitney Houston (1987), and "Alone" by Heart (1987).

Billy Steinberg was born in Fresno, California, though his family moved to Palm Springs when he was a teenager. After graduating from college, he formed a band called Billy Thermal. However, they didn't have any success, and one album they recorded around 1980 wasn't released until decades later, after he made a name for himself as a songwriter. He had his first songwriting success with "How Do I Make You," which was a hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1980.  

Tom Kelly was born in a small town in Illinois in 1952. He went to a college in that state, but dropped out to pursue a music career. He was a backing musician for Dan Fogelberg in 1976 and 1977. He also did a lot of session work, for instance singing backing vocals on Toto albums. He had his first songwriting success with "Fire and Ice," a minor hit for Pat Benatar in 1981.

Both Steinberg and Kelly independently had songs on Benatar's 1981 album, "Precious Time." They met at a party that year, and soon began writing together. Previously, both of them had written lyrics and music. But they soon fell into a pattern where Steinberg generally wrote the lyrics while Kelly wrote the music. Their really big break as a songwriting team was "Like a Virgin" by Madonna. After that, they were in high demand. What's on this album is just the cream of the crop of the many dozens of songs they wrote for well-known musical acts.

Their partnership continued very fruitfully until the mid-1990s. At that point, Kelly tired of songwriting and dropped out of the music business. He'd already had enough success to live on the royalties he'd made. However, Steinberg kept going with new songwriting partners. From the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s, he mostly wrote with Rick Newels, who already was a successful professional songwriter. From the mid-2000s to about the mid-2010s, he mostly wrote with Josh Alexander.

Steinberg had a lot of songwriting success after he stopped working with Kelly. But I listened to his big hits and, to be honest, didn't like them very much after about 2000. They suffer the same problems as most popular pop music since about 2000: formulaic and forgettable. So I generally didn't include most of those. To be honest, even a lot of their earlier stuff was formulaic and forgettable, but sometimes, in fact many times, they had some real winners.

But in case you're curious, Steinberg's biggest later hits include "I Turn to You" by Melanie C (2000), "Love Doesn't Have to Hurt" by Atomic Kitten (2003), "Too Little Too Late" by JoJo (2006), "Don't Hold Your Breath" by Nicole Scherzinger (2011), and "Give Your Heart a Break" by Demi Lovato (2012). After that, the hits petered out, although some older songs keep getting rerecorded and making the charts again, especially "Alone" and "I Drove All Night." For instance, Alyssa Reid went all the way to Number Two in the British charts with "Alone" in 2012, although it was titled "Alone Again" and had the now practically obligatory rap section.

I'm not a fan of Whitney Houston's version of "So Emotional." But since it was a massive Number One hit, I wanted to include it in some form. I found a radically different cover version by Jon McLaughlin from 2019 that I like much better, so I used that instead. Had it not been for that song, this album would end in 2000.

Here are their Wikipedia pages: 

Billy Steinberg - Wikipedia

Tom Kelly (musician) - Wikipedia  

That album is an hour and ten minutes long. 

01 How Do I Make You (Linda Ronstadt)
02 Fire and Ice (Pat Benatar)
03 Like a Virgin (Madonna)
04 Sex as a Weapon (Pat Benatar)
05 True Colors (Cyndi Lauper)
06 Eternal Flame (Bangles)
07 Alone (Heart)
08 In Your Room (Bangles)
09 I Touch Myself (Divinyls)
10 My Side of the Bed (Susanna Hoffs)
11 I Drove All Night (Roy Orbison)
12 Night in My Veins (Pretenders)
13 Lucky Love [Acoustic Version] (Ace of Base)
14 I'll Stand by You (Pretenders)
15 Falling into You (Celine Dion)
16 California (Belinda Carlisle)
17 One and One (Edyta Gorniak)
18 Everytime It Rains (Ace of Base)
19 The Consequences of Falling (k.d. lang)
20 So Emotional (Jon McLaughlin)

Steve Winwood - "Now The Green Blade Riseth”

 Finally stopped raining here . . . . . .don’t hold your breath seems like months . . . . . . so here is Farmer Stevie echoing his roots in English folk music if old English songs float your boat and beckoning the coming Spring here he is at home singing Now The Green Blade Riseth

Steve Winwood - "Now The Green Blade Riseth”

from his Facebook page

Steve Winwood

Bid you G’day with some Tuba Skinny - Sweet Levon’ Old Soul indeed

 Tuba Skinny - Sweet Lovin’ Old Soul Wilmington Sept 2025

What we all need is a Tuba solo coda!

David Byrne returns to Amsterdam . . . . . 16th February 2026

 

Slippery People - David Byrne (Talking Heads) -  Live Amsterdam - 16 February 2026

oh well I could tell you wanted more . . . . . he seems to like playing Amsterdam . . . . where my son and his family are as we speak some of my favourite people in my favourite city!

Luke O'Neil's Writing . . . . today this from across the pond

 

There are ordinary heroes everywhere. 

All hail, the good citizens of Surprise, Arizona!

‘“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was 'done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said 'This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’“

"The morning after the tour, the Mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the Mayor of Ordruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought 'How is this my fault? I have no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, 'This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

Cindy Gallop

Luke O'Neil’s Writing https://www.welcometohellworld.com/a-surprise-zone-of-interest/

Luke O'Neil's Writing

https://www.welcometohellworld.com/a-surprise-zone-of.../