7th
May 72 .The Bickershaw Festival .
"For
all our muddy friends
THE
GRATEFUL DEAD."
The
whole goddam show makes it into circulation !
Jerry backstage
at Bickershaw © Wombat
|
What
better way to mark the 30th anniversay of this classic show than to
assemble all the various versions of the gig , both SBD and audience
- together in as complete and (most importantly )as best sounding
a condition as possible and release the whole kaboodle on the unsuspecting
Deadhead community for what could be the first time ever ? Well that's
just what has happened in May 2002 .
Discs
1 & 2 are a compilation of multiple Audience sources which were
used to piece together the complete 1st set and first 4 songs of the
2nd set. A big thanks to Mick Etherington, GW Shark
#,
Simon Mould - and most especially to Simon Phillips
*and
Chris Jones §-
the only tapers we can identify- for supplying missing tracks such
as Mr Charlie and Casey Jones from their master recordings of this
show, as well as Alan Schlissel and Steve Barbella for getting the
different versions all in one place. The various versions were all
speed corrected, but there are still some speed fluctuations and "wow
and flutter" here and there.
Disc
1
1st Set
1. Intro > #
Truckin' (10
seconds into Sugaree, splice in Chris Jones' master )
2. Banter §
3. Sugaree §
4. Banter §
5. Mr. Charlie §
6. Beat it On Down the Line #
7. Banter #
8. He's Gone #
9. Chinatown Shuffle #
10. China Cat Sunflower >
11. I Know You Rider #
12. //Black Throated Wind #
13. //Next Time You See Me #
Disc
2
1. "Happy Birthday Billy"#
2. Playin' in the Band #
3. Tennessee Jed#
4. Good Lovin'#
5. //Casey Jones *
2nd Set
6. Greatest Story Ever Told #
7. Big Boss Man #
8. Ramble On Rose
#
9. Banter #
10. //Jack Straw #
Disc
3
1. //Dark Star(patched) >
2. Drums >
3. The Other// One(patched)>
4. Sing Me Back Home
Disc
4
1. Banter
2. Sugar Magnolia
3. Turn On Your Lovelight >
4. Going Down the Road Feeling Bad >
5. Not Fade Away
Encore
6. One More Saturday Night
7. Bonus - Banter Highlights
Disc
5
NRPS
1. Contract
2. Truck Driving Man
3. Rainbow
4. Sailing
5. Whatcha Going to Do
6. Willie & The Hand Jive
Alan
Schlissel relates the tangled tale of the recent compilation of this
show .
I
was approached by Mick Etherington about
finding and putting together the best possible sources for his only
Dead show, the Bickershaw Festival. Bickershaw
was a 3 day festival with many popular bands of the day. By all accounts
the weather was cold and rainy with mud everywhere. The cold weather
wreaked havoc with the equipment and the band and it made conditions
extremely unpleasant for concertgoers. Mick recalls sheltering under
the sound tower from the rain, wet and tired after a long weekend.
Mick
had long
harbored the dream of getting the whole show together after having
listened to the second set from Dark Star onwards that had circulated
for some time. What Mick started ultimately became an effort spanning
2 oceans and 3 or so continents to find all versions of this show
that were known to be in circulation. We eventually turned up many
pieces of this show, some workable, others not. We were able to identify
two of the tapers, Chris Jones and Simon
Phillips (who did a good job considering the circumstances)
through GW Shark -who runs this web page
, and who had also been busy compiling as many versions of the tapes
as possible over the past years with the eventual aim of cleaning
them up . The Shark provided three of
the versions used here: the audience recording- source unknown- which
comprises most of the recording and he also passed on the vile hissy
sound board ( which was thankfully not used ) as well as a digital
copy of Chris Jones original masters
of the Dead and NRPS recordings .
I
approached Steve Barbella to locate someone
with the knowledge and proper equipment to analyze, clean up and sew
together the bits and pieces. Steve suggested
Scott Clugston and I subsequently mailed him a large stack
of discs. Scott examined all the source material and the result of
this effort speaks for itself. Scott supplied his copy of soundboard
material that was used on discs 3 and 4. After some consideration
he decided to use only audience tapes for discs 1 and 2 since the
soundboard segments we obtained were of poor quality. Scott considers
this to be one of the more difficult projects he has worked on and
I thank him for his time and talent.
Only
a few hours after I initially released this "new" show,
Steve contacted me to say that he had heard from Seth
Kaplan and that he had a version of the soundboard that did
not have a cassette generation in it. We agreed to recall the few
copies that we released and to see what Seth had. Seth had the same
partial set 2 soundboard only it was remastered by Bill
Giles, whose comments follow below.
Scott
contacted me regarding this new soundboard version and according to
him: "I've spoken at length with Jeff Tiedrich
regarding the Sbd portion of this show.....here's the scoop;-)........when
the more complete copy of the 2nd set began to circulate, we were
told that the lineage was MSR>DAT.....after listening, and based
on the hiss levels, the pedigree was questioned and the source came
back and said that it was possible that there was a cassette gen present,
but couldn't confirm one way or the other........being a bit conservative
when it comes to pedigrees, we opted to list this new copy (with the
Betty Board patch in The Other One) as MSR>C>DAT........this
was approximately March of 2000.........I never gave it a second thought
and since then, Jeff has confirmed that what we have (and patched)
is MSR>DAT......"
In
all likelihood, Scott's version has the same lineage as this upgrade.
This
upgrade has a very nice patch that restores the opening notes of Dark
Star. Also, Bill scrubbed some broadband noise from the quiet passages
of that song. I did an A/B comparison of discs 3 and 4 and found that
the 2 versions were identical in quality except for the patch of the
first 5 notes of Dark Star and a slightly reduced noise level during
certain quieter passages in Dark Star.
The
other advantage to using Seth's version of the soundboard is a little
extra banter at the beginning of disc 4 before Sugar Magnolia and
some excerpts of assorted stage banter that was placed after the encore.
I verified and fixed sector boundaries with shntool and seek enabled
all tracks with seek tables appended using shn v3.
Digital
wizardry
by Scott Clugston, discs 1, 2 and 5
SBD Remastering by
Bill Giles, discs 3 and 4
Concept by Mick
Etherington
Ways and Means by Steve
Barbella
Audience taping by Chris
Jones , Simon Phillips and others
Special thanks to
GW Shark for his role in tracking down other sources
Thanks to Simon
Mould for providing me with his source
Big
Thanks
to Alan Schlissel
for coordinating the whole thing
GWShark notes:
Originally
my only copy of the show was a respectable audience tape ( the one
that was used for the majority of this seeding ) which was missing
a Casey Jones (which was the orgasmic end of the first set ) and
couple of other gems . I began to search for the missing items ,
and over a number of years, through the Archive, I acquired all
the other audience sources and the dodgy SBD as well as a very good
quality copy of the Dark Star onwards SBD.
I was
then contemplating cleaning up the audience tapes in Pro Tools and
putting it all together as a continuous package, but lack of time
and the complexity of the task kept me from doing the deed.
Therefore,
when Mick contacted me, not only was I in the perfect position to
forward all of this material to Alan , but I was also relieved to
do so as the speed correction needed to improve the main source
tapes and the huge differences in sound quality between the various
audience tapes was daunting .
"I'd
like to pass on my sincere thanks to all involved in bringing this
to fruition."
- Mick Etherington
"Little
did I know at the time that two of the shows that I taped are now
regarded as 'master' audience recordings. Jeez, I'm so glad I did.
If Alan wants to know, the recorder I used was an early Pye Cassette
recorded with a hand-held mic."
- Chris Jones
"Bickershaw:
I'm 100% confident that this remastered version *is* the best in
circulation. When Gavin Lawson kindly
sent me his CDR some months ago, his source's lineage showed a cassette
gen. In contrast, Tiedrich's Resources for Traders said the best
source had no cassette gen.
"This
version starts with Dark Star (but missed the first 5 notes which
I've patched in from a poor denoised and re equalised SBD cassette.
It's OK!! You'd never know if you hadn't been told). It is not the
Betty Board, the circulating copy of which only starts in the 1st
verse of TOO (33 mins late!).
"The
Dark Star's a true beauty, er blissfully spatial in the 72nd degree.........
but the source contains a lot of broadband noise - a bit like there's
glass reverberating intermittently but frequently on your speakers
(or, if you're grooving in the cans, inside your head). Sometimes
it's one channel, sometimes the other, sometimes both. Real irritating.
David Hollister confirms that the noise is on the original master
reel and that he had not tried treating it because broadband noise
is not susceptible to general scrubbing. So, to cut another long
story short, I've been through each and every burst of noise in
Dark Star, channel by channel, and tried to clean each one individually.
Well, it's one way of getting into the music :)) The result's not
perfect and never would be, but all the noises are attenuated and
some are removed. It's definitely very OK, the basic sound is first
class.
Most important, the MUSIC IS OUTTASIGHT.
The other
problem with the source is a 30 sec cut in TOO and the absence of
stage announcements (in particular Weir's "we've
forgotten how to play St Stephen....... maybe we could go back and
listen to our records and cop our licks" rap, and apologies
for yet another technical problem "Garcia's
got to clean his glasses". (Weir was really on good
stage rap form on this tour)). I've patched in the music and announcements
from BD>DAT>CDR (Betty Board), courtesy of
Steve Nicholls. I had wondered whether to use the Betty as
the master source from when it enters in TOO onwards, but comparative
listening shows the non-Betty is the better and clearer sound -
drums are crisper, instruments brighter - whereas the Betty has
some bass saturation and is slightly muddier in the middle. (Very
appropriate for Bickershaw, ha ha.)
Finally,
as a reminder of the atmospherix of the event, I've added a few
other moments of the concert from the poor quality SBD cassette,
denoised (though you might not think so!) and re-equalised, as a
brief filler. In particular 'Happy Birthday Billy' and Weir explaining
that, to keep warm, they are playing under 30 knots of jet breath
from hot air heaters and getting dizzy with the smell of kerosene.....
