Soundboard

CDR

1

DVD 3543; lineage: Soundboard recording. 1st-gen copy of original cassette > Azimuth-optimized analog-digital transfer to hard drive > tracked in CDWav editor > SoundForge processes applied: DC offset > Traders Little Helper processes applied: SBE check (passed); .flac conversion (level 8); .ffp + .md5

I know this one has made the rounds for years, but this is the first time I ever did it right. I had been plugging into the board at The Uptown all week, and this show has always been one of my favorites. It's particularly special to me because I helped mix the show, which accounts for the guitar levels in the mix. I'm afraid I don't remember the name of the sound man who ran the board that night, but we had a great time hanging out, and I can't thank him enough for letting me get my mitts on the board for a while. I kind of pushed the limits a bit, because I knew if I left the levels as they were in the beginning, the board tape would be all vocals and drums. Once I got my fingers on the dials, I tried not to change the mix he had set up for the room, because that already sounded great, but I shaped the mix for the tape as well. It can be a tricky balance, but I think this one worked. I also think that pushing things in this case helped capture the live energy that was in the room - I would not call this a typical sterile board tape by any means.

It was a blast hanging out with the band that night. I smuggled in Jessica Hopper, who was a school-mate of my daughter, and was just getting her own music 'zine off the ground, and wasn't quite of drinking age, but then again, she wasn't drinking, either. She was just psyched to be able to hang out with the members of Pavement. Gary Young was still in the band at this point, and was off the wall all night. Before the show, he was sitting at a table in front of the bar, set up by a local Planned Parenthood group, and Gary was handing out condoms to everyone who walked into the bar, insisting they would need them. During the show, he seemed to be in his own world, and would frequently leave his drum kit between songs, and a few times, I was certain that "S.M" and "Spiral" were pretty frustrated with him. Having been in both of those places in bands, I understand it, but I will say that I thought Gary's energy was definitely a part of the Pavement experience I witnessed that evening.

The original SBD tape mysteriously disappeared, and this transfer was made from a copy I recently discovered in my archives with a note in my own hand-writing, taped to the case, that reads" band copy". Some background here might help: I was attacked by a mob the day after the Pavement show, and woke up with half my face missing, a bunch of kicked-in ribs, a broken collarbone, and a smashed-in eardrum, in what was apparently part of a slew of rioting that had continued to sweep across the U.S., in some sort of empathy for the Rodney King incident which had taken place Los Angeles, earlier that year. Things were a bit dis-oriented for a while after that, so among other things, I'm not sure where the original cassette got off to, but it's more likely that I misplaced it, than someone making off with it. It's even entirely possible that I never labeled it, and may have even recorded something else over it!

Anyway, that finally answers the question I've been asking myself for years - why didn't they want to use this tape for anything? Ummm, I guess because they never got it - ouch! A friend once told me that they read somewhere, that Stephen Malkmus said he heard a bootleg of this show, and it was his favorite Pavement bootleg. I don't know if this is true, but I had mixed feelings about it, because I hadn't realize they had never heard the original tape, and I really thought it was good enough to use for something officially. After I made this digital transfer and played it back, I still have mixed feelings about it, especially having just recently listened to the Brixton show included on the 2-disc reissue of "Slanted + Enchanted". I really do think the energy of this one has more to do with what I heard in Pavement's music. The Brixton show, to my ears, sounds like they already played out the early material, and were ready to move on to something else - like maybe the next album?

As far as I can recall, no previous trade copies were ever made from the original master, so if I ever traded copies of the complete show, they would have been from this same cassette. The brief snippet from the soundcheck came from an edition version of the show, which was originally on a different cassette. As I recall, there was truly nothing else on the original soundcheck tape worth listening to - a lot of mic checking and guitar feedback, and the one short bit of a song included here. A week or so after the show, I made my own personal edited "live album"-style copy of this show, which featured nothing but the music, and the song from the soundcheck. I EQ'd the hell out of that tape, because I wanted the guitars to literally scream in my ears, as it ended up living in my walkman for several months. Somewhere along the way, I traded a few copies of that, and I've heard that it became bootlegged, with a bunch of "filler" tracks, once the CD-R burning craze hit. Bear in mind that the edited version I made was done with half my hearing, and under the influence of whatever I was using to kill the pain from my injuries - although, it might be possible that version was made using the original tapes, although I can't be sure. Whatever - this is the way the show went down, and I haven't changed a thing here. If the levels are too hot in a few places, I left 'em alone. Same with the quieter bits. With this version, the only significant thing I did was to tweak the living daylights out of the Azimuth on the playback head, and I actually had transfered it a couple of times, until I found the settings I could be satisfied with.

I recently located the calendar for The Uptown Bar for the month of June '92, and just looking at it brought back a ton of memories. 6/4 - My Dad Is Dead; 6/8 - Mark Eitzel; 6/9 - Toiling Midgets and Vic Chesnut; 6/10 - Rein Sanction; 6/11 - Pavement; 6/17 - Surgery; 6/21 - The Cake Kitchen, The Mad Scene, and Bratmobile; 6/23 - Silkworm. There were more, but I wasn't going out for a while, and it took the better part of a year for my hearing to come back in my left ear, so I wasn't doing a lot of recording, and I couldn't really run a soundboard as well as I used to, either. In time, all those shows and more will make their way up from the basement as well. In the meantime, I hope this sounds as good to your ears as it does to mine.

3543

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