And now for something completely different........
Van Halen - " How The South West Was Won"
(9-28-81), Phoenix, Arizona, Veterans Memorial Coliseum
Audience Recording,
Lineage: Master Cassettes > Panasonic SW Cassette Deck, Evolution Patch Cord > Goldwave > 24 Bit, 48 KHZ WAV > Goldwave, Batch Processing > 16 Bit, 44.1 HZ > Remaster > Flac Frontend, Encoding Options, Level.6, Algin On Sector Boundaries > Flac
Label: N/A
Original Taper: " Diamond" David Homes
Cheers and thanks to my mate in the Southwest Mr. David Homes, an incredibly nice guy.
I truly appreciate you giving me the opportunity to transfer and share this recording with everyone here.
Also thanks to my mates The 7th Son for helping me with the transferring, and to my mate Donkyflip for making the fantastic cover art, and for helping me out on all the tracks. Really appreciate your advice and value your opinion.
Disc One:
1) On Fire ( Fades In)
2) Sinners Swing
3) Hear About It Later
4) So This Is Love
5) Jamies Cryin'
6) Bass Solo
7) Running With The Devil
8) Dance The Night Away ( Cuts Out)
Disc Two:
1) Sunday Afternoon In The Park ( Fades In)
2) Romeo's Delight
3) Everybody Wants Some
4) Drum Solo/Everybody Wants Some Conclusion
5) Ice Cream Man ( Includes: " Summertime" ( Tease) )
6) Mean Street ( Cuts Out)
7) Eruption ( Cuts In, Cut, Incomplete Song)
8) You Really Got Me ( Cuts Out)
9) Unchained ( Cuts In)
10) Ear Ache My Eye ( Cuts In, ( Tease) )
11) Ain't Talkin' Bout Love ( Cuts Out)
Enjoy!
Please Do Not Convert To Lossy Formats
Please Do Not Sell
Please Share With Others
Notes About the show from the taper " Diamond" David Homes:
This was the first show I ever taped, but not the first time I had seen Van Halen perform.
The first time I saw them was in either 77 or 78 in Phoenix, can't remember the exact date, but I remember that show being an excellent performance from the group, so I was extremely excited to catch them live once again and try and capture that energy on tape.
I really wasn't a hardcore fan, I was a fan of their early material, around this time I felt their egos were far too inflated, I was mostly going to tape for my friends in High School.
I remember being incredibly nervous the whole time I was taping...kind of like the feeling you get when you're about to lose your virginity.
My hand was shaking the whole time I was recording, scared about getting busted by security, it takes you a few times taping to calm yourself down and build up your confidence, but it was exhilarating.
My arm was also extremely tired from holding the deck up all night.
I forget what type of equipment I used to tape the show with, it belonged to a friend of mine who lent it out to me to use for the show, sorry I can't be more specific about the equipment.
I was positioned on the floor, can't remember if I was in front of or near the board,but I was close to them and the stage.
As for my opinion on the show itself, a major disappointment for me was watching David Lee Roth's drunken antics on stage.
He admitted to the audience that he got " fucked up" backstage when the opening band was on.
He was even drinking on stage right from a bottle of Jack Daniels, drinking seemed to make him slightly sloppy, his timing on some songs was off, he wasn't able to hit a lot of his trademark high notes at the right time so he often over compensated by doing too many screams, and I also noticed his speech was slurred.
The bands performance was quite nice though, they all kept it together, Alex had been drinking a bit, and he screwed up a few times, but didn't ham it up like Dave did.
His antics were indeed quite tiresome, the crowd really enjoyed them and the performance though, they were whipped into a real frenzy.
After the show I listened to my masters and I was quite upset with the sound quality.
I was comparing it to the quality of some of my vinyl LP bootlegs and I actually thought it's quality was quite disappointing compared to the quality of those LP's.
I shouldn't have done that to myself though, I was probably setting my standards and expectations too high, especially since it was my first tape.
Besides the sound quality, I was also upset with the recording because the tape speed had changed when I switched tapes and started recording " Eruption".
The batteries were starting to die on me, which slowed the recording down.
I was so upset with the tape that I didn't do another recording a few years after I did this one, but I did learn a lot about taping after this experience.
I've only released this recording to a few of my friends in Arizona, one of them actually did correct the tape speed problems with his 4-track, but I never got a copy of that version for myself.
This is the first time I've put this out in wide circulation, there's mention of this show at DB.Etree, but there's no setlist and all the people who say they have a copy only have it in MP3 format.
Don't know if it could be my tape that I made for one of my friends, or possibly someone else taped the as well, which really would be great because I'd like to hear what theirs sounded like, and if they caught the parts I missed.
I hope you Van Halen collectors enjoy this tape.
My own personal notes:
I've been working on this for the past few months,Dave sent me his masters quite a while ago, and I've been trying to fix them up for him ever since they first landed here in Canada.
I lost count of how many different remastering attempts I did before settling on this one I'm sharing here with everyone.
This was the hardest project I've ever worked on, it was such a difficult project to work on because I'm not a Van Halen fan at all, the only song I really liked of theirs was " Ice Cream Man", so it was hard for me to get into the music and figure things out about the group, things like how Daves voice should sound ( is the tape running at the correct speed and is he singing too fast or too slow), what do other Van Halen tapes sound like, and how they would compare to this one, all sorts of things that go along with tape collecting.
But I treated this show like a Zeppelin recording, gave it my full attention and care when trying to remaster it and correct it's tape speed issues.
I even downloaded a few Van Halen shows to compare this one to others that are already circulating out there,and to get a feel for the sound and pick up on some things about their performances through the years.
I downloaded " The Nightmare Before Halloween",a 77 soundboard, and " Tora!, Tora!, Tora!", a 1980 audience recording.
You can do that sort of thing with Zeppelin tapes, for example, Plant's voice had changed from what it had originally sounded like in 1975, he couldn't hit the high notes as well as he used to, so I wanted to see if I could find something like that in these Van Halen tapes.
So I listened to the tapes in my stereo, then the Van Halen bootlegs I downloaded, and I thought the tapes weren't as bad as what Dave described to me, the sound quality was pretty good on it's own, there was a little too much top end on the tape, and they needed to be cleaned up a bit.
Things like guitar, Daves vocals ( especially his high notes), and the cymbals drowned out things like the bass, and back up vocals by the group, and I think was the cause of the distortion in the channels.
Too much top end also didn't really create an ambiance of the show, the noise from the crowd was almost unbearable sometimes.
Their whistling, cheering, screaming, was way too loud, and also probably caused a lot of the distortion, and of course there were the tape speed problems on " Eruption".
So the goal was to clean up the tapes, balance out the highs, correct the tape speed, and get some of the ambiance of the show.
So I hope you like the work I've done on the show, I'm no remastering genius in the leagues of Winston Remasters or anything, but I do hope you all enjoy it.
The title " How The South West Was Won" came to me after doing some research on Arizona, and it's also sort Zeppelin influenced, I asked my mate Donkyflip if it was possible to make the art sort of resemble the cover art of Zeppelin's " How The West Was Won", and he did a great job.
I had a few other ideas, things like " Running With The Sun Devil", or " Southwestern Flavour".
The " Sun Devil" reference would've been more suitable if the show took place in Tempe ( where the Sundevils play), and especially if they played in the activities center there, and the Southwestern Flavour title didn't have that much appeal.
I like to name bootlegs I'm working on with some sort of reference to the city, or state/Province that they take place in, and if that doesn't work, I usually name it after something the singer or a member of the audience says during the show.
So while I was doing some research on Phoenix, I found out that the movie " How The West Was Won" was actually filmed in Phoenix, but to not create confusion or just completely rip off the movie title, I made it " How The Southest Was Won".
So I hope you like the work I've done on the show, I'm no remastering genius in the leagues of Winston Remasters or anything, but I do hope you all enjoy it.
Please pass it on, or just pass, the choice is yours.
Cheers!
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