R.E.M.
Toad's Place
New Haven, CT
Sunday 17 July 1983
Support: The Replacements
The Alex Butterfield Archive No. ABA-029-2
Lineage: Master cassette recorded in Sony TCS-310>recording studio mixing board>EQ>compressor>Audiomedia II card>Mac IIci>Soundesigner 2>output to CD-R>ripped in iTunes>FLAC conversion in xAct
Eckythump October 2020 remaster: iZotope RX8 Advanced (declip, azimuth adjustment) -> Audacity 2.4.2 (split tracks and export to FLAC Level 8) -> Foobar2000 1.6.1 (Files tagged)
Originally uploaded to Dime on 5 September 2011 by butterfield. Remastered version uploaded to Dime by eckythump 25 October 2020
Track List:
00 - Intro
01 - Wolves, Lower
02 - Moral Kiosk
03 - Laughing
04 - Pilgrimage
05 - 7 Chinese Bros.
06 - Talk About The Passion
07 - Romance
08 - Sitting Still
09 - Harborcoat
10 - Catapult
11 - Pretty Persuasion
12 - Gardening At Night
13 - 9-9
14 - Just A Touch
15 - West Of The Fields
16 - Radio Free Europe
17 - Encore break
Encore 1
18 - White Tornado
19 - Ages Of You
20 - Time After Time (Annelise)
21 - We Walk
22 - 1,000,000
Encore 2
23 - Eight Miles High (The Byrds cover)
24 - Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars)
25 - Skank
Michael Stipe - Vocals
Peter Buck - Guitar
Mike Mills - Bass, vocals
Bill Berry - Drums, vocals
Show notes: There's a few periods in R.E.M.'s live career where they hit a hot streak and produced some incredible shows - August 1985 comes to mind in the first instance, but July 1983 isn't far behind. 'Murmur' had been out for a few months by this point, word of mouth was spreading quickly, and clubs that had been sparsely attended in 1982 were now packed with fans screaming out requests for songs. There's some brilliant recordings from this month, including the JEMS recording from Detroit the week prior to this, and the FM broadcasts of Toronto and Boston that were commercially released (well Boston mysteriously appeared on Spotify at least), but this one is up there with them. The band had played Toad's Place twice in 1982, the first time supporting The Ventures, and the second time their own headlining show, and this show had far more audience enthusiasm than the other ones (random guy mid show - 'you're fucking great!!!'). Michael was in an extremely chatty mood, and I can't work out whether he swapped t-shirts with an audience member mid song, or was talking about a time he did it on stage, but there's a lot of t-shirt discussion at one point. There's some classic banter here (Bill before Eight Miles High - 'oh fuck off Michael!'), a crowd that is truly up for it, and a great setlist. Eight Miles High was an audience request, and it sounds like the person making the request got up on stage and sang as well. Also of note is the first ever performance of 'Time After Time', only played one other time that week then dropped until 1984. If you listen to the opening bars of the song here, they sound identical to 'Find The River' which was still 9 years away from release at the time!
Recording Notes: This is an excellent audience recording. If you listen on headphones you will hear some audience chatter every so often of two friends discussing the band, which for once is actually quite interesting (eg. during 7 Chinese Bros. someone says 'you ever heard this song before?', and they start discussing Stipe's t-shirt, which seemed to be Andy Warhol related), and it's quite infrequent. I gave it an azimuth adjustment in iZotope, but it's not a huge upgrade to Alex's original recording. I experimented with some EQ adjustments but too much hiss came through, so left it untouched.
Torrent notes: Misterhank had uploaded a version of this show to Dime from his cassette in 2009 (not sure if it was this recording), but then in 2011 Alex Butterfield uploaded his master recording, which was a massive upgrade. It dropped off the tracker in 2013 and hasn't been seen since. This is one of the premier 1983 shows and deserves another go on Dime. Enjoy!
From Alex's original torrent: "The Alex Butterfield Archive--begun in 1978--covers punk rock, garage rock, pop, rockabilly, new wave, rock 'n' roll, jazz, reggae, blues, indie, folk music and more. The Archive includes bands local to Connecticut as well as national and international acts."
http://www.remtimeline.com for all your R.E.M. setlist needs
http://www.remtimeline.com/listentome for an old school R.E.M. discussion board!
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