Led Zeppelin - " The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"
( 5-13-73), Mobile, Alabama, Mobile Auditorium
Raw + Remastered Soundboard Recordings ( A Group/Personal Project)
Lineage: Source One/Disc One: " Mobile Auditorium, Master > CD-R", ( No Label), Master > CD-R > EAC, Secure Mode, Accurate Stream, No Disable Cache > WAV > Remaster > Flac Frontend, Encoding Options, Level.6, Align On Sector Boundaries > Flac
Source Two/Disc Two: " Mobile Auditorium, Master Reel > 1st Gen Reel > DAT > CD-R", ( ZeppelinDigital/FBO),
1stgen reel> DAT> CDR> SHN > TLH, Decode > WAV > Remaster > Flac Frontend, Encoding Options, Level.6, Align On Sector Boundaries > Flac
This is a group/personal project by The 7th Son, Joel, and Acapulco Gold.
We hope that you will enjoy this recording, and will pass it along and share it others, or just pass, the choice is yours.
This is not meant to be a definitive recording.
Thanks go out to:
- The taper, wherever you are, thank you for taping and sharing this with everyone in the community. If you're out there, and you happen to pick this up, we hope you'll enjoy it.
- My friend who hooked me up with the " master source" I've used as the first disc of material.
- The original uploader, my mate Clint111 for hooking the community ( and myself) up the 1st gen source, and for all your input on this release, thanks as always for being a true friend.
- My deepest thanks also go out to my mates Eeklair, and Porgie for all their help and input on the recording as well, your opinions mean so much.
Dedicated to my mate Phil, and Luke " The Drifter".
" The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", Raw Tape Sources:
Disc One, ( Master > CD-R):
1) Rock And Roll * ( Cuts Out)
2) Celebration Day * ( Cuts In Slightly, Cuts Out)
3) Black Dog * ( Cuts In Slightly)
4) Over The Hills And Far Away * ( Cuts In slightly)
5) Misty Mountain Hop *
6) Since I've Been Loving You *
7) No Quarter *
8) The Song Remains The Same * ( Cuts In slightly)
9) The Rain Song *
Disc Two, ( Master Reel > 1st Gen Reel > DAT > CD-R):
1) Dazed And Confused + ( Cuts In Slightly, Includes: " San Francisco")
2) Stairway To Heaven +
3) Moby Dick + ( Cuts Out)
" The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", Tape Speed Corrected And Remastered Sources:
Disc Three:
1) Rock And Roll *
2) Celebration Day * +
3) Black Dog * +
4) Over The Hills And Far Away * +
5) Misty Mountain Hop * +
6) Since I've Been Loving You *
7) No Quarter *
8) The Song Remains The Same * +
9) The Rain Song *
Disc Four:
1) Dazed And Confused ( Cuts In Slightly, Includes: " San Francisco") +
2) Stairway To Heaven +
3) Moby Dick + ( Cuts Out)
Legend:
* : Source One, " Master > CD-R" ( No Label)
+ : Source Two, " Master Reel > 1st Gen > DAT > CD-R" ( Zeppelin Digital/FBO)
* +: Combination Of Source Recordings
Enjoy!
Please Do Not Convert To Lossy Formats
Please Do Not Sell
Please Share With Others
My personal notes about this release:
This release is our first remaster of a soundboard recording.
We've remastered them to use for merges, and matrixes, but have never remastered and released an entire soundboard recording tape on it's own.
My friends and I have never really thought about remastering a soundboard recording, we enjoy working on and listening to audience recordings because we like recordings that give ( or try and give) the listener the tapers/audience concert experience.
We do love and enjoy soundboard recordings as much as audience tapes, but soundboards can sometimes just focus on the music, pushing out any traces of the audience, which really takes away from the whole concept of hearing the band live.
That's the issue that this tape suffers from, to quote Gerard Serpico's thoughts on this recording:
" It is an excellent, clean and detailed soundboard recording that is also dry, clinical and flat. It sounded less like a live performance than a private rehearsal."
Besides the issues with soundboard recordings, we also took into consideration the popularity of soundboard tapes, and how often they're released, and then re-released by labels as new remasters or "definitive versions", and we were very hesitant about offering up a recording to the community that has already been released several times over to collectors.
But my friends and I sat down and talked about it, and we decided to give remastering a soundboard tape a shot, and try something different.
We hope you enjoy what we've done, please know that this version is not meant to be definitive.
We're just fans who love Led Zeppeln, enjoy remastering these recordings, and working together to release these projects for the trading community.
The " master source" that's used for the first disc of audio material came to me in the trade I did with the person who hooked me up with the " master source" used for the group project " Bad Muthafuckers" ( Leicester, England, 11-25-71).
The person I got this from only had one disc worth of audio material of this " master source" from this show, but I was definately interested because I didn't have a version who's generation dated the master reels ( the closest I have is the 1st gen source I've used to make up the second disc of audio material).
I'm sorry I can't offer everyone here a complete remaster of the show from the master, if I had a complete tape I would've most certainly have offered it up here to everyone.
So after listening to the " master source" version of the show, I dug out all of the other releases I have of the Mobile tape to see how it ( the raw version of my master to CD-R source) compares to them.
I'm not including my remaster in the comparison's because I feel that would be patisan.
I'll leave it up to everyone here in the community how the remaster stacks up to the other versions.
These are the other versions of this show that I have in my collection, ( I've listed their disc times beside their titles):
- " Mobile Auditorium, Bertha Remaster" ( Bertha Remasters), Disc Length: D1:, D2:
- " Mobile Dick" ( Ghost), Disc Length:
- "Sean The Bootlegger's Tape Speed Corrected release, 3rd Gen" ( No Label), Disc Length: D1:, D2:
- " Mobile Auditorium, Master Reels > 1st gen Reels > DAT > CD-R" ( Zeppelin Digital/FBO), Disc Length: D1:, D2:
Here's how the sources compare in terms of sound quality:
- Bertha's release " Mobile Auditorium, Bertha Remaster" is the warmest sounding tape, it captures the ambiance of the show very nicely, I can hear crowd cheers and a slight echo in the instruments and Plant's vocals.
They've also eliminated a great deal of tape hiss from the recording.
It definately doesn't sound dry and sterile, but there really isn't an even distribution in the instruments.
Plant's vocals, and Jonesey's bass and organ dominate over the guitar and drums, Bonham suffers the most.
Besides the issues with the instruments, the tape speed hasn't been corrected, and it runs too fast.
With all the time they probably spent on remastering the recording, why they wouldn't correct the tape speed issues as well is beyond me.
I don't know what Bertha's intention was with this release, if they wanted to offer collectors the Mobile tape with more ambiance and warmth, then they have definately succeeded in that area, but the recording definately suffers from the uneven distribution in the instruments and the tape speed issues not being corrected.
They do quality work, I really enjoy their remaster of the Dallas 73 tape (" Dallas Remains The Same").
- There are three different versions of " Mobile Dick", two of the three are the complete tape, and they come from the Flying Disc label, and the Oh Boy! label.
The third release consists of only the second disc of audio material, and comes from the Ghost label.
All three of those labels are out of commission.
The version I have is from the Ghost label.
The recording has a lot of punch, and has very powerful sound, and I like the use of panning effect on " Dazed And Confused" for the bow solo, and Plant's vocals.
But the sound is a touch too loud, and it's tape speed runs too fast.
- Sean The Bootlegger's release is definately an improvement over all the older silver pressed boots, partly because of it's sound, partly because we have concrete lineage on the generation of the cassettes used in the release, but mostly this is an improvement over the older releases because it's playing at the correct tape speed,which automatically trumps a lot of the other releases.
Although sound is important, the recording running at the correct pitch is just as significant.
Like the Bertha release, Sean's tape has a nice warm sound to it, it's a little hissy, but it's not too distracting, and it hasn't been over EQ'ed and had it's sound unnescessarily amplified.
- Zeppelin Digital's/FBO'S release ( used to make up the second disc) was used as the patching source for my master source, and the second disc of audio material mostly because it's generation was the lowest, it had very soft tape hiss, and it had a pretty decent distribution in it's instruments ( the bass is quite dominate in the mix, but isn't totally dominating the recording) and ambiance.
The tape does have it's faults like the others do, it's volume has been amplified too much, the right channel dominates over the left channel, and it runs a little too fast.
- The " supposed master" tape source has very little (to almost none) tape hiss,it has the missing few seconds of tape at the beginning of the recording that are sometimes missing from some of the releases, and has a crisp sound to it ( even though Plant and Jones dominate the recording).
The tape is unfortunately incomplete, on the recording, a few songs are missing tiny little segments of tape at the end, that's why it was nescessary to patch up the recording with portions from the 1st gen source.
The recording was also running at the incorrect tape speed, but unlike the other recordings, the " master source" was running too slow.
So what I've noticed is that even though each tape is different in someway, there are two consistant things that each one suffers from:
- They all suffer from tape speed issues,(either running too slow or too fast)
- plant and Jones are the most dominate in the mix of the recording, drowning out Page's guitar work and Bonham's drum fills and cymbals.
Since the original releases of this recording over a decade ago, the labels have tried to improve the sound quality of the tape.
The newest offerings of the Mobile tape ( Empress Valley's " Alabama Getaway", and Tarantura 2000's " Heritage Strain" ) have stood out as being definate improvements over the first bootleg releases of the Mobile tape according to new reviews posted on boot-review.com
I don't have Empress Valley's or Tarantura's release of this show, so I can't give anyone my opinion on their sound quality, but here are two reviews posted about Tarantura's release " Heritage Strain" on the site:
Heritage Strain (Tarantura TCD-38-1,2)
Municipal Auditorium, Mobile, AL - May 13th, 1973
Disc 1: Rock & Roll, Celebration Day, Black Dog, Over the Hills and Far Away, Misty Mountain Hop, Since I've Been Loving You, No Quarter
Disc 2: The Song Remains The Same, The Rain Song, Dazed & Confused, Stairway To Heaven, Moby Dick
Empress Valley and Tarantura have been engaged in low-level competition with several releases being duplicated over the past several months (Baltimore 1970, Blueberry Hill, Montreux, etc). Heritage Strain is Tarantura's version of the popular Mobile soundboard which follows close on the heels of Empress Valley's Alabama Getaway. The most recent release of this show (before EV) was a decade ago on Goin' Mobile on the Midas Touch label. It is an excellent, clean and detailed soundboard recording that is also dry, clinical and flat. It sounded less like a live performance than a private rehearsal.
In comparing Alabama Getaway with Heritage Strain it sounds like both labels wanted to address the criticisms directed towards the recording. Both wanted to liven it up a bit and make it breath more. The Empress Valley worked on the bass and lower frequencies, but maybe too much as the bass is sometimes distorted. The hiss also is very high during the quieter parts and is very distracting during the intro to "Over The Hills And Far Away". In the Tarantura the bass isn't quite so loud and the hiss is not so distracting. They did an excellent job in bringing out Jimmy Page's guitar which sounds very wild and aggressive. On the downside Heritage Strain does sound more compressed than the Empress Valley with a narrower spectrum of frequencies.
WGPSEC does an excellent job in contextulizing and analyzing the performance in his review of the Empress Valley release so I encourage you to read that to get the background. I will affirm what he says about "Since I've Been Loving You" which is one of the greatest performances of the band's favorite song ("something we'll play as long as we're in existence, something we get off on a lot" Plant says at the song's conclusion). This tape is longer than some of the other fragments but is still not complete and there is no audience source to complete the show. It comes in an attractive package similar to their recent releases. In the end it's all a matter of one's taste as usual, but I found this recording to be very enjoyable. (GS)
Heritage Strain (TCD-38-1,2) finds the mighty Tarantura label giving us what may be, in all fairness, the strongest, most balanced presentation of this famous May 13, 1973 soundboard recording. All instruments are perfectly blended with each other as the show kicks off with “Rock and Roll.” Robert’s hoarse to start the show, but that lessens as the performance unfolds. It’s a rather routine rendition of this song, moving seamlessly into “Celebration Day.” Of the many things that grabs me about this recording is the clarity of Bonzo’s ride cymbal during this song. The echo in Robert’s call-and-response to the crowd during the “Ah, Ah” portion of “Black Dog,” it’s all beautifully here. Bonzo apparently does some tuning of his toms as Robert introduces the song “Over the Hills” after Jimmy prematurely begins the song. The first couple of verses of this song are particularly rough for Robert, with his voice falling out at times, but the band more than makes up for this after the “Acapulco Gold” lyric is dropped in – killer lead and recording of the rhythm section grooving behind Jimmy.
The “Acapulco Gold” reference does deserve some special mention, of course, due to the totally unique packaging of this title. The heavy stock case is adorned on the front with a pack of 20 “Acapulco Gold” marijuana cigarettes. A caution label on the side of the package advises any user of the cigarettes that they “may result in drowsiness” and warns not to operate machinery or driving a vehicle “during or shortly after smoking” one of these butts. There is no warning, however, to avoid smoking one of these cigarettes when enjoying this show, which sports fantastic versions of “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Indeed, the long-haired chap pictured on the discs smoking such a cigarette seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit. I don’t know, however, where the title “Heritage Strain,” although there may be a connection to the “Acapulco Gold” theme. For those interested in “Acapulco Gold” prose, there’s a song, or limerick, in the inside of the package, which opens to display a great shot of Jimmy in action. If there can be any knock on the packaging, though, it’s about the live pictures on this title. They seem to all be from 1972, but that means nothing when listening to the great show.
The “I really don’t know” lyrical ending to “Misty Mountain Hop” is extremely heavy, with the short-stop into SIBLY tight, but the re-entry just a tad off. It’s just as well, though, as a rest was in order from the prior song, with the English blues of SIBLY fitting the bill perfectly. Beautiful expressions by Jimmy in this song, with Robert’s throat now in form as compared to the rougher moments earlier in the show. “Talking about getting off a lot on things,” Robert introduces what becomes a moody intro to “No Quarter” before the song is performed flawlessly, and powerfully. It always amazes me how Bonzo picked just the right time to drop in the tympani accents during Jonesy’s meandering solo in this song, which have a depth to them in this recording that is painfully absent in so many recordings of Zep. The first disc ends with “The Rain Song,” which explodes at 5:10 in a way like no other band. Great special effects on Robert’s voice, and the overall sound of this song, making the ending of this disc only an invitation to quickly get that second disc playing to continue the show.
Disc two opens with “Dazed and Confused” already underway, but what a great version of this song! 1973 had its moments, for sure, and this was a great one for this song. It’s hard not to come back to the incredible power of this recording, and performance, when listening to this song. What a performance! Clocking in at 28:31 doesn’t hurt, either. “Stairway to Heaven” and then “Moby Dick” conclude this disc, unfortunately leaving me wanting more. Of course, there was (and is?) more as this concert certainly didn’t end with a drum solo. Tarantura’s done a wonderful job presenting this concert in the most complete form to-date, making it required listening for those who love this stage in Zep’s history. (CH)
After reading those reviews, I noticed there is a lot of talk about the remastering of the tape, but there's no mention about the tape speed issues that the recording suffers from, and whether or not any tape speed correction has been applied.
Gerard does state that the tape is longer than other fragments, which could mean that the label did apply tape speed correction, but it could also mean that the label has added the few seconds of tape at the start of the first disc of audio material.
So after saying all that, this is what we've done to make our remaster:
- We've patched up the holes in the " master source" with the 1st gen tape, we've tried to make the transition from the tape sources as smooth as possible.
- We've corrected the tape speeds of both sources.
- We've eliminated as much tape hiss as we possibly could.
- We tried to bring up more of the audience banter, and some of the acoustics of the venue to eliminate the flatness in the recording.
After doing so, I can now hear things that were buried underneath the music of the tape, like banter on stage between Bonham and Page, and cheering,clapping, and whistling from the audience members.
- And finally, we tried our best to keep some of the punch of the recording, trying not to make the recording sound hollow.
We've added the remaster of first disc of audio material from the 1st gen source because we wanted to give everyone here options on which project they woulld prefer, a half master and half 1st gen remaster, or a complete 1st gen remaster.
We spent all this time remastering the first disc of the 1st gen tape so we could patch up the holes in our " master source", it seemed to us a waste to do all that work, and just use it as a patching source.
A brief review about the band's performance:
This is an excellent performance from the band, they've finally settled on the material they'll be playing for the U.S. 73 tour after constantly moving songs around the setlist for their European tour.
It's a tight, no nonsense performance from the group, Plant has even limited his Plantations for the crowd.
Usually Zeppelin shine when they venture outside the box and jam, but those types of things really did work for the group in the early years.
By the time 1973 came around, tightening up their set was a definate change of pace for them, and it definately works in their favour rather than hurting them.
They're also not going overboard with the special effects they use during their show,only using them for certain songs and when it seems nescessary, like Robert's vocals, or theramin solo's during " No Quarter", and " Dazed And Confused".
Later into the tour they would apply the sound effects to Bonham's drum kit, an exceptional " Moby Dick" that uses the effects is Salt Lake City ( 5-26-73).
After this show, they would move on to New Orleans where they would put on another exceptional performance.
Highlights of this show are:
- "Since I've Been Loving You" ( Some excellent soloing from Jimmy)
- " No Quarter"
- " The Rain Song"
- " Dazed And Confused"
Shame that the recording is incomplete, and that there isn't an audience recording out there to fill in the gaps in the soundboard tape.
For those that might not understand the reference, the title of the show " The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down",comes from a song with the same name by the group The Band, and was released on their self titled second album.
We we're mulling over names for titles, but couldn't come up with anything too fitting, or suitable, so we did some research on Mobile, and Alabama to see if we could find something that would fit the project.
We thought about using some of the old state motto's like " The Heart Of Dixie", or " The Stars Fell On Alabama", but the song " The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" seemed like a suitable title because it has the connection to the state that the show takes place in ( Alabama is called " The Heart Of Dixie"), and it also seemed fitting to describe the bands performance, which we mean it in a positive sense, (like they "drove" the crowd over with their amazing performance, winning the crowd over).