MOUNTAIN
"Wichita Lineman"
Wichita, KS
March 25, 1971
Audience recording (B+)
Lineage: unknown
Restoration: speed correction and dropout repair (March 2012).
Includes a (not very interesting) studio jam with Richie Blackmore.
This is a really good recording. All of the instruments can be clearly heard
and the balance is real nice.
Track list:
1. Never In My Life
2. Animal Trainer And The Toad
3. Theme For An Imaginary Western
4. Leslie West Solo
5. Dreams Of Milk And Honey
6. Leslie West & Richie Blackmore Jam - New York studio, 1971
Total length: 1:02:50
Leslie West - guitar
Felix Pappalardi - bass,
Corky Laing - drums
Steve Knight - orgam
NO ARTWORK!
Restoration:
* Speed correction *
The tape ran 3.65% fast. Proper pitch was determined by finding the correct key for each song from the original studio recording, then adjusting the pitch of this bootleg until it matched my (properly tuned) guitar. I mention this because "Never In My Life" is a bit slow and plodding compared to the record, which is definitely faster. Apparently Mountain didn't get the memo that Rock 'n' Roll is ALWAYS played faster in concert. ;-) Just for reference though, at the June 28 Fillmore show later that year they also played it at this slower tempo.
The upshot of all of this is that, despite how "Never In My Life" SOUNDS, slowing the tape down by 3.65% was the correct thing to do.
No speed changes were made to the jam.
* Repaired dropout *
In "Dreams of Milk and Honey", during an extremely repedative section about 10 minutes in, there was a dropout, followed by 31 seconds of what sounded like mangled tape, then another dropout, then 53 seconds where the left channel was 3dB too quiet and the right channel was 2dB too loud. Since this was a very repedative part anyway, I seamlessly whacked out the mangled tape and dropouts, and fixed the volume problem.
* I also retracked it and fixed sector boundry errors.