The Wailers
Upstairs at Max's Kansas City
New York City, NY
July 18-23, 1973
Set 3
JEMS Archive Upgrade
Lineage: 10-inch, 1/2-track reel at 15 IPS > Revox A-700 > Wavelab 24/96 > .wav > convert to 16/44.1 via iZotope MBIT+ > iZotope RX and Ozone mastering > FLAC
01 Put It On
02 Slave Driver
03 Burnin' and Lootin'
04 Stop That Train
05 Kinky Reggae
06 Stir It Up
Several years ago, JEMS acquired three reel-to-reel master tapes from the private collection of a recording engineer. All were 1/2-track, 15 IPS reels (this and one other 10", the third 7") which helped add to their credibility (most fans and collectors in the '70s were not working with tapes in those professional standards), as did some of the other tapes we didn't get which were clearly from studio sessions. This famous recording of Bob Marley and the Wailers at Max's Kansas City was one of the three.
The entire contents of the reel are what has been classified for years by Marley collectors as "Set Three" or "Segment Three" of the trio of known recordings from the July '73 run at Max's. The exact recording dates of the three sets are unverified, but they are all drawn from the six night run in July. Previous torrents of this material suggest "there were two shows per night and three shows on the weekend," all opening for, amazingly, Bruce Springsteen.
The track list of our copy varies slightly from the widely available version(s) of Set Three in that it is longer and includes "Stir It Up," where most copies stop at "Kinky Reggae." The version of "Stir It Up" is different from that of Set One or Set Two. It is an audience, not soundboard recording, but may well be an "open mic" recording, perhaps from mics mounted at the mixing desk and recorded with permission to document the performance.
Sonically, our transfer of this reel source is a material upgrade to the circulating copy of the set, clearly two or more generations closer to the master, though with only 28 minutes of material on the tape, our guess is this reel was copied from the master back in the day. Where the circulating copies are murky, muddy, hissy and very narrow stereo, this upgrade is much sharper, clearer, better defined, with a much wider stereo image and less hiss. It is also speed corrected to what we now feel is the accurate pitch. Samples provided.
The recording engineer switched the recorder off either on the master or the copy between songs, but what is there is complete. It is also better sounding than Sets One and Two and represents one of the earliest quality recordings of The Wailers in the US, along with the outstanding Paul's Mall, Boston set from the week prior.
We would love to hear from the Marley experts and enthusiasts out there about this upgrade. Thanks to Dubwise1 for his help in comparing this to the previously circulated sources.
BK for JEMS