Jefferson Airplane
Municipal Auditorium
San Antonio, TX
fair-good audience recording
Lineage: audience master cassette > wav > flac
Mastering: None except indexing of tracks.
Track listing:
Disc 1 (38:35)
01. Volunteers 3:26
02. Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon 4:47
03. Plastic Fantastic Lover 3:06
04. Star Track 5:24
05. You Wear Your Dresses Too Short 18:01
The above timings are song timings, not CD track timings.
A partial recording of this concert, notable for the very late performance of
"Star Track." There are a few seconds of drums after "Plastic Fantastic Lover"
before a tape cut; this may be the start of a song not captured on this recording.
This may be uncirculated; the taper traded some of his tapes years ago, but this
one might not have made it into circulation.
Quality:
This is a somewhat distant audience recording, with vocals lower in the mix than the
instruments; so they get lost when the instruments get loud. The main distraction
during the first couple of songs is the clapping audience, who seem determined to clap
in time to the entire concert. Fortunately they seem to tire after the first two songs
and retire more to the background. There are also momentary bits of distortion
in places which are on the master.
I usually hesitate to use the description "for completists only" since i think that is
often taken to mean "unlistenable." This is better than that, and i suppose i'm a
completist since it's enjoyable to me. But check the samples before you download, since
the sound quality may not satisfy you.
Background:
The taper of this concert is Gerard Daily, a resident of Forth Worth. He was kind enough
to send the original cassette to me for transfer. He describes the event:
"The opening act was Flash, which I wish I had recorded. It was a band made up of
local high school guys, one of whom was Chris Geppert, who was a shit-hot guitar
hero in San Antonio at that time. He later transmuted into the easy listening
Chrisopher Cross and you wouldn't have seen that one coming if you had heard Chris
Geppert first. Everyone in Flash was a great player and they had good originals
for being juniors or seniors in high school.
"I had high hopes for the Airplane show but it deteriorated and I stopped
taping early. That is the tape that has the guy sitting next to me yelling
'Fillmore' a lot. San Antonio is host to a lot of Army and Air Force bases,
and you would see all these guys with G.I. haircuts over-compensating by wearing
tons of fringe vests, love beads, and high-water bell bottomed pants to prove that,
even though they were in the Armed Forces, they were still groovy. Hence the
yelling of 'Fillmore,' I suppose. The sound was horrible, which was unusual for
the auditorium because it was built for opera and the San Antonio Symphony.
I saw a lot of good bands there with really good sound."