Pink Floyd - Rolf's Pepperland Bomb - MQR 012
Pepperland Auditorium, San Rafael, CA, USA
October 16th 1970
Source: Audience
Sound Quality: EX+
Tapers: Jay D. and Ron C. ...They sat 10-12 rows back, left of center.
Recording equipment: Sony TC-126 with Powered Single Point Stereo Microphone, using either Sony Red or Green cassette tapes
Lineage:
Oct. 1970. Recording equipment > Sony TC-252 7" Reel to Reel Recorder >1/4“ Scotch 140 RtR Tape (Jay D. copy).
Jun. 2011. 1st gen 1/4“ Scotch 140 RtR Tape > Baking process > Revox A77 RtR Deck > Tascam US-200 > Adobe Audition 24/96. 2013. 50 Hz dehumming in iZotope RX 2 Advanced > EQ > NR1 in RX > 1st Manual cleaning and restoring iZ RX2 A> NR2 in RX > 2nd Manual cleaning iZ RX2 A > EQ and MB compression > Balancing > Adobe Audition 1.5 for some manual dynamic adjustments.
a) 24/96 version - TLH for SBE fix and FLAC Level 8.
b) 16/44.1 version - Conversion and manual dynamic adjustments done with Adobe Audition 1.5 > TLH for SBE fix and FLAC level 8.
Remaster and Artwork made throughout the whole 2013 by MQR - creamcheese, WRomanus and }{eywood
Released on 17 December 2013
DVD Audio 2:12:05 - (Disc One 69:05)
03:14 - 01. Astronomy Domine (1 st Attempt - Tune Up)
03:58 - 02. Astronomy Domine (2nd Attempt - Tune Up)
09:03 - 03. Astronomy Domine (3rd Attempt - Tune Up)
06:07 - 04. Astronomy Domine (4th Attempt)
00:27 - 05. Tune Up
12:09 - 06. Fat Old Sun
00:46 - 07. Tune Up
11:09 - 08. Cymbaline
01:53 - 09. Tune Up
20:19 - 10. Atom Heart Mother
.................................. (Disc Two 63:21)
01:13 - 11. Tune Up
11:01 - 12. The Embryo
01:26 - 13. Announcement - Tune Up
03:24 - 14. Green Is the Colour
10:52 - 15. Careful with that Axe, Eugene
01:14 - 16. Tune Up
12:06 - 17. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
01:27 - 18. Tune Up
20:37 - 19. A Saucerful of Secrets
MQR releases this in memory of Rolf Ossenberg, who passed away on
17 December, 2012.
This show was the last Rolf worked on in the few
days before he left us.
Thanks to him and his passionate research over
the course of 35 years, research that took him all over the world at great
expense to himself in search of master tapes and other Pink Floyd
material, this show wasn't lost to time.
All those who knew this gentle
and nice guy can recognize in this artwork the same style he used in
his loony New Year cards.
The following notes were written by WRomanus and }{eywood based on the recollections of Rolf, Mike K., Ron C., Duckpont49, creamcheese and WRomanus.
Pepperland resided in San Rafael, CA, USA from September 1970 to the end of January 1972.
Prior to that it was known as Euphoria (though only for the summer of 1970) Bermuda Palms, and Lichfield's.
Pepperland was a Beatles-themed hall that featured a quadraphonic sound system designed by sound engineer John Meyer, who later built custom PA systems for the Grateful Dead.
It was 2 large rooms joined together with a partial wall separating both rooms.
This wall was opened up and later removed. The Room had a very low ceiling less than 10 feet high, creating excellent sound.
The support girders for the hall’s roof were adorned with painted portholes that mimicked the windows of the Yellow Submarine.
Even the sound system blended into the décor, with the speakers molded into huge fiberglass cones in which people would often be found sitting. There was very poor ventilation. Lots of pot and cigarette smoke. No air conditioning. No HVAC.
Very cold in winter, too hot the rest of the time.
For Pink Floyd's shows there the band needed to use the ballroom floor to accommodate all of their gear, which took up two trucks to transport. PF was set up against the back wall opposite the entrance on a very low riser.
The big Glyph horns were set up in the corners and there were Shure vocal columns set up every 20 feet or so along the walls in between. There were slide projectors up in the metal rafters projecting fisheye photos of farm animals into the painted portholes on the walls in reference to the Atom Heart Mother cover.
A few steps up at the back of the performance space was another space with a trippy sculpture in the center, a female hand holding up a glowing sphere surrounded by "angel hair" and all under a plex dome.
There were no more than 500 people present, sitting on the floor in the center, with some folks sitting up inside the big Glyph bottom horns.
Pink Floyd were on tour promoting their new album, Atom Heart Mother, which had just been released a few days before.
They played there two nights, the 16th and 17th, returning to California for the fourth time in their career.
As with everytime they came to CA they felt at their best and their performance was really hot. This time, though, was the first time they didn't play Interstellar Overdrive, an omission not lost to the Californian fans who considered it a certainty.
That first night there were many problems with the power.
The club's system was unable to deal with the multichannel sound system the Floyd brought, and several power outages marred the performance of Astronomy Domine.
Three more small outages occurred during the crescendo of A Saucerful of Secrets, but this time the band forged on and finished the song in spite of them, much to the fans' delight.
The show was originally recorded by Jay D. and Ron C. with a Sony TC-126 with Powered Single Point Stereo Microphone,
using either Sony Red or Green cassette tapes. They sat 10-12 rows back, left of center.
When the boys got back home, they instantly made two copies onto Scotch 7" Reel, one for Jay and one for Ron C.
The Master Cassettes were re-used for next day's Jethro Tull show in Berkeley.
They were usually never kept, due to the unreliability of cassette transport mechanisms at the time.
Thanks to this recording the show was soon famous amongst the fan trader circles and many bootlegs were released with at least some of these songs, especially the four attempts at Astronomy Domine.
Jay D. never traded this item so all copies around came from Ron C.'s reel copy which went rotten in the early 90's.
Rolf Ossenberg managed to get the Jay D. 1st gen reel copy which would no longer play back at all.
With the invaluable help of Mike K., the reel was baked in June 2011 (the morning after Roger Waters' show in Düsseldorf) and transferred from Revox A77 into Tascam US-200 to a 96KHz/24bit file.
Rolf was really nervous about baking the Scotch tape.
The issue is that the binder used was incorrectly made so it absorbs moisture.
This is
believed to be a
problem with all
old Scotch/Ampex
reels.
This moisture interferes with the adhesive so during playback you get lots of sticky gunk (yes, that is the technical term for it) collecting on the playback head and it impacts playback quality and even speed.
So you have to fix it. Rolf had bought a well-controlled oven specifically for this purpose.
They baked at 53C to 55C for 3-4 hours to drive the moisture out without damaging the plastic backing, let cool down to room temp, and voila' ... The tape plays back with no problems for a month or so.
Rolf gave that to creamcheese for cutting and some "basic treatment", as we used to call it.
A 50 Hz hum that probably appeared with the transferring process was taken away very carefully.
A little EQ was done to give the recording a bit more body.
Rolf approved it that way. He furtherly agreed to MQR making a remastered release from this but it was his wish to release that (almost) raw one himself first.
Unfortunately we were in November 2012 and Rolf's time has come.
Creamcheese released the transfer as Grolsch's Baked Pepperland
Reel a few days after Rolf (Grolsch) passed away.
This remaster uses that same transfer.
The 50 Hz de-humming was redone with iRX2. The recording was
then EQ'ed and a 1st run of Noise Reduction was done with iRX2.
A 2nd
Noise Reduction run was applied later. Some kind of noise "popping up"
around sharp transients is audible throughout the show. A hiss that only
appears in conjunction with an audible sound; when there's no sound
there's no hiss.
This was particularly noticeable during the spoken intros. For this reason the whole project was restarted from scratch.
Although
the result of the 2nd attempt is way better sounding, we were not able to
remove that popping noise entirely.
As it appeared independently of the NR settings, we suspect it to have been in the source material but buried
in the hiss.
After that WRomanus manually removed clicks, pops, shits and some
coughs for a more pleasant listening with iRX2.
The final master was then done by creamcheese
applying another slight EQ, balancing the stereo image in collaboration
with WRomanus and removing some phase issues on the bass range of
the recording.
A little pressure was added applying very gentle multiband
compression.
}{eywood manually adjusted the volume
of a few parts to be more dynamic and better represent the way the songs
sounded live, countering the level compression of the original analog gear, and then made an optimized 16/44.1 Master for CD
playback of this very dynamic recording.
The main artwork is made with two of the pics WRomanus took of Rolf
talking about this show with Ron C., one of the tapers, during a meeting of
floydian fans in Rome.
WRomanus conceived
this artwork with Rolf's loony New Years
cards in mind... Some of which you can see
in the booklet.
MQR - Magna Qualitas Records (creamcheese, WRomanus and }{eywood )
Released on 17 December 2013