Monday, January 10, 2011

GG - 1977-11-08 - New Haven, CT

Here
Posted by at

1 comment:

Dr. Forrester said...

Gentle Giant
Derek Shulman- vocals
Gary Green- guitar
Kerry Minnear- keyboards
Ray Shulman- bass
John T. Weathers- drums
Woolsey Hall
Yale University
New Haven, Ct. U.S.A.
November 8, 1977
uploaded by: Doinker
performance quality: A- (an inspired, very good performance)
recording quality: B (very good, slight background noise)
source: 1st generation audience tape (master maybe with Dolby B? copy is w/o)
runtime: 72:41

setlist:
1: two weeks in Spain
2: free hand
3: on reflection
4: turning around
5: just the same
6: playing the game
7: memories
8: betcha thought we couldn't do it
9: talk and funny ways
10: violin and drum solos (maybe another song before?)
11: for nobody
comments:
this sounds to me like maybe a full Gentle Giant show, at least all I have of it (maybe another song after "for nobody" but that is a rather common closer number for GG shows of this era.) It's from the Missing Piece tour, I think,and you can tell it's a hall, not a club, but not a bad take at all by the recorder of this. Hard to tell if there is a "missing piece" of this concert, since there's no Advent of Panurge and this recording runs shorter than some of the 77 shows I've heard. It also sounds like there was no encore in the show, which would seem odd since the crowd was into it. (unless they were an opener or running behind schedule.)
I've heard a lot of rather marginal sounding Gentle Giant recordings, even this recent, fortunately this is definitely better than that (or I wouldn't want to be bothered taking
up D.'s time and bandwidth to have him upload it). I don't know what kind of deck and microphones were used, decent equipment, I'd say. The sound in Woolsey Hall doesn't sound very good to me here, a little boomy and echoey, (I've never been in there but a couple who have, told me the acoustics in there are not very good for concerts) Not much crowd interference in the sound, I spliced a couple of abrupt edits in the source recording, but didn't notice any cuts in the songs. Sounds like this dude did a pretty good job and recorded a good Gentle Giant concert, which should please some here on the dime.
I did not see this (or any 1977) Gentle Giant show so I don't know if some shows were just 72+ min. at this time, I've heard a couple that run 90-100 min. from 1977, so who knows, but it's a nice disc worth having if you like these guys. I've seen them 3 times, 2 in 1975, 1 in 1980 (the 1980 was just posted a few days ago and is still seeded).
I do not know if there was another band for this concert, if so then this could very well be their full show. I've been told by a few from Ct. that Gentle Giant likes playing
in New Haven, Ct. This would suggest they're right about that. Apparently New Havenites like Gentle Giant too. They patiently endured some sound problems in the beginning which fortunately get better fairly early in the show.

January 10, 2011 at 3:37 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)