Monday, February 4, 2008

Day 35: 11/7/1969 San Francisco, CA

11/7/1969 San Francisco, CA  (master>cassette)
Good Times Bad Times/Communication Breakdown, I Can't Quit You Baby, Heartbreaker, Dazed and Confused, White Summer/Black Mountain Side, Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, What is and What Should Never Be, Moby Dick, How Many More Times

Page's soloing sounds like razor blades during Good Times Bad Times/Communication Breakdown and I Can't Quit You Baby. He plays the opening chords of Joe Cocker's With a Little Help from My Friends during the latter. Plant tries to get the crowd under control before introducing Heartbreaker, to which someone near the taper responds "listen to this." The band gets a bit lost during Dazed and Confused when Page starts playing a third verse instead of the lead-in to the bow solo, but they recover quickly with an improvised transition. There are a few strange tape speed-ups/cuts during Page's solos and toward the end of the song.

There are more recording issues during White Summer/Black Mountain Side, most noticeable is a huge volume shift about two minutes in. Page plays a really nice sitar-like interlude near the middle of the song. Page goes wild during the final chorus of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, chopping the riff to pieces. Moby Dick is cut in a few places. How Many More Times includes a strange avant-garde intro during which Page plays a bit of Count Five's Psychotic Reaction. The remainder of the tape is plagued by constant speed fluctuations until it ends during The Hunter section.

The tape is muddy and distorted with Bonzo and Plant buried under Page and Jones. It's also riddled with speed fluctuations throughout the show.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

1969-11-07 Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA (From Source)
A painful listen, the tape isn't too bad generally, but has some serious stretching issues. The speed is shifting all over the place, speeding up, slowing down. At times it's not so bad, but other times... pure pain. Setlist is the same as the previous night, but the end of How Many More Times and any encores are missing - which is fine because by then the quality had dropped to 'please, make this stop' levels. The performance itself sounds fairly good from what I can tell, but all the tape issues makes it hard to know for sure. Listened in the background while working.

Eric said...

Like Connor said, a very good, but painful to listen to on tape, show. This would probably only be recommended to the hardcore fans, because, as it states above, Bonzo and Plant are very hard to be made out, Sometimes I can't tell if Plant is actually singing, or staying quiet.

dragonspirit said...

A good show (better than the first night). This has the last performance of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You! :(