pink floyd - 1970-12-22 - 'disgusting, hardly music'

here it is! one of the most intriguing pink floyd performances before the dark side of the moon era, or perhaps ever. just imagine being there: the year is 1970, it's just days before christmas, and you find yourself going to see pink floyd, the premier experimental rock band, perform a monster of a show, playing 7 songs over the course of two and a half hours to a quiet but appreciative audience. perhaps you've also consumed some LSD in order to enhance the experience.

i give the sound quality of this recording a B/B+... this is a very good recording, and you can hear each instrument pretty damn clearly, although there are occasional small drop-outs (my major gripes being a second-long cut right after the scream in 'careful with that axe, eugene' as well as a cut that ends 'set the controls' before the final vocal reprise). i've found many recordings lack the low end where roger waters' bass resides, but you can hear roger plunk away pretty clearly on this one. while i honestly don't think the performance is particularly great, i think it's worth a listen for its historic nature, given the interesting set opener and closer.

a very rare 'performance' of 'alan's psychedelic breakfast'--clocking in at almost thirty minutes long--opens the show. after such a rambling start (you can hear the band enjoying a meal on stage), the band breezes through extended versions of their concert staples.

the show concludes with two long renditions of pink floyd's pre-dsotm album centerpieces. first; 'a saucerful of secrets,' which is interrupted by a power outage right as they start the final section; keyboardist rick wright hops on a grand piano to keep the song alive while power is restored. and finally: a triumphant version of 'atom heart mother,' complete with a backing brass band and choir. i really like the much more common small-band versions of this with the foursome covering the choral parts themselves, but the backing choir works so well in this version. after the song, as the band presumably walks back onstage following the encore break, a perfectly audible shout requesting "bike!" goes unfulfilled (unfortunately, for this syd barrett fan), and instead the band ends the concert with a short reprise of the 'atom heart mother' main theme.

while this isn't my favorite pink floyd performance, it's worth a listen for the good sound quality and song selection. see the included notes and bootleg art for more lineage and background information. please keep this marked as mp3 (~224 vbr) if you're going to share it. enjoy!

Disc 1:
1. Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast [29:21]
2. The Embryo [14:33]
3. Fat Old Sun [15:06]
4. Careful With That Axe, Eugene [15:59]

Disc 2:
1. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun [12:21]
2. A Saucerful Of Secrets [25:21]
3. Atom Heart Mother [32:54]
4. Atom Heart Mother (encore) [2:48]

pink floyd - 1968-07-27

besides my current obsession with electronic music, i've had a long love affair with the psychedelic sounds of the 60s and 70s. over the years i've collected a bunch of live recordings from a bunch of bands, and a huge share of my collection comes from pink floyd... and i'm not talking about your goddamn dark side of the moon floyd. while that album is good and historically important, and i agree that it is one of the tragedies of modern music that no video exists of a full 1970s performance of the DSOTM set, i feel that the band was way more interesting in the years before DSOTM. originally started as a white-boy blues band, songwriter/guitarist/singer syd barrett steered pink floyd toward a 'progressive pop' direction with their essential first album, piper at the gates of dawn, released in 1967 and recorded at abbey road studios, down the hall from where the beatles were finishing sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band. few recordings exist of syd playing with the band, and none that i've found are of particularly good quality (another tragedy, methinks).

while syd was 'replaced' by dave gilmour in mid-1968 due to drug problems and an increasing lack of focus, his whimsical influence was felt for a few more years, and expanded upon by gilmour's calculated guitar attack, before roger waters took the helm with DSOTM. before the relatively polished presentation of that album and its live tour, pink floyd in concert was a raw psychedelic beast, capable of steering through mind-shattering walls of sound and, moments later, descending gently back down to earth with pastoral odes and falsetto choral sections, and even some ridiculously funky, bluesy jams. i can only imagine that a pre-'72 pink floyd show was the psychedelic experience par excellence...

this is a short recording, but definitely a good one: two 15-minute long mindfuck jams with exceptional sound quality. in my opinion this is a good representation of the early live floyd sound, immediately after the syd-led 'pop' phase and before the composed, theatrical feel of DSOTM.

pink floyd - 1968-07-27 - los angeles, CA
1. interstellar overdrive
2. a saucerful of secrets

as i consolidate my live cd collection, i'll occasionally post an old recording which i think deserves to be heard. i'll upload ~224 kb/s vbr mp3's, directly from the wav files i have. since we're indebted to the tapers and sharers of these treasures, i must say: individual use only--please do NOT pass these along as lossless/wav files. lossless files are available all over the internet, particularly via torrents, if you're interested in getting this in wav quality.

enjoy! there is much more to come...