Eric Burdon & Robbie Krieger – San Luis Obispo, CA (02/02/91)

Eric Burdon, Robbie Krieger, & Brian Auger
02/02/91
DK’s West Indies Bar
San Luis Obispo, CA

Aiwa CM-30 Stereo Cardioid >Sony WM-D6C Cassette Master >CDR >FLAC

FOB; Audience Master:
Transferred Via: Sony TC-D5M >HHb CDR 800 PRO
CD Masters >FLAC (Level 8) Via xACT 2.25
FLAC Tags Via xACT 2.53

Recorded, Transferred, FLAC’d, Tagged, & Front-Cover Artwork By OldNeumanntapr

Late Show:

  1. I Just Want To Make Love To You
  2. Back Door Man
  3. We Got To Get Out Of This Place
  4. 16 Tons
  5. Elmore’s Blues

Disc II:

  1. Tobacco Road

Encore:

  1. Roadhouse Blues >
  2. The House Of The Rising Sun

OldNeumanntapr Notes:
This was the second year that Eric Burdon and Robbie Krieger played DK’s in SLO, but this time they brought along Brian Auger on keyboards. Burdon was so drunk that night he was screaming about the Gulf War, “They Were Bombing My Home Town When I was Born!”, and he was complaining about how much he hated the song ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’. I recorded the late set, but I had friends who went to both sets. This was the last time that I have seen either Eric or Robbie.

Do NOT Convert To MP3.
Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉

Sci-Fi In July: I Married A Monster From Outer Space (1958)

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They say that horror movies reflect the anxieties and fears of a culture at the time of release. If that’s true then I Married a Monster From Outer Space says a lot about America in the late 1950s. Made on a shoestring budget and initially run as the b-side in a double feature with The Blob, it nevertheless dips its toes in anticommunist rhetoric and the changing roles of women in the post-war decade.

Marge Farrell (Gloria Talbott) is a nice girl set to marry Bill (Tom Tryon) a nice guy. The night before their wedding he is attacked by an alien monster who then takes Bills form. The alien follows through with the wedding, but a year into their marriage Marge is beginning to suspect something is wrong.

Bill rarely goes out. He’s stopped drinking. Dogs bark at him, and cats hiss. Worst of all she’s still not pregnant. The doctor assures her it isn’t because anything wrong with her, but maybe Bill should come in for a few tests.

One night she notices Bill get out of bed and leave the house. She follows him down the road, into a field, where she sees him enter his spaceship and take his true form.

Marge runs to the chief of police who swears he believes her, but behind her back indicates she’s overworked, tired, or just plain crazy.

She confronts Bill who admits everything. His planet, along with all the women folk was destroyed by their son. They found Earth to be hospitable and hope to colonize it. They can apparently have sex with human women, but as yet cannot figure out how to impregnate them.

Marge runs to her doctor who makes comforting motions that he believes her, but he doesn’t do anything about it. Bill indicates there are more just like him, and they’ve taken over the bodies of other men in the town.

Fully realizing she cannot tell which men are aliens and which are human, she still runs to other men for help. Never once thought she could just form an army of women to destroy the aliens.

During World War II women had to fill the gaps left by the men in the workforce. They got jobs in factories, making weapons, and manufacturing goods. They made money and enjoyed an autonomy rarely found before the war. When the men came home some of them were reluctant to go back to the way things were.

This film seems to indicate that maybe they should.

It can also be read as an anti-communist film. The monsters look just like us, that’s the same line of fear Joseph McCarthy had been spreading for years.

If you take this a little further the men whom the aliens have taken over are mostly childless. They have failed the American ideal of masculinity. The men who destroy them are family men, good, old-fashioned manly men. True Americans. Marge is smart and tough, in today’s parlance she’s a badass. But she’s more than happy to take a backseat to the men and let them save the day. By the time the credits roll, she’s happy to go back to being a happy housewife.

Or maybe this is all a load of bollocks. Maybe it is just a silly little science-fiction horror film, riffing on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that came out a few years prior.

I’ll say this: the effects look good for what they are. At 78 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome. All of that stuff I just wrote is fun to theorize about, but I’m not sure it makes for an enjoyable watch. For a low-budget sci-fi flick from the 1950s, you could do a lot worse. But it isn’t the first film in that genre that I’d recommend.

Lyle Lovett – Radio & TV Appearances (1989-1999)

Lyle Lovett
Radio & TV Appearances (1989-1999)

Grammy Awards 2/22/89

  1. She’s Hot to Go

KSGR Broadcasts Vol 6 & 8

  1. (Townes Van Zandt’s) White Freightliner Blues

KFOG-FM, San Francisco, CA 10/26/94

  1. Hello Grandma

Johnny Cash Tribute 1999

  1. Tennessee Flat Top Box

KSGR Broadcasts Volume 4

  1. That’s Right You’re Not from Texas

TNN

  1. Road to Ensenada
  2. Fiona

The Arsenio Hall Show

  1. I’ve Been to Memphis

KCRW, Santa Monica, CA 10/30/98

  1. Bears

World Cafe

  1. Private Conversation

Late Night w/David Letterman 8/9/95

  1. Funny How Times Slip Away

KCBO

  1. She’s No Lady

KSGR Broadcasts Vol 7

  1. If I Had a Boat

KFOG-FM, San Francisco, CA 8/14/99

  1. Church

Lyle w/Asleep at the Wheel

  1. Blues for Dixie

KSGR Broadcasts Vol 4

  1. Test Signal

The Tonight Show w/Jay Leno 2/17/93

  1. Stand By Your Man

Late Night w/David Letterman 6/16/93

  1. You’ve Been So Good Up to Now

Hee-Haw

  1. Which Way Does That Old Pony Run?
  2. I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You
  3. Where Oh Where are You Tonight? / jokes

Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics by Van Morrison

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I swear I posted this review on this site when I first published it, but I cannot find it anywhere. Several years ago, before I went private and public again, I was contacted out of nowhere by a publicist for the company releasing a book of Van Morrison’s lyrics.

She presumably had just googled Van’s name and came across my site. Amazingly she didn’t balk at the fact that I was posting lots of ROIOs from Van and asked me to review the book.

Van is better known for his music than his lyrics, but as my review points out, the man can write some words, too.

Maleficent (2014)

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The idea that Hollywood has run out of new ideas is not new. We’ve been complaining about that for about as long as I can remember. There are still wildly original movies coming out these days (I just watched Poor Things as just one example – although come to think of it, that film was clearly greatly influenced by Frankenstein…). But it does seem that the local cineplex is constantly filled with sequels, remakes, and reimaginings.

That last one has gained a lot of traction over the last few years. Movies and television shows are often going back to the “classics” and tinkering with them a bit, reimaging them for today’s age. Maleficent takes the classic Sleeping Beauty villain and gives us her backstory, making her not quite so evil.

As you can read in my review, it doesn’t quite work.

Don Henley – Mountain View, CA (10/11/92)

Don Henley
Shoreline Amphitheatre
Mountain View, California
Sunday October 11, 1992

Recorded By OldNeumanntapr from lawn repeater stacks, left side
2 Nakamichi CM-300s w/CP-2 Omnis > Sony WM-D6C using Maxell UDXLIIS cassettes
Transferred: Sony TC-D5M > Tascam DR100mkII (24bit/48khz)

Mastered by Flying -M- (January 2021)
Har-Bal 3.0 & iZotope RX 8 advanced > CD Wave > Korg Aqua (16-44) > TLH (flac level 8)

Billed as “Healing The Sacred Hoop – The Next 500 Years”
A benefit for the International Indian Treaty Council
Sunday’s show also featured performances by Bonnie Raitt, Todd Rundgren, Little Feat, Ry Cooder & David Lindley, Cris Williamson, and Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman

  1. The End Of The Innocence
  2. Reason To Believe
  3. Sweetheart Like You
  4. Best Of My Love
  5. What’s Goin’ On
  6. Same Girl
  7. Chief Joseph
  8. Lonely Weekends
  9. What A Wonderful World
    Encore:
  10. The Heart Of The Matter
    [52:36]

Recorded By OldNeumanntapr From Lawn Repeater Stacks, Left Side
Nakamichi CM-300s w/CP-2 Omnis > Sony WM-D6C Cassette Master
XLIIS Master Transferred: Sony TC-D5M > Tascam DR100mkII (24bit/48khz)

Mastered by Flying -M- (January 2021)
Har-Bal 3.0 & iZotope RX 8 advanced > CD Wave > Korg Aqua (16-44) > TLH (flac level 8)

OldNeumanntapr Notes-
These performances were Bill Graham’s last big festival that he was working on before he died the previous year. I’m sorry that he never lived to actually see them performed. On the surface it seemed these benefit concerts were held to commemorate the 500 year anniversary of Columbus ‘discovering’ the new world. 1492-1992. Actually, it was more to open people’s eyes to the suffering and misery that the Native American people have endured during that 500 year history. One of the Native American speakers between sets commented, “Why do we celebrate Columbus? He was LOST!!” Santana headlined on Saturday and Bonnie Raitt headlined on Sunday. Saturday was billed as ‘The Good Road Concert” and Sunday was billed as ‘Healing The Sacred Hoop’. I remember that between songs, Bonnie remarked that there were a bunch of young girls trying to get into John Lee Hooker’s dressing room. “That’s what I call ‘Healing The Sacred Hoop'”, she said. They were awesome shows. Some of the sets were kind of quiet and have more crowd noise on the recordings than I would have liked. I’m kind of amazed that there are not more recordings of these shows out there. I recorded both days up on the lawn with Nakamichi CM-300s with CP-2 omni capsules->Sony WM-D6C. The music went on from about 3pm to around midnight, so bringing in enough blank tape was a major problem. Another big problem was that since the shows started so early in the afternoon it was nearly impossible to hide recording equipment in broad daylight. I rode up to the shows with my friends Dave and Brian and it wasn’t until I was putting my equipment together in the back seat of the car that I discovered that I had the CP-2 omni capsules on the mics instead of the CP-1 cardioid caps. I was really upset because the omnis add a lot more crowd noise because they lack the side and real isolation that the cardioids have. I had been recording a band in a bar back home the night before and we did a matrix mix with a feed off of the soundboard plus the two CM-300 omnis that were hung from the ceiling.

I got everything in OK on Saturday but Sunday I had a problem. (This saga became one of my best ever taping stories in the years to come!) Because it was kind of cold at night I had brought extra clothing to both stay warm and conceal equipment. I had taken a long-sleeved flannel shirt and wrapped up the mics and knotted the sleeves together. I hid the D6 and cables and a couple of tapes with an ace bandage wrapped around my crotch and had no other option but to put the mics at the bottom of a backpack with misc. crap on top of it. I looked for a line with a security guy that seemed to be doing a minimum of searching and had Dave and Brian go through the turnstiles ahead of me. At the last second a supervisor took over my line just as I stepped up to the search. My heart kind of did a double beat but I hoped for the best. I always relied on the old magician’s sleight-of-hand trick of showing them what you wanted them to see while at the same time distracting them from what you wanted to hide. While my friends went through the turnstiles the supervisor was rummaging around in my bag and felt the mics wrapped up in the shirt. “What’s This?,” he wanted to know and stopped the line. I had to think fast as he was trying but could not untie the knots on the shirt. “It’s a beer bottle,” says I, after the other guy had already torn my ticket. He pulled me out of line and, yelled at me,”You can’t bring that in here!” I stepped out of line and said that I’d get rid of it. Meanwhile, Dave looked back and saw what was going on. I put my hand up in the air palm up and he tossed the car keys to me over the top of the turnstiles. I went back to his car, opened the trunk, and took out two blank cassettes from under my ace bandage and left them in the car. I unwrapped the mics and shoved them down next to the tape deck under the ace bandage and hoped for better luck! When I went back I picked a different line and got through without a problem. The usher at the gate did a double take when he saw that the ticket had been torn already and then signed off on the back by the supervisor. He asked me about it and I said, with my best ‘dumb-guy’ look, that they had found a beer bottle on me and made me go and get rid of it. What did he say? You guessed it! “You can’t bring that in here!!!!” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave found me inside as I was making my way to the lawn and asked me about it as I gave him back his keys. I told him I had to lighten the load a bit and had to leave some tape behind. “I guess I just won’t tape Don Henley,” I said. “Oh you’ve Got to tape Henley,” he said. Later on, about 5 minutes before Henley came on stage, I looked up to see Dave drop two blank tapes in my lap. “How in the hell did you get Those??” I asked. He said that he had gotten cold and asked the people at the gate if he could go out and get his sweatshirt! Naturally, he had another thought in mind as well. I laughed and shook my head. That’s my story and I’m sticken’ to it! That’s the closest I’ve ever come to getting caught taping.

Once night fell, I could get the mics up higher and make a better recording, but in broad daylight I had no other choice but to sit on the ground under the repeater towers and build a little pile of clothing on top of my backpack. I hid the mics in the sleeves on the shirt and ran the mic cables back to the backpack where the D6 was. I need to transfer these cassettes to CDR. Some will sound better than others.

The music was pretty good. I couldn’t see much of the stage, especially in the daytime, because the view screens were not on. I remember that the Hooker / Cooder set and the Lindley / Cooder set was kind of quiet. Those sets have more crowd noise on them, plus the omni caps sure didn’t help matters. It would have been nice to have the shotguns but they are a little noticeable!

Do NOT Convert To MP3.
Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉

Thanks go out to Professor Goody for verifying the pitch on this recording.
Jewel box artwork by ethiessen and it looks so nice, a million thanks for the beautiful covers.

Finally, thanks to OldNeumanntapr for trusting me with his recording and waiting forever for me to finish this.

For historical reference only and not intended for resale or any commercial use

Enjoy…
-M- (January 2021)

FLYING M PRODUCTIONS

Sci-Fi In July : The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)

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A young girl sits counting in her cell. Suddenly an alarm sounds and the lights come on. Armed soldiers come calling. Though she can walk she sits down in a wheelchair. The soldiers strap her arms and legs down and her head so she cannot turn it. She is wheeled into a classroom with numerous other children likewise strapped to wheelchairs.

Soldiers look in on the classroom calling the kids names like “freaks” and “abortions.” Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) is the only adult who is kind to them. In a moment of grace, she touches the girl’s head. Immediately, the soldiers, led by Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) come in and chastise Helen for touching a student. He then spits on his hand and pushes it under one of the children’s nose.

Immediately, the kids go feral, writing in their wheelchairs and attempting to bite the soldiers. They are zombies. Or more correctly, they are zombie hybrids. They will attack with fury when they smell humans, but can also talk and think like normal people.

They may also be the key to a cure. The zombies in this film were caused by some sort of fungus that grows inside the brain. These kids were In Utero when the virus first came about (the film occurs some ten years after the beginning of the apocalypse). They absorbed the virus when their mothers got it which may have caused them to be…well not immune as they are definitely hungry for human flesh, but special. The scientists, led by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) think this specialness may lead them to a cure.

I feel like I’m getting bogged down in the plot, but really what I’ve just described happens in the first ten minutes or so. But it is such an interesting setup for a zombie movie I wanted to dig into it a bit.

All of that occurs at a well-guarded military base, but just after those events, it is attacked by hundreds of zombies and overcome. Our heroes narrowly escape and the rest of the film finds them traveling into London in hopes of rescue.

That girl I mentioned is named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), she is smart chatty, inquisitive, and kind. In the time we spend with her on the base, she always says hello to the military people even when they are cruel to her. She always asked a lot of questions and was the top student in her class. This both endears her to her capturers and ingratiates them.

The look and feel of the film has a lot in common with the recent television series The Last of Us (the series came out in 2023 but was based on a game from 2014 game – the book this film was based on also came out in 2014 so I’ll let you be the judge of who created this look first). The landscapes are overgrown with vegetation while the city buildings and infrastructure are beginning to collapse. This creates a beautiful yet eery look to everything.

The plot is your basic quest scenario but it is well done. This type of movie often will involve a child but they are usually just there to add a sense of danger. Melanie is something different. Because she is a zombie the other do not sense her as food. She is safe from them. But when she gets hungry she is a force of danger. Yet she is also the human’s only hope. That makes the plot more interesting than your standard zombie fare.

This all worked for me quite well. I dug the the look of the film, the action scenarios, and all of the characters. If you like zombie films I highly recommend this one. It also has a fantastic ending.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The City of The Dead (1960)

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Christopher Lee made well over 200 films in his storied career. Not all of them were great, of course, out of the 40 I’ve seen only a few of them are truly wonderful. But I love him just the same. From the late 1950s through the early 1960s he had a run of horror films that are just terrific. Many of them were made for Hammer Studios and I’ve talked about a few of them, but he made plenty of other films for other studios as well.

The City of the Dead was put out by British Lion Studios. It was directed by John Llewellyn Moxey who mostly did TV work (including the influential The Night Stalker in 1972). It is a slight, but evocative slice of gothic heaven.

Lee plays Alan Driscoll a history professor whose lecture on the New England witch trials intrigues his student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson). Enough to make her want to take a trip there to get some first-hand sources. Driscoll recommends the small town of Whitewood and tells her to stay at the Blackbird Inn, where his name will guarantee her a room.

One fog-filled night she drives to Whitewhood. Along the way she’s warned off by an old man at a petrol station, then she picks up a creepy hitchhiker who magically disappears when she arrives and is met at the inn by the mysterious Mrs. Newless (who looks suspiciously like – and is played by the same actress, Patricia Jessell – as the woman we saw burned at the stake in the flashback sequence that begins the film).

Strange things are afoot at the Blackbird Inn.

I won’t spoil what happens next. Not that anything that happens is too surprising, the film’s plot is pretty standard stuff, but it has style to spare.

The town is in a constant state of fog creeping in. The buildings are all in disrepair, making it look ancient and decrepit. The cemetery with its crosses sticking out at odd angles sits in the center of town. The stark black-and-white photography gives it an eerie quality.

The townspeople are creepy as can be. Nan has a boyfriend back home, and a brother. She befriends one friendly lady in Whitehall. They all come looking when she goes missing, giving the film some needed action.

At just under 80 minutes in duration, it all goes down quick and smooth. I had a marvelous time watching it.

Sci-Fi in July: Palm Springs (2020)

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I love Groundhog’s Day-type movies. There is something really interesting about watching characters relive the same day over and over again. Ironic, since when our daily lives feel like that, we want to strike out and do something different.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I think that is what makes these films so interesting. Because the characters are literally stuck on the same day, getting a reset whenever they fall asleep or die, they are free to do whatever they want. Knowing everything will go back to normal the next day, they can do all the things they were too afraid to do in real life.

Palm Springs came out in 2020 when many of us were stuck in lockdown. It felt like every day was the same because we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. It is fun reading reviews of the film when it came out because everyone was feeling like they were stuck in their own time loop.

It does a couple of interesting things with the concept. First, the film is a romantic comedy which I don’t believe has ever been done with this type of film. Second, it brings other people into the time loop with fascinating results.

We suspect something is different from near the start. Niles (Andy Samberg) behaves strangely. He attends a wedding reception in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. He gives an impromptu speech that seems well-rehearsed. He dances to impress a girl, Sarah (Christin Miloti), but his moves incorporate all the other people at the reception in a way that seems impossible.

Of course, he’s been stuck in the time loop for a long time. That’s something else that’s different about this movie. Normally we enter the loop with our main character, here he’s already been inside it for years.

He starts to hook up with Sarah but before they get too far he’s attacked by a strange man named Roy (J.K. Simmons). Niles runs into a cave and even though he shouts for Sarah not to follow, she does anyway.

Now she’s stuck in the time loop. They are stuck together. They get to know each other. They have fun. They do crazy stuff. She tries to kill herself. It is all the same basic time loop movie stuff, but they make it fun.

Roy is also stuck in the loop. Years ago he and Niles connected at the wedding reception, got drunk, had a lot of fun and Niles took him to the cave. Now Roy hates Niles for putting him into the loop.

One of the interesting things about this film is that it delves a little into what a time loop would do to you psychologically. Niles has become ambivalent about everything. Nothing matters because it will all reset tomorrow. At one point Sarah becomes depressed and tries to kill herself. Later, she’ll become angry and she lashes out violently against some men. Niles stops her because he says, that while those people won’t remember what she did to them, she will. Knowing she is capable of such violence will take its toll on her own mind.

But mostly it is a silly little romantic comedy. The jokes don’t always work for me, they are a little too broad and silly for my tastes, but I still laughed quite a bit. What makes it work in a big way is the chemistry between Samberg and Miloti. Christin Miloti is especially great. I haven’t really seen her in anything, but she deserves to be a star. Together they make it work. I wanted to spend all the time with them living through each day, even though it was the same day.