Joni Mitchell
Cambridge, Mass.
January 1968 (date unknown – but labeled as the 10th, which is commonly used for this recording.)
01. Cactus Tree
02. Night In The City
03. Gift Of The Magi
04. I Had A King
05. Morning Morgantown
06. Ballerina Valerie
07. Song To A Seagull
08. Both Sides Now
09. Conversation
10. Come To The Sunshine
11. Chelsea Morning
12. The Pirate of Penance
13. The Way It Is
14. The Dawntreader
recording quality: B+
source: FM broadcast tape, possibly from a vinyl boot LP
original comments from glasnostrd19 in 2009:
A real early solo acoustic show with Joni Mitchell. This is the earliest Joni I’ve ever heard and she already had her distinctive vocal style. She does a bit of talking between some of the tunes, I didn’t bother to seperate the talk into its own tracks as some like to do. I’ve had this tape for years, no idea of its lineage, there is likely a better source for this out there somewhere but this is quite listenable for a 41 year old analog recording. it does have one rather annoying but very brief speed problem in the source recording (or transfer between that and my copy), otherwise the recording is pretty good, especially for this early date, and Joni sounds fine.
Almost all the other Joni Mitchell I listen to is from 76 w/ the L.A. Express and 79 w/ Metheny/Pastorious/Alias group, but some of this is nice to hear now and then. If I wasn’t more interested in jazz and rock music, I’d listen to this alot more. It’s classic Joni.
If you haven’t heard this (apparent parts of 2 sets) and like Joni Mitchell’s unique songwriting and performance style, you will enjoy hearing this. I don’t know how many generations my tape of this is, but there’s only a little bit of tape noise. I have not done any processing of this except to balance the levels out, DC offset where needed, and a couple of splices to smooth out abrupt endings. I don’t know how close to complete this is, but all the songs here are uninterrupted.
Joni played a run of shows at Club 47, the only date in etree is Jan 10th, that setlist order does not match here. It does sound like track 1 may not be the opening song, hard to tell since there’s no stage introduction in the recording.
Since June 2005 this collection has appeared seven times (now eight) at Dime. There were speed problems, dropouts and sector boundary errors along the way, as well as possibly different source tapes and/or tinkering with the sound.
This file set was originally seeded at Dime on Mon 12th Jan, 2009 by glasnostrd19, and doesn’t appear on the bot list after that.
It is not the speed-corrected version by Randall, seeded in 2007. According to one comment, this version has ‘more hiss and more bass though it would be going too far to describe it as “muffled” by comparison’. If somebody could reseed that version it would be nice to be able to compare.
This reseed has new txt, ffp and md5 files, and the SBEs were fixed – all with xACT.
This is the boot commonly known as “By The Banks of the River Charles”. It has four never-released Joni songs: “Gift of the Magi,” “Ballerina Valerie”, “The Way it Is” and “Come to the Sunshine”.
Reseeded at Dime: April 2012
