Leon Redbone
October 8, 1982
Cotati Cabaret
Cotati, CA

soundboard > high end desktop Sony cassette deck (Dolby B on) (TCK-777?) > master cassette > JVC KD-V6 (playback, with Dolby off) > coax digital cable > Sek’d Prodif Plus soundcard > Sound Forge 8 (normalize, fade in and out, track splits) > BIAS Sound Soap plugin > .wav files > FLAC level 7 encoding

Recorded by Easy Ed. I, Easy Ed, was at the show with my cassette deck connected to the soundboard – this is not a multigenerational cassette received in trade years ago. This is my master soundboard cassette.

A scan of the flyer for the show that I saved is included in the torrent. Two promo photos from that epoch are included in the torrent.

There were two shows that night. I believe I captured all of each.

first show:
Gal Of Mine
Desert Blues
Hot Time In Old Town Tonight
Hard Luck Blues
Shine On Harvest Moon
Diddy Wah Diddy
Big Time Woman
Blue Heaven
If We Ever Meet Again This Side Of Heaven
The Gang’s All Here
CC Rider

second show:
Marie
I Ain’t Got Nobody
Sheik Of Araby
Big Time Woman
Your Cheatin’ Heart
Diddy Wah Diddy
Blue Heaven
Sweet Sue
I Wanna Be Seduced
Champagne Charlie
If We Ever Meet Again This Side Of Heaven
“When The Bird Flies From Branch To Branch”
(title unknown)

Now the bad news. I think this was my first live recording with my new (at the time) Sony deck (TCK-777?), which had a feature called ‘record mute’ which put muted the recording for four seconds during recording. I used it because it would make it easier for ‘music scan’ or ‘auto seek’ features on play back decks to skip to the beginning of songs. I’m sorry I did it. I never did it again. But this recording had a four second gap at the end of every song. Really, I’m sorry, forgive me.

So when mastering this recording I put a one second fade out before the gap and a one second fade in after the gap and then deleted the four second gap. So that means that less than six seconds of what happened that night between each song are missing. It does not make the recording unlistenable in the slightest. Nonetheless I wish I hadn’t done it and I promise I never did it again in the 24 years since.

Since the original recording was made with Dolby B on, which adds 10dB boost to the high frequencies, yet the playback was done without Dolby B on (which would have cut the high frequencies by 10dB) I took the liberty of applying some very slight noise (hiss) reduction using BIAS Sound Soap. If anyone wants the recording without this processing please contact me and I’d be happy to oblige. I usually am against offering original recordings with any processing but I was very light-handed here.

The venue for this show was The Cotati Cabaret in Cotati, CA. It was a small club that held about 300 people. Cotati is a small town located about an hour north of San Francisco.

Cotati is next to Sonoma State University, which was called Granola State University back in the hippie days. SSU is where the great recording of Old & In The Way with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott opening was made. There is a great poster of the O&ITW show, my copy of which is long gone :<(