Derek and the Dominos
Electric Factory Theatre
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
October 16, 1970
CD-R1 from 1st Gen Audience Source – Aud 3
Track Listing:
1) Ramblin’ on My Mind (slide guitar)
2) Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?
3) Blues Power
4) Have You Ever Loved a Woman
5) Mean Old World
6) Motherless Children
7) Let it Rain
Geetarz Comments:
This is a legendary Dominos show, and a personal favorite. Some older reference guides inexplicably refer to this as a soundboard, but it’s clearly a marginal to average recording.
Luckily a fantastic performance makes for any drawbacks of the source material.
“Ramblin” features some of EC’s best ever slide playing. EC can at times play slide a little too precisely – but in this performance, he exhibits loopy, “out of the box” playing that clearly shows Duane Allman’s influence as he dances around all the notes. I don’t recall EC performing “Ramblin'” in this arrangement again, which alone makes it unique.
This performance is also notable for an incredible, mind bending, tour-de-force performance of “Why does Love…”, which is in my Not-So-Humble opinion, not only the finest performance of this song of all time, but has to be one of EC’s top performances of any song, ever. If I were making a list of the “Top 25 songs EC ever played” or something like that, this song would be on that list.
And it’s not just EC here. If you listen to some of the very early gigs, the band were a little loose, but here they play as a single organism, rising and falling, playing off each other for all they are worth. “Why Does…” has always had a demanding and unusual bass line, and Gordon holds it down, driving the song in the same way that Entwhistle would actually drive the rhythm of The Who as Moon, or in this case Jim Gordon, lays out some 15+ minutes of drum madness, and Bobby Whitlock holding it all together with a shimmering B3 and his incredible vocals.
This performance of this song is indeed “epic”, and unforgettable.
This show also features the first-ever live performance of “Motherless Children”, albeit in raw form, which in a way adds to its charm.
Now, back “in the day”, cassettes of varying degrees of distance from the source were in circulation, and this performance had, again in varying degrees in distance from the source, made its way onto ROIO releases on vinyl and CD.
Up until 2000, the best extant version was the one best identified by its length, 73:08. Keep in mind that different CD players can show time a second or two off, but that is the best advice I can give you for you to determine which version of this show you may have.
In mid-2000, my long-lost D&D maniac collector friend Tony, who really did have a nose like a bloodhound when it came to unearthing rare and low gen stuff (along with some pretty funny anecdotes) came up excitedly with this version, which is labeled “1st Generation Audience Source”.
Now, this is where people get into semantic differences, and I’ve never gotten a real consensus on this. Personally, I write my lineage out like this:
Master > 1st Gen > 2nd Gen > 3rd Gen > etc.
But I have also seen many people who list lineage like this:
1st Gen Master > 2nd Gen > 3rd Gen > etc.
In other words, if someone tells you that they live on the 5th house on the left on Elm avenue, are they counting the house on the corner of Elm and Main?
In this case, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just giving you all the information I have, which is that the disc and the accompanying notes I received read “1st Generation Audience Source”. One way to identify this source, is that it clocks in at 72:54, whereas the inferior source clocks in at 73:08, with the additonal time on the inferior source being extra space on the tape where it was copied along the way.
Sonically, this is a vast improvement over the 73:08 version, I’d say at least 2, perhaps as many as 4 generations’ improvement.
It goes without saying that this is also a real improvement over the commercial RoIO “Electric Factory” CD (Deep-6, Deep6-5).
In the years since 2000, this low gen recording has been traded a bit, first among a circle of the pretty serious collectors and then likely used as the source for some of the tweaked and remastered versions later released on various ROIO labels. Here’s your chance to get that original source, not to say that the “remastered” versions may not suit your fancy more than this untampered recording, but if you’d like the original, here you go in the best quality available.
As always, all proper thanks to the anonymous taper, and my long lost friend Tony, who burned brightly in this hobby and then disappeared to pursue other interests, likely with the same vim and vigor he exhibited with D & D.
Even if you’re one of those people who typically avoids audience recordings, it would be a huge mistake to pass this up if you’ve never heard this show.
Put on “Why Does Love …”, and it’s definitely required that you play this as loudly as possible … if the cops come, tell ’em “Geetarz made me do it!”.
Lineage:
“1st Gen Aud Source” > CD-R > LiteOn iHAP 322 > EAC v. 0.99 Prebeta 5 (Secure Mode, Offset Correct +6, 0, 24 bytes) > FLAC
Checksums (ffp, MD5, ST5), info file, and EAC extraction log included.
Enjoy!
~Geetarz, April 2010
themidnightcafe.org 