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CD 1 - Soundboard 9.0 and Audience 8.7 - The Sparrow show is great, amazing that such an early document was captured so well (by a radio station no less). The Dallas material comes after and is also very good, and at first it may seem it could even be a board tape but closer inspection suggests otherwise but it’s pretty decent. The Baltimore material filling out the 2nd half of Disc 2 is the worst of this collection at an 8.3 Audience rating which is not bad at all really. John Kay sounds very prominent in the mix, guitar and bass pretty heavy sounding, keys and drums kind of washed out a bit, but you hear pretty much all of it nonetheless.
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Audience 7.8 - Thin to win, well yeah it’s kinda like that because though it is not exactly booming hi fi, it does allow one to appreciate this man’s guitar wizardry at a time in his career where you can literally hear him transitioning out of hard psyche rock into blues rock. Not a lot of Taste live recordings out there, this is a complete show, it’s worth having.
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Audience 8.0 - A utilitarian tape that captures the action on stage where you clearly get each instrument without much separation or dynamics. The selling point of this show is the set list, some seldom performed numbers including Crossroads which is played with aplomb. Energetic, fresh, all that without any hiccups but lacking clarity and dynamic range.
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Audience 8.6 - It’s easy to find board tapes from most of their tours so I can understand why one might take a pass on an audience tape but you do get a different perspective here, it’s a “bouncier” sound, a more kinetic feel to the happenings and you know, the Cure sometimes drones on a bit so I like having a recording that helps keep things moving.
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Audience 8.3 - A fine recording all things considered. It’s a big hall, recording comes from somewhere in the middle of the arena but the capture is reasonable albeit without a good definition and some mild boominess. Overall you can be happy with this recording and of course the band has a fine repertoire.
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Soundboard 9.0 and Audience 8.6 - This is a very interesting document of a period of time in the band’s history where they lost a key member of the band in guitarist Randy Bachman. That did not stop them, as these shows attest. Quality varies but is consistently good across all shows with the first part being Soundboard and the rest very clear and reasonably dynamic Audiences.