The problems associated with early live recordings of bands, particularly Rock bands, of the 60's, had mostly to do with the limitations of technology brought on by PA systems just not being able to handle the level of sound. It was very rare for an engineer at the time to actually record a band performance because, again, the limitations of technology and portable equipment were in their infancy. So a lot of early performance recordings were done by people in the audience, using battery powered reel-to-reel machines that were small enough to carry around on your shoulder, a microphone stuck in front of a stage speaker and hoping for the best because you couldn't hear anything once the band got started. And that's how the Bootleg industry was born.

Or, the local radio outlet would send a recording team and a truck loaded with equipment parked outside the venue and sometimes their own Sound system, and a decent recording was made and everybody was happy. Sometimes the band would release that live performance as an album and then the record company was happy. As time went on the technology evolved and companies such as the forward thinking Tychobrahe pioneered concert sound and the world was happy.

This weekend's Backstage is a performance that was recorded by one of those radio outlets. Sveriges Radio, the network in Sweden, sent a team to record the newly formed Traffic, who were performing in Stockholm in September of 1967.

Here is what you'll be hearing:

Traffic - Stockholm - Sept 12, 1967
Sveriges Radio

1. Giving To You
2. Smiling Phases
3. Coloured Rain
4. Hole In My Shoe
5. Feelin' Alright
6. Paper Sun
7. Dear Mr. Fantasy

Line up: Steve Winwood Dave Mason Chris Wood Jim Capaldi

Traffic during their exciting, formative period. Around the time their first album was released.

The sound is surprisingly good but a little quiet in places (particularly during announcements). But for a historic document, a wonderful glimpse into a band that went on to become a legend in Rock, whose music is still enjoyed and discovered by new fans, this is quite amazing.

Enjoy.

Update: Coming into the final stretch and, thanks to a flood of donations the past few hours, we're almost at our goal. It's been incredible, the support and encouragement that's come this way. I can't begin to express my humble gratitude to all of you for your kindness, your generosity and your support of Newstalgia. Sometimes it's difficult, posting day after day, not knowing if anyone besides me is actually listening to any of this stuff or really cares about its existence. Clearly, the past several days have proven you are out there reading and listening and enjoying what Newstalgia has to offer, and that is gratifying, to say the least. It has certainly given me renewed enthusiasm to bring as much interesting, rare and essential material as I can drag out of the Archive. For the moment, we're right at the home stretch, within a few hundred dollars of our goal. If you haven't considered making a donation, please do - no matter how much you are willing to donate. No amount of money is too small that it won't make a huge difference. - it all does. We're getting there - we've almost done it!

Taking a break from sessions this week and diving into no genre in particular. Tonight it's 60's Folk-Pop-Psych icon Donovan and one of the Jazzier selections from his Mellow Yellow album of 1967, The Observation. With the exception of his debut, most of his earlier projects of the 60's were a combination of Folk, Pop, Psychedelia and a nod in the direction of Cool-School Jazz. Usually making for an interesting and somewhat eclectic listening experience, it also tried to deflect from the stereotype that Donovan was presented to mainstream music as a sort of Bob Dylan-Lite, which just wasn't true. But in the world of pigeon-holes, he had to be put in one, and as we all know, Jazz isn't big commercially.

So here's Donovan's nod to Beat-Poetry and Word Jazz from 1967.

One of the truly unique voices in Jazz belonged to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. His mastery at playing multiple horns at once and his breath control were legendary, almost bordering on the mythic.

But he was the real deal and no one has come along, before or since, to take his place.

Here is a concert, recorded by Polish Radio on October 14, 1967, featuring Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing at Sala Kongresowa in Warsaw.

Here's the track listing and the players:

01 Creole Love Call
02 The Inflated Tear
03 three for the Festival
04 Blues for C&T
05 My Ship
06 Lovellevelliloqui
07 Intro / Cousin Mary /
08 Things Ain't What They Used To Be
09 Fly By Night
10 You Did It, You Did It / Ow!

Rahsaan Roland Kirk - flute, tenor sax, stritch, manzello, clarinet, vocals etc...
Ron Burton - piano
Steve Novosel - bass
Jimmy Hopps - drums

There's a few more Rahsaan Roland Kirk concerts sitting in the wings so stick around.

In the meantime, enjoy.

Every so often the overseas radio networks will toss a zinger at you. This past week, RSR Espace 2, the famous Swiss Radio outlet broadcast a concert given by l'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by their former Music Director, the legendary Paul Kletzki from 1967 (and 1969). Joining Kletzki is the equally legendary Belgian violinist Arthur Grumiaux, who joins the orchestra in the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

For collectors, the name Paul Kletzki is significant. He was one of the outstanding conductors of the 20th Century whose survival under Nazism, Fascism, and the Stalinist purges occasionally overshadowed his tremendous gift as a musician. His recordings are highly sought after and his live recordings (like this one) are milestones in the area of interpretation.

So it's a special Mid-Week Concert this week and hopefully there will be others in the future.

For now - here's the rundown of what you'll be hearing:

Les archives de l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Concert hommage à Paul Klecki,
chef de l’OSR de 1967 à 1970
Enregistrements réalisés au Studio
Ernest-Ansermet et au Victoria Hall
à Genève entre 1967 et 1969
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Arthur Grumiaux, violon

Direction : Paul Klecki

- C. M. von Weber:
Euryanthe. Opéra en 3 actes (extrait), Jähns 291(Victoria Hall)

- L. van Beethoven:
Concerto pourviolon et orchestre, en ré majeur, op. 61(Victoria Hall)

- S. Rakhmaninov:
Symphonie no 3,en la mineur, op.44 (Studio Ernest- Ansermet)

The concert is broken up between two players - the top player has the Weber and Beethoven and the bottom player has the Rachmaninoff.

A little history to go with your Anti-Road Rage Wednesday.

Something special and rare this weekend. A set by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, recorded live at Hollywood Bowl on August 11, 1967. They were the opening act for a Summer Jazz concert which also included Count Basie and Lou Rawls. I'll be including those in the coming weeks, or the next time it feels like Summer in Los Angeles (it's 90 degrees in Santa Monica today). Perfect hot day music.

Needless to say, this hasn't been available in any form anywhere since it was recorded. So it's a special concert and it's a great one.

Enjoy. And if you're on the West Coast, dip into something cool and turn this up.

These days, when you want distraction from the world in general you can be bombarded by mindless reality shows, mindless talkshows and mindless infomercials. In 1967 the avenues weren't so plentiful (newspapers, radio or non-cable TV), so what was the equivalent of a "media event" in 1967 was a White House Wedding.

Not that much unlike the substance-free Kardashian wedding of recent vintage, in 1967 we had the wedding of Lynda Bird Johnson and Captain Charles Robb. And on December 9, 1967 that was pretty much what the world watched.

The interviews with the Bride and Groom-to-be are quite priceless, only because in a few scant years the social underpinnings from where this interview sprang would come quite unglued. And needless to say, in a few short weeks the madness that would be 1968 would be upon us and this event would seem quaint and distant and from another time.

So if you were curious as to how America got their attention riveted prior to the dawn of Social Media and instant access, this twenty minute capsule of what was at the time one of the most talked about events in America, may prove enlightening.

That was then and this is now and the concept of something being many lifetimes ago seems somehow apt in retrospect.

And in the event you weren't there, or weren't even getting started yet - here is a glimpse of what may or may not have missed.

NBC News with "Candlelight and Crossed Swords" for December 9, 1967.

In July 1967, with all the recent developments in the Middle East, the riots throughout America and escalating dissent towards the Vietnam War, Secretary of State Dean Rusk still maintained the eroding position that the majority of Americans supported the War and it was only a small "marginal" segment of the population trying to end it and get us out of there.

This interview from Face The Nation on July 30, 1967, features a trio of reporters - Marvin Kalb, Murray Marder and Martin Agronsky. They tried for some clarification from Rusk that our Foreign Policy was indeed going in the right direction and that the seemingly rampant violence hitting our cities was only a minor blemish on the bigger picture.

Dean Rusk: “I think they know enough about us to know that these riots have nothing to do with the situation that they face in Vietnam and their ambitions to take over South Vietnam by force. We’ve had some indication that they are becoming a little more sophisticated about the American political system and that they know that these marginal dissents and these minority views do not represent the United States or its policy or its determination. I think it would be a great mistake for them to think they get any comfort out of what has happened here recently in some of our cities. Obviously in their propaganda they are trying to use it to our disadvantage and this is happening also in Peking and Havana and Moscow.”

The only problem was, it was far from true and the level of dissent towards the war was escalating at a rapid rate. It was easy in 1964 to label dissent towards the war in Vietnam as marginal - only a comparatively few people actually knew there was war going on before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. But as the war dragged on and as casualty reports kept coming in (even though they were shaded in number so as to appear not so bad), it was hard to justify being there by 1967. The notion that billions of dollars were being spent on a War in Southeast Asia while our own cities languished in depressed times seemed wildly inexcusable. Despite the fact that a bastion of hawks and supporters of the war insisted it wasn't, the war was quickly becoming lost to the vast majority of American people. Particularly those who had sons fighting, or who were becoming of draft age and were facing the daunting prospects of being another number on the casualty lists.

But they tried to paint a rosy picture and they tried to say it was not what the majority really wanted. And Dean Rusk was somehow stuck propping up a rapidly weakening position.

Ever since AM Talkradio became the domain of screamers, malcontents, alarmists and trolls, something got lost in the translation as to what constituted entertainment via Radio.

Jean Shepherd is mostly known today as the guy who wrote "A Christmas Story" and not much else. But he was a successful author with several books to his credit, a frequent contributor to Playboy Magazine, made periodic appearances on PBS and was generally acknowledged as one of the great wits and humorists of the 1950's and 60's who had a daily radio show on WOR in New York and had a massive following. He was a story teller and something of an iconoclast with a somewhat surreal sense of humor.

Here is one of his daily shows over WOR, which was syndicated around the country. This one is from December 4, 1967 and gives you an idea of what he was like on a daily basis.

If you remember him, you know. If you have no idea, check him out and remember there was a time radio wasn't there to scare you to death or turn you into a psychopath. You could actually hear something interesting. And Jean Shepherd was certainly interesting.

Since America had escaped the ravages of the Red Scare during the 1950s reasonably well (aside from all the careers devastated by innuendo), the new scourge of Western Society was the advent of the Counter Culture in the 1960s. That wholesale rebellion against social airs and graces that typified life in a terrified yet insular society, the Counter Culture, at first a logical next step from the vestiges of the Beat Generation, was a combination of the Free Speech Movement, the Anti-War Movement, The Civil Rights Movement and probably a few hundred other social and artistic movements all rolled into one massive social upheaval.

And because most aspects of the Counter Culture had to do with politics reasonably well to the left, the practitioners of the various movements were labeled misfits, deadbeats, malcontents and the newest and most lasting one for the period; Hippies.

Hippie was a nice blanket classification for anyone who questioned the previous status quo in social/political/artistic behavior. Hippie came to be associated with shiftless, lazy, unmotivated, perverted, hirsute to the extreme and manipulative. It was also a movement that was officially pronounced dead at the end of summer 1967.

But when mainstream media began looking at this Counter Culture phenomenon after the fact, they did it with a certain jaundiced eye geared to the sensational. And as anything that starts off as a small independent movement and gains popularity, it inevitably gets into the mainstream (usually after the fact when it morphs into a life of its own) and that's when the trouble starts. And as is always the case, the initial motivators behind this and other movements either faded away, wound up in jail or on the run or were co-opted by the malcontents, agenda-grinders and grandstanders and turned into a quasi-profitable lifestyle. So what began as a serious questioning of social mores became a free-for-all and disintegrated, certainly by the end of 1969. Some say 1968. My feeling has always pinpointed it around Altamont (but that's just me).

But in November of 1967 the media were still very curious about it all and WNEW in New York ran a documentary/essay called A Child Again where a nineteen year old girl named "Marcy" was interviewed and asked about her lifestyle and her choices.

Today it may sound quaint and somewhat naive, as does a lot of history when you look back at it. At the time though, Marcy represented every parent's nightmare. And truths to tell, they had a lot to spend sleepless nights over. But that's the stuff of youth and every generation has it since the beginning of time.

And Marcy and her love of Speed and Alice In Wonderland was ours.

Oh, and if you're curious about the music bed that plays in the background, it's Jefferson Airplane off Surrealistic Pillow - in case you were driving yourself crazy wondering.

(Radio in the 1960s looked an awful lot like this most everywhere)

It's been one and possibly two generations gone by that never actually heard what AM radio was all about, or what it aspired to do, in the 1960's. Before radio tightened up playlists, got generic and became bastions of shrill talk radio, there was music and lots of it.

In 1967 it was still pretty much geared to the 45 rpm disc, the singles market. Even though by the end of that year things would already be changing dramatically until by the following year the discovery of FM would further erode a once powerful force of the Music business. AM radio, despite trying, always sounded lousy, it just couldn't help it. But what it lost in quality it more than made up for in sheer personality and a desire to connect with an audience in a meaningful way.

In 1967, upstart radio station KBLA located in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank became something of a middle ground between the 45 culture of the hit record and the burgeoning subculture of free form radio.

Because it was a very competitive market (KRLA, KHJ and KFWB being the dominant forces in Los Angeles at the time) and because the station wasn't all that powerful, the experiment didn't last. And on June 16, 1967 KBLA did it's final day as a free-form/top 40 radio station. Dave Diamond, himself a popular fixture on the L.A. scene in the 1960's, would go off to other stations after this final broadcast.

But the writing was on the wall and it would only be a matter of months before a tsunami of change would sweep over popular culture, and popular media was the first to feel it. Top-40 on AM radio at least, had its days numbered.
So here is a small slice of history (less than one hour from a three hour show) to give you some idea of what the fuss was all about at the time. Fortunately for everyone, there were a lot of people armed with tape recorders who, like their geek brethren of later years with computers, sat faithfully by their radios day after day and preserved this stuff for some future generation to marvel or gaze askance with strained credulity.

It was another element in what it all later became - how it all wound up.