The Slits @ San Francisco, CA 1980-11-25

 


LIMITED TIME / LAST TIME

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Pm5tVKGX

The Slits
Rat's Palace
San Francisco, CA
1980-11-25 (Tuesday)

THTP Release 123

NOTE: The Slits' Official bootleg 'Typical Girls Live In Cincinnati & San Francisco USA' featured tracks from this US tour, in Cincinatti, OH, and The Stone, San Francisco. Their other Bay Area shows, at San Francisco Rat's Palace, 1980-11-25, Tuesday, and the Keystone Berkeley 1980-11-23 were not used in the Slits record. According to Terry, who knew the Slits' manager well, the manager told him that the Slits in fact did NOT do soundboards at the Keystone Berkeley and SF Rat's Palace shows, and they also did not use Terry's recordings from these shows, although they were offered them. The SF show part of their record therefore had to come from their show at The Stone, San Francisco, 1980-11-21 (Friday). Hopefully this clears up the long-standing confusion about which shows were used to make the Slits Typical Girls 'bootleg'.

Recording chain: 
Stage mics > splitter (split to house snake/SBD and TH snake) > TH dedicated snake >
Peavy MkII 12 channel mixing board (10 channels snake, 2 channels audience mics) > 
AKAI GXC-570D Cassette Deck (Dolby B on) > TDK SA-90 tape

Archival Process: 
1999: Sony TC-KA3ES > TDK SA-90 tapes playback (NO Dolby) > BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer (to clean up tapes) >
Tascam DA-30 DAT > HHb DAT-125 DAT tape
2002: HHb CDR-850 Professional CD Recorder (In real time) > HHb CDR74 Gold 100 year archival grade CDRs
2005: Transfered to HDD in AIFF file format

Dime release processing: AIFF Master Files > FFMPEG > 16 bit FLAC 8 > tagging, cover artwork, checksums.

Recorded, preserved, and master AIFF files provided by: Terry Hammer

Setlist:
01. New Town
02. Walkabout
03. Man Next Door
04. Life On Earth
05. I Heard It Through The Grapevine
06. Seconds?
07. Fade Away
08. Typical Girls
09. Animal Spaces
10. In The Beginning There Was Rythm

Length: 1:00:18

Band:
Ari Up (Ariane Forster) - vocals
Viv Albertine - guitar
Tessa Pollitt - bass
Bruce Smith – drums

Notes:
* Ari Up RIP 2010

* This was part of a series of shows/appearances the Slits did in the SF Bay area on this tour: Friday, 11-21, The Stone, which provided the SF tracks used on their self-released bootleg); 11-22, Keystone Palo Alto; 11-23, in store appearance at Berkeley's Leopold Records, and in the evening, the Keystone show (THTP 122); and finally the 11-25, and more underground, SF Rat's Palace show (THTP 123).

* Bruce Smith was the drummer for the Pop Group, Mark Stewart's original band, and later, worked with Adrian Sherwood's Onu stable of musicians. Budgie (Peter Clarke) immediately preceded him in the Slits after Palmolive's departure, but I believe it was Bruce on this tour.
* About band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slits
"The Slits were a British post-punk band formed in London in 1976 by members of the groups The Flowers of Romance and The Castrators. The group's early line-up consisted of Ari Up (Ariane Forster) and Palmolive (a.k.a. Paloma Romero, who played briefly with Spizzenergi and later left to join The Raincoats), with Viv Albertine and Tessa Pollitt replacing founding members Kate Korus and Suzy Gutsy. Their 1979 debut album, Cut, has been called one of the defining releases of the post-punk era.
...
Their Dennis Bovell-produced debut album Cut was released in September 1979 on Island Records, with Neneh Cherry joining as additional vocalist. The album's sleeve art depicted the band naked, except for mud and loincloths. Palmolive left the band around this time: it is often claimed that this was partly because she did not like this artwork, including by Palmolive herself, but according to Viv Albertine Palmolive had been asked to leave the band before that, and does not appear on the record. She was replaced by the drummer Budgie (Peter Clarke), formerly of The Spitfire Boys and later of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
The Slits' sound and attitude became increasingly experimental and avant-garde during the early 1980s, when they formed an alliance with Bristol post-punk band The Pop Group, sharing drummer Bruce Smith and releasing a joint single, "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm/Where There's a Will There's a Way" (Y Records). This was followed by a bizarre, uncommercial, untitled album of mostly homemade demo recordings, and a few more singles. The band toured widely and released another album, Return of the Giant Slits before breaking up in early 1982. Ari Up went on to be part of the New Age Steppers."

* Ari Up's later project, New Age Steppers, were another in the almost endless whirlwind of creativity found in Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound studios/label releases. If you never checked out On-U Sound stuff, that's an oversight you might want to remedy!! Adrian and Lee Scratch Perry have just done a few new releases on On-U, also worth checking out.

* Rat's Palace was run by Paul Rat, an influential player in the San Francisco area punk rock scene. It was at 705 Natoma Street, an alley between Mission and Howard streets in San Francisco, right at 8th Street. Later he and Dirk Dirkson would run the On Broadway together. src: https://www.jneomarvin.com/scrapbook/pages/25E.htm

* Includes flyers for their Stone shows, and for their Leopold Records (Berkeley record store on Durant, right by the campus) Slits in-store appearance.

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No distribution in lossy formats!!
No selling!!
No bootlegging!!
No remastering!!
Yes sharing. Definitely share.

Support the artists when or if they play, and buy their records/merchandise.

Please correct any errors or oversights in this information in the comments section so the information can be as accurate as possible.

If you can find related materials like flyers, posters, ticket stubs, even photos, etc, please add them in a comment and I will add them to the main release folder, so that can be included on the next re-seeding. Every bit is welcome, and as I am time constrained on this project due to the amount of material, I cannot spend as much time on each release doing research as I would like, so if we can add to and improve the information and release contents during this series, that would be great.

Please make an effort to pick at least one of these THTP releases and keep it seeded for as long as you can, particularly the lesser known groups. That will really help out long term.

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About Terry Hammer and the THTP:

Someone put my feelings very well about these recordings in the following quote. I can't really improve on their words beyond noting that these recordings sound absolutely and utterly stunning, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to present these to you here in their original, first generation, lossless hi-fidelity versions, for the first time ever.

"[These recordings were] recorded and preserved by collector/engineer Terry Hammer, for broadcast over the UC Berkeley station KALX and several others from the 1979 -1981 period. Anyone who spent a night at one of these clubs knows how chaotic the atmosphere was. That he was able to, not only get a decent feed from the sound mixing board, but was also able to get clean recordings was something of a miracle. And the fact this guy did it over and over again is pure dedication to the cause of preserving history for decades to come. Fortunately for everyone, he’s been making these gems of history available and their value as historic documents is inestimable. This is really exciting stuff and I am grateful for Terry’s foresight and deft skill."
src: https://pastdaily.com/2014/06/25/gang-four-live-american-indian-center-san-francisco-1980-nights-roundtable-concert-edition/ 

As Terry notes about the process of recording these shows: "Like all of my live recordings this was mixed direct to 2-Track Reel To Reel (and Cassette deck for backup and personal use) using headphones. Sitting in the club with the loud P.A. sound trying to drive the amp in my mixing board loud enough to hear what I was mixing.If you've ever been to a live concert,then,you know how loud it can be."

If you've ever been looking for an excuse to upgrade your sound system, these recordings certainly should provide you with some motivation, because they have incredible sound. And if you already have a quality sound system, you are in for a treat!! The audio goes straight to 20k hz, no losses I can detect. Due to the reality of tapes, even high end as used here, the low end starts at 47 hz.

And if you want to learn more about this incredible musical era, listen to the stuff you haven't heard, there are amazing gems in there.

Do we call these soundboards? Technically not precisely because this is not the house mix, these shows were mixed using a dedicated mixing board, with an additional 1 to 2 audience mics (1 for Mab because he needed 11 snake inputs), 2 at other clubs) in the mix. But I call it the Terry Hammer Tape Project (THTP) to make sure there is no doubt about the project's creator.

TECH:
Note that Terry made 2 master recordings (recording at the same time) when he mixed these shows live:
1: Reel to reel, for the radio stations: 
Technics RS-1500 Reel To Reel (mostly TDK Audua L-1800 & LB-1800 tape with back coating or Scotch 206 / 207 with back coating. Maybe a few Maxell UD-XL). All the KALX shows went to KALX, they supplied the reel to reel tape.

2: For his own use, and as backup in case something happened to the reels: 
AKAI GXC-570D Cassette Deck (Dolby B on) > TDK SA-90 tape

Terry isn't sure, but thinks the audience mics he used maybe were Electro Voice EV-DS35's.

Info: http://www.bbesound.com/products/sonic-maximizers/482i.aspx

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 - teetering