Dire straits - emerald city 1980
posted on 19 Oct 2006 under category Meta
This is another of my Dimeadozen haul items - another bootleg of Dire Straits from the Making Movies On Location tour, this one from their gig at The Emerald City in Philadelphia, PA on November 12, 1980. This was early on the tour, when the band was swinging through the US before heading to Europe in December. New members Hal Lindes and Alan Clarke had just joined the band in September, but already had integrated themselves well, and you can see the band firing on all cylinders, performing easily at the same level as bootlegs from the ending phases of this tour. However, what makes this particular recording so special is the club atmosphere of the performance and the great deal of rarities in the setlist. Tracklist:
It’s jam-packed at just under 80 minutes, barely fitting onto a single CD - and in perusing the normal tracklist from gigs of this era, it seems that whoever put this on CD just lopped off the first four songs of the gig (Once Upon a Time in the West, Expresso Love, Down to the Waterline, and Lions) - I wonder if they were even recorded, or just left off of this particular burn. But I digress. Anyway, as you can see, the tracklist was quite different from what they played in Europe - Single Handed Sailor, Wild West End, and In the Gallery seem to have only been done in the US, and so recordings of this track are pretty rare. Furthermore, even in the US, the band would switch out between Solid Rock and Les Boys, and so recordings of Les Boys are even harder to come by.
Almost everything I said about San Remo ‘81 could be said here. The band is tight, which is impressive considering that Alan and Hal just joined two months earlier. In my San Remo review I mentioned some of the liberties they took with interpreting the older songs - and that holds true here even more as you get to hear some rarely-played versions of songs from the debut and Communique. In the Gallery gets more upbeat and almost a bit funky. A bit of that jazzy funk-type groove creeps into Single Handed Sailor as well. Wild West End stays sedately faithful to the original, but the piano adds some nice coloring textures here and there. As for updates to the newer songs, Romeo and Juliet gets a rather nice piano solo added between the last verse and the guitar solo (while Mark trades his resonator for the Strat) and Les Boys has some humorous ‘triumphant’ horn-sound synths added for a nice effect. The ‘intro song’ that they commonly played before Tunnel of Love is not fully fleshed out just yet - the piano just plays the basic arpeggio pattern quietly while Mark tells the story of how he wrote the song.
The sound quality, while obviously recorded from the audience, isn’t overly saturated, and the house mix was well-balanced enough that you can hear most everything going on. However, this recording was in a smaller club, so you get a few recorder voices and neighbors intruding now and then - and this guy must have been drunk because he just says some off-the-wall things now and then. As for cuts in the recording, the last minute or two of Sultans of Swing fades out, just before those famous fast guitar licks at the crescendo, and it sounds like the second verse of Angel of Mercy is cut quickly - it seamlessly jumps from the first chorus to that ‘turn around, spit on the grave of your mother’ bridge verse.
Also, instead of stage banter, you get conversation. You know how it is when you see a band in a big arena; they may talk to the crowd, but interaction is mostly limited to the ‘how are you doing’ (big scream) variety and the stories and between-song chat is mostly set and somewhat rehearsed. Not so on this one. Quite often you’ll hear Mark respond to someone in the crowd. The stories he tells about some of the songs are longer than you’d expect from an arena-type gig, too - such as his introduction to Skateaway where he talks about walking around not too far from the club before the show and seeing a girl skating around, or when he talks about how some people called Romeo and Juliet “Julio and Juliet”, or when he talks about the fairgrounds he called “The Spanish City” just before going into Tunnel of Love. But the piece de resistance is the intro to Les Boys.
It’s a shame it’s tracked on as the last three minutes of “Sultans…”, because it’s funny enough to listen to purely on its own. Mark tells a long, involved description of how they came to write the song while in Munich on the previous tour; after the gig, they wanted to eat at the hotel, but the restaurant was closed. The manager said they could eat at the disco bar at the hotel’s club on the rooftop, and so they go up to the disco. Just after they get there the disco stops and the cabaret act comes on - three old guys who call themselves ‘Les Boys’ dressing up as women and supposedly miming to old records, but doing it so badly that the crowd and even the house DJ are giving them crap. Mark’s rendition of it is quite funny, but as he’s telling it the band members cut up with him - at one point he’s talking about going up in the elevator and the disco music is getting louder, and Pick and John start jamming on a disco-type drum and bass groove which gets a big laugh from the crowd. Just the entire atmosphere of this story makes it like a big group of friends in a club, not like a regular old arena gig.
As I said before, in addition to the great atmosphere, the band is in top-notch form, the sound is quite good for an audience recording, and the set list includes more than a few rarities. Any fan of Dire Straits, especially of this Making-Movies era, should put this bootleg on their ‘mandatory’ list.
(Still one of my favorite bootlegs, but Boston is my go-to, because it’s basically this show, slightly better sounding, complete, and with fewer cuts. Since the stories aren’t so rehearsed, though, you can’t go wrong getting both. Also, both are free with a trader account at Dimeadozen, so what are you out, a few processor cycles?
Looking at the dates, I see this is about 3 years before my London trip with my Dad. One of the sights I wanted to see was the Cutty Sark, and even though it had burned a couple of years before and was completely covered up during the restoration, I went to that plaza by the “Mother and the baby and the College of War” - what I wanted to see was not the ship, so much, but just the entire scene - to stand where Mark stood, see what he saw (basically), and feel what he felt that made him write that song. Why did I love this song so much? As a kid I gave Communique a short shrift, but now it’s an album I get. And, while I love the studio version of Single Handed Sailor, it’s the version that opens this bootleg that made me love the song.
So, I guess it’s this blog post right here that planned that part of the trip for me. Funny how those things work out sometimes.)