PAIGNTON, ENGLAND
FESTIVAL HALL
DEC. 10, 1972
OU: Here's a little treat I've been meaning to offer up for a while. I own the master cassette but never got around to doing anything with it until now.
PERSONNEL
DEL BROMHAM - guitar
GARY GILES - bass
RITCHIE COLE - drums
STEVE GADD - vocals (no, not THAT Steve Gadd - this is not the well-known drummer, but a guy who has the same name)
1 "Cross Country"
2 unknown
3 "Cold Turkey" (Lennon)
It's only 26:59 long and cuts out abrubtly in the third song.
Here's what happened -
You see, I'm mainly a live Gentle Giant collector. I knew a guy in the UK who saw and recorded GG three times. Some years ago, he basically gave me two of his master tapes from GG headline shows he attended in 1973 and 1974, both in Plymouth UK. I digitized both of those and began trading them around to a few people.
Then, a couple years later, the guy finds his third GG tape in his closet. This time, Giant played first on a triple bill. The Groundhogs were the headliners and, in the middle, was this band called Stray, a totally new group to me. The taper recorded all three sets on two 90-minute cassettes. The first tape had GG on side A and Stray on side B. The Groundhogs were on the second tape by themselves. The
taper offered both tapes separately on ebay. Of course, I was mainly interested in the GG / Stray tape and ended up in a bidding war with another guy. Cost me 50 bucks, but I won. As it turns out, unbeknownst to me, I was bidding against a friend of mine. He told me that if he knew it was me, he would've stopped bidding. I coulda
saved 40 bucks! Oh well, at least I got it...
I immediately digitized the Giant set and started trading it around, as I had with with the previous two shows. I remember listening once to the Stray set. It was short and obviously incomplete. Maybe the taper wasn't impressed and shut down his recorder partway through? I remember him telling me the band had some trouble on stage and got in some sort of argument. Maybe that's when he stopped recording, as
no argument appears on the tape.
Anyway, from what I did hear, Stray seemed like a decent hard rock band but, admittedly, not my cup of tea. I stuck the cassette back in a drawer and forgot all about it.
So I come across it again recently and I do a little research on Stray. Turns out they started playing together way back in 1966, developing a decent following among UK hard rock fans, but they never broke into the big time. Apparently, some permutation of the group still tours today. And, in my unscientific research, I haven't come across any other unofficial live recordings of the band from the early days. So that makes this a little more historically significant and now I'm
thinking there may be some collectors out there who would want to hear this recording. If so, here it is at last.
By the way, the Groundhogs cassette also was sold on ebay but I have no idea what ever happened to it after that. Did that ever surface among traders?
LINEAGE: master cassette --> Technics tape deck (azimuth adjusted) --> TDK stand-alone CD burner --> ripped to hard drive with Exact Audio Copy --> encoded to flac level 8 with Trader's Little Helper
rar files packed with a (winrar) recovery record -
links require copy and paste to browser
rapidshare.com:
http://lix.in/-a8e267
http://lix.in/-aa6908
or
http://zwvwzx.link-protector.com
http://zwvwzw.link-protector.com
megaupload:
http://lix.in/-a5ec1d
http://lix.in/-a772be
or
http://zwvzrx.link-protector.com
http://zwvzrw.link-protector.com
Comments welcome.
