Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Magic Minstrel (Of The Dawn) and Terry's Magic fingers

http://www.corfid.com/vbb/showthread...+minstrel+show
was a thread started by a "young stranger" to highlight the unreleased song Magic Minstrel Show
and in my response at
http://www.corfid.com/vbb/showpost.p...97&postcount=6
I said in part

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnfowles (Post 162597)

Yes I have now heard this extreme rarity in a February 1983 concert bootleg

That bootleg had come to me via a torrent distribution listed on dimeadozen.org as a set of great if flawed high quality lossless (FLAC format ) files from a gentleman named Den Greeney and soon thereafter some kind soul uploaded the complete concert to sugarmegs but although I cannot readily find it I am sure it was announced here too. Unfortunately either the uploader (who I now understand was apparently not Den) or the website converted the set of individual song files to an all in one single low quality wma (Windows Media Audio) format file sampled at the abysmally low rate of only 40 KBPS for completeness's sake the sugarmegs streaming version (which IMHO sounds far better than it has any right to) is at:-
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/alpha/g.html
click on "g" for gordon not "l" for lightfoot then scroll down (past several bazillion Grateful Dead bootlegs) to to find
View SetList Download GordonLightfoot1983-02-17OperaHouseSanFranciscoCA.asx

if you then click that view setlist link you will see a listing of 16 items on 2 CDs plus an alleged/unlikely 4 encores
and it includes a comment as originally made in Den Greeney's initial torrent listing
" Note:
11.cut short.
This tape has a few Anomalies but not bad"
on the torrent page there was a most useful comment made by "nivekissor" one of the users of the original FLAC torrent who said:-

thanks again Den.

Here is the set list from what I could figure out:

{CD1}
01. Ghosts of Cape Horn
02. Old Dan's Records
03. Seven Island Suite
03a. Seven Island Suite continued
04. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
05. 14 Karet Gold
06. In My Fashion
07. Shadows
08. Magic Minstral Show
09. Broken Dreams

{CD2}
10. Knotty Pine
11. Biscuit City
12. Someone to Believe In
13. Someone to Believe In (duplicated) ??? Seems to be picked up at a different spot than the previous one
14. Forgive Me Lord
15. Salute (A Lot More Livin' to Do)
16. Hangdog Hotel Room

Encores:
17. Race Among the Ruins
18. All the Lovely Ladies
19. Spanish Moss
20. If You Could Read My Mind

Another regular Lightfoot fan on dime axeman517 chimed in
"Not to mention an unreleased song!

By the way this torrent fits on one CD."

Den Greeney then revised his torrent announcement to include nivekissor's setlist but the info file that you get with the torrent and the sugarmegs setlist both still show only the track or flac number and no song titles and insist on splitting the concert unnecessarily onto a pair of CDs
I myself replied to the torrent saying
"yes well the anamolies are just strange volume variations or no sound glitches.
Not too noticeable but mildly irritating other anomolies include the fact that track 1 is actually two separate songs Ghosts of Cale Horn then non segueing into Minstrel Of The Dawn. but both tracks 19 and 20 are 2 song medleys
19.Spanish Moss/The Last Time Ever I Saw Her Face.
20.If You Could Read My Mind/Don Quixote"
On sugarmegs if you right click the download link and "Save Target As" you could then download the complete concert recording as a single 22.8 MB wma file.

I have to say that Den Greeney deserves a huge round of applause for making this concert available at all even though what he has given us is a superb mess!!
I have to wonder how one man with one recorder could possibly record one song twice(whilst it is not unknown for Gord to perform a song twice in one concert the only occasion I know of was at Massey Hall a few years back when Carefree Highway got repeated allegedly because they were taping the concert for a potential live album and the first take of CH was not good enough!!) (If you believe that you'll believe anything!!!)
In this case the two tracks 12 and 13 (Someone to Believe In) sound virtually identical to me
the foreshortened Biscuit City hardly notices since the recording here is in fact significantly longer than the final album cut anyway
two more serious issues are
1 the recording of TWOTEF presented here runs for rather less than half of the full album and usual concert version length
I have not determined which verses are omitted but I did notice that the poor cook never appears
and
2 the plendid performance of the sublime Seven Island Suite is in two parts but unfortunetly part two is at a different volume level and appears to be monoaural so it cannot be simply tacked onto part one
Although talbot10/Bill Hall kindly offerred to sort out the mess for me I fancied getting to grips with Audacity myself using the three major faults in this recording
as examples to be described in one of my world class tutorials
I have to say that repeatedly replaying the "Minstrel Of The Dawn " performance whilst trying to remove four short pieces of silence from the recording I was overhelmed by Terry's fantastic guitar riff.
Last year and soon after I heard it I was able to tell Terry himself how much I was enjoying it and asked him why he no longer included it . He muttered some reply to the effect that Gord axed it to keep the time down. A real shame in my opinion as it is Truly Magical and ranks up there with several other instrumental breaks that you wish would never end
you can now see the results of my tutorial labours at:-

http://tutorials.fileave.com/audacity/
I now have a set of 22 fettled files and intend uploading them to a file sharing website shortly
but the sad news of Terry's passing made me realise that the MOTD track would make a most fitting tribute to his memory
So I will concentrate on uploading that track first

OK done right click this link then "Save Target As" to download a 192 KBPS mp3 of about 4MB
http://johnfowles.org.uk/LIGHTFOOT/E...The%20Dawn.mp3
the riff is not very long it begins at 1:41 and lasts for only about 25 glorious seconds long so it is a great shame that Terry was not allowed to include it on other occasions

　