George Harrison - 1974-11-12 Los Angeles, California The Forum

[dognose]

George Harrison only went on tour twice as a solo artist, in 1974 and 1992. Up until recently, I had avoided any recordings from his 1974 tour, because I'd heard it was a musical disappointment, and because I'd heard there were no good bootleg recordings at the soundboard level. (There's never been an official album from the tour.) I'd glad to say that I was wrong on both accounts. This is a soundboard recording that's very nice in terms of sound quality. And I think people who listen this this will reassess the idea that the tour was a bust in terms of musical performance.


The posting of this album wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the always excellent music editing work of Captain Acid. I saw that he'd found a soundboard of most of one of the concerts from the tour (the Los Angeles Forum), and that's what made me consider posting something from this tour. I'm using Captain Acid's remixing work for all the songs sourced to the Forum show. He sprinkled his usual magic dust on the recording to make it sound even better.

Unfortunately, the soundboard recording ended before the show did. So Captain Acid used an audience recording from a Seattle, Washington on November 4, 1974 for the last five songs. I listened to that portion and wasn't so impressed, because even Captain Acid can only do so much with poor source material.

So I looked around for a better source for those remaining songs, and found it with a concert in Fort Worth, Texas, on November 22, 1974. Like the Seattle show, it was just an audience bootleg, but it was a better recording, for whatever reason. The main problem with it was the lead vocals were too low in the mix, but I used the UVR5 audio editing program to fix that. Furthermore, I took extra care with the banter between songs for the Fort Worth tracks, using the Enhanced Speech program by Adobe to add clarity to the words. The result was that portion now sounds nearly as good as a typical soundboard. I doubt you'll notice the difference between the two sources.

However, there were additional problems with the Forum section of the show. Three songs were incomplete: "Cheparte" was only missing about the last 30 seconds, "Hari's On Tour [Express]" was missing only the very beginning, and "Tom Cat" had over half missing. I used the Fort Worth tracks to fill in the missing portions. So that's why those songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. Additionally, one song in the Forum section, "Sound Stage of Mind," was missing altogether, so I used the Fort Worth version for that. Finally, the first ten seconds or so of "Sue Me, Sue You Blues" sounded dull and muddy. Luckily, that spot was an instrumental bit that was repeated later in the song, so I patched in the better audio. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in the title too.