Follow That Nice Long-Haired Fella Into The Country Warehouse, He's Got Some Goodies For You...

One of my favorite bootlegs of all time, recorded in the Country Warehouse in Rochester, New York November 25 1988, with the title fittingly also having a sort of double meaning, as the shows on this tour with the Patrician Homeboys - multi-string instrumentalist Dan Dugmore and Timothy Schmit on bass and backing vocals - were easily the most 'country' of Zevon's career, with Dugmore adding banjo, steel guitar and dobro to a bunch of songs. Wanna know why this is one of my favorite bootlegs? That's why! Some of the songs here have never sounded like this and would never again, like a banjo-led almost-bluegrass version of "Boom Boom Mancini", a slide-guitar "The Factory", and pedal steel-supported versions of "Carmelita", "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Hasten Down The Wind". A track list heavy on Warren's debut album was of course always going to find favor with me. Zevon used the acoustic country-esque atmosphere to dust off some of the blues covers he did with R.E.M. (minus Michael Stipe) as Hindu Love Gods. I don't think Zevon is a particularly good Blues interpreter, but these are fun enough, and add to the unusual track list.

Fellow friendly neighborhood music blogger Babs shared Flac files that were a definitive upgrade over what I had, though these are still de-Flac-ed, for a couple of reasons. The first: I ran almost everything through Audacity, not for sound, but for presentation. There's two types of thinking with live bootlegs, either leave everything exactly as is - warts and all - or...not. Warts and all meaning long silences, noodling and tuning, etc. etc. If you know me and you know this blog a little bit, you probably have guessed that that's not my way of doing, and the Gene Clark boot from a couple of weeks ago already should have tipped you off: The first order of the day: listenability. The second order of the day:re-listenabibility. Some banter might be fine once, but do you want to hear it two, three, four, five times? 

Now with this bootleg, things are a little different, because Warren is an all-time great banterer, and even if some of his comedy routines - like introducing the band and joking about Dan Dugmore's instruments - are well-rehearsed, they're still worth hearing and rehearing. So except for a bit between Warren and Dugmore that went nowhere I kept all the pertinent banter, which brings me to the second issue I often have with boots, especially ones that were 'commercialised'. The indexed tracks begin with the songs proper, meaning any introductions or related banter will be attached to the preceding track, which isn't a problem when you listen to the whole thing, but not if you hit the shuffle or random function on your music listening device, or if you want to use a track on a compilation somewhere, 'cause then you would have the track proper and then some talk introducing a track that never comes. 

So I attached all the intros from the preceding tracks to their rightful place in front of the song concerned, so you can listen to this at random, extract highlights or do whatever the hell you want with it, without the need to work around restrictions or firing up Audacity. Without those pesky minutes of dead space, it's also a breezy listen at a little over 70 minutes. 

So, off into the Country Warehouse with y'all, for a rather unique Warren Zevon experience...