22 February 2013 (Day 53) - Archive.org

One of the great things about the internet is how we can now access so many live performances by acts from an incredibly wide period of time.  For example, I was looking at the SugarMegs site the other day and was staggered to find a number of shows from Melbourne including The Rolling Stones at Kooyong 40 years and a few days ago and the monumental Neil Young with Crazy Horse/ The International Harvesters shows at Festival Hall from 1985.  This is something that some  bands have well and truly commercialised, enabling fans of acts such as Pearl Jam, The Who, Metallica and The Pixies to obtain recordings of shows that they’ve attended as a form of audio souvenir.

But the forerunner to all of this is probably the Archive.org site.  This is an American non-profit internet archive that seeks to preserve many forms of audio visual material online for free distribution and downloading.  Included in the site is a live music archive where recordings of performances for many acts have been preserved.  Nothing is permitted to be played on the site without the permission of the act and recordings can be uploaded by anyone.  As such quality can be variable because the source material could have come from someone’s recordable Walkman, a cassette recording of a radio broadcast or from the act’s soundboard.

Provided permission has been granted any act can have their performances uploaded leading to the site being dominated by acts I know nothing about.  But there is an impressive range of name acts available if you’re prepared to browse the list including Warren Zevon, The Dream Syndicate, Ween, Ryan Adams, Little Feat, the Smashing Pumpkins and the John Butler Trio.  It is also the home to the Grateful Dead archive of a staggering 9,106 shows.  Here are three performances I was given copies of and decided to play over the course of the day:

(143) Camper Van Beethoven – 9.30 Club Washington D.C 12 October 2004

This is an excellent sounding audience recording for a show around the time of the release of their slightly disappointing New Roman Times album.  Fortunately the better tracks from that album got into the set along with plenty of CVB classics to keep up my interest including Tania, Take The Skinheads Bowling, their cover of Status Quo’s Pictures Of Matchstick Men and rounding things off, Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive.  

(144) Fugazi – Electric Factory Philadelphia 5 March 1997

One of the finest bands, if not THE finest, to have emerged from the Washington DC punk scene, Fugazi were a legendary band live.  This would have been one of the last gigs performed prior to the end of the tour supporting the Red Medicine album and provides a fine representation of their catalogue and the power of their live performance.   The only drawback for me is that this show lacks many of my favourite Fugazi numbers.   There are only 18 Fugazi gigs on Archive.org because the band is systematically live recordings they made of 800 of the approx. 1000 gigs they recorded in their career.  The ones released to date are available for download for a suggested fee of $5.

(145) Sleater-Kinney - 9.30 Club Washington D.C 3 August 2006

This is a radio broadcast but I suspect this was never on the Archive.org page but rather from the npr (National Public Radio) site.  Nonetheless this is a powerful performance from the all girl punk three piece with songs from their entire history.  This wasn’t altogether surprising as this turned out to be one of their final shows.