ZZ Top
Hec Edmundson Pavilion
Seattle, WA
December 5, 1973
JEMS Full Track Mono Masters
Recording Gear: Sony ECM-22P Microphone > Tandberg Model 11 Portable Reel to Reel
JEMS 2021 Transfer: Mono Master reel > Otari MX-5050 w/full track mono head stack > Sound Devices USBPre 2 capture (24/96) > iZotope RX and Ozone > MBIT+ resample to 1644 > xACT 2.50 > FLAC
01 Thunderbird
02 (Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree
03 Chevrolet
04 Waitin' For The Bus
06 Jesus Just Left Chicago
06 Gonna Ride Away (?)
07 Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers
08 I Just Got Back From Baby's
09 Rattlesnake Shake
10 La Grange
11 Let's Go Get Stoned + Mellow Down Easy
Known Faults:
-None
Stan Gutoski and the Tale of the Tandberg
If you follow JEMS releases, you know we lost our founding partner Stan Gutoski early last year. Stan was to Seattle what Mike Millard was to Los Angeles--the guy who taped every important show.
Stan started recording a year before Mike did and both made a key decision to buy what they believed to be the best tape recorder available at the time to do the job right. For Mike, that was the Nakamichi 550 in 1975. For Stan in 1972, it was a Tandberg Model 11 portable, full-track mono reel to reel. Both decks were capable of high-quality recording, especially for the era, and were a step above the decks used by many early tapers.
If you don't know about the Tandberg, it was a remarkable piece of gear in its day, not only capable of recording at 3-3/4 and 7-1/2 IPS, but in full-track mono. I won't do the math, but compared to a cassette, the surface area of tape capturing the music is orders of magnitude higher, which is why so many of Stan's Tandberg masters from the likes of David Bowie, Elton John, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen are considered by some audience-recording classics. The Tandberg required 10(!) D-cel batteries to operate, is roughly the size of a compact typewriter and weighs around ten pounds. Imagine sneaking that into a show and your respect for what Stan accomplished only grows.
Stan's original Tandberg deck is still functioning, but after years of making transfers on it, I noticed that our Model 11 introduced a lot of noise in playback. Not surprising considering the age of the unit (closing in on 50 years old), but an issue just the same.
In recent years I used software to help address the noise Tandberg playback introduced, but I wanted a better solution. The obvious answer would be to transfer the tapes on a different reel to reel deck. But because the Tandberg recorded in relatively uncommon full-track mono, transfers done on any standard deck, be it 1/4 or 1/2-track, would not capture the full fidelity of the master tapes.
As luck would have it, I was taking another reel to reel deck in for repair at the one place in Southern California that still specializes in them and has for decades, Adrian Proaudio Services in Canoga Park. I was talking to Adrian about the Tandberg issue and my primary reel to reel, which is an Otari MX-5050. He said, "Why don't you get a full-track mono head stack for the Otari." Before I even took a moment to ponder why I had never thought of that, Adrian pulled out a new, dead-stock, full-track mono head unit that I could plug and play in my Otari. Needless to say, I bought it on the spot.
The Otari full-track mono playback was a revelation. The noisiness I had come to expect from any Tandberg playback was gone. The fidelity was everything I had always hoped we could extract from Stan's master recordings.
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In the last couple of years, we've revisited some of Stan's best Seattle recordings by making new transfers from the master reels, shows like Led Zeppelin '73, George Harrison '74 and Pink Floyd '75. In the process, I did an audit of all Tandberg master reels released by JEMS on DIME and compared that to the physical tapes in the JEMS Archive, an exercise I had inexplicably never undertaken.
You can probably guess where this is going (in part because I revisit this narrative thread often): turns out there are at least two dozen Tandberg masters that don't appear to have been torrented or posted. Several of these may not have circulated in any form, even in the analog trading era. I suspect some haven't been played since the day after the show--if at all.
Stan would have been the first to admit he devoted 95% of his energy to capturing these shows and only 5% to listening to them. His legacy of over 100 Tandberg recordings made between 1972-1979 is a truly remarkable archive that, delightfully, has not been fully tapped.
Not Black Oak Arkansas
The first step in my Tandberg tapes audit was to go through all the reels on the shelf and write down which ones were not on the list I had compiled of Stan's tapes released on DIME. As noted above there were many, including a two-tape set marked Black Oak Arkansas/Leon Russell December 1975.
A few months ago I transferred both reels and did a little research about Russell performances in an attempt to confirm the date and venue. It was then that I realized the show was not from 1975 but 1973, making it one of Stan's earliest recordings.
Last week as I was selecting the next Tandberg transfer to release, I settled on the Black Oak Arkansas opening set for Leon Russell, thinking that recordings of the band from this era were surely few and far between. I'm not at all familiar with BOA, but as I prepped the recording, I thought a couple of the tunes sounded familiar, but didn't think much of it.
Unlike the glorious 1974 Elton John Tandberg master we released recently, this recording is murkier and fuzzier, most likely owing to Stan's taping position, which doesn't sound close to the PA, and to the venue, which is the old basketball fieldhouse on the University of Washington campus, never known for its acoustics.
I did my best to improve the sound through mastering and sent it on to our pal Professor Goody for pitch assessment. He sent it back with the following note:
"This is actually Tres Hombres era ZZ Top. Either that, or Jim Dandy stole their entire set... lol
Anyway, was this a show that also included Black Oak Arkansas? You may want to look around for a tape labeled ZZ Top from this date - they may have switched 'em by accident.
...fuckin' Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers...
And I'm sure you'll be glad to know that you have a vintage ZZ show on the way to the peoples..."
As I wrote above about Stan, there are many concerts he recorded that he never played back. Surely he was there to see Leon Russell and decided to record the opening act. All these years he thought that opener was Black Oak Arkansas, wrote it down as such, and until I transferred the tape and Goody heard it, no one knew Stan had recorded ZZ Top.
While the fidelity of this one doesn't match Stan's best Tandberg efforts, the scarcity of ZZ Top recordings from this era surely outweighs the average quality. Samples provided.
So there you have it, a previously unknown, Tres Hombres-era, Tandberg master of ZZ Top in Seattle, the only time JEMS recorded them. Or is it?
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Stan was one of the kindest and humblest people I ever met. He took me on as an apprentice in the mid-'80s and taught me everything I know about taping. He also gave me access to his archive, and the act of doing so was the beginning of JEMS, as we began to treat our collective recordings as a single entity.
This tribute video captures the sweetness of Stan and provides a glimpse of the great man I was fortunate enough to call my friend for 35 years. If you love this hobby and have ten minutes to spare, I'd strongly encourage you to watch it.
Stan video: https://vimeo.com/503750464/493aa4f757
Huge thanks this week to Professor Goody for identifying this recording as ZZ Top when I was too daft to realize the songs sounded familiar to me because I had heard them on the radio hundreds of times. His tune up helped make this sound its best. Our own mjk5510 helped out with set-list research and post-production during this busy time of year. We couldn't do it without him
https://mega.nz/file/KzoBzTzD#3K6WAF1Q_llv3bDiONuFYlxnfWUjP5gEBaEpI44VzPA
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