Yes, baby
I been drinkin'
And I shouldn't come by, I know
But I found myself in trouble, darlin'
And I had nowhere else to go
Got some whiskey
from the barman
Got some cocaine
from a friend
I just had to keep on movin'
Til I was back in your arms again
I'm guilty
baby I'm guilty
And I'll be guilty
all the rest
of my life
How come I never do
what I'm supposed to do?
How come nothin' that I try to do
ever turns out right?
You know
you know how it is with me baby
You know I just can't stand myself
It takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I'm somebody else
Randy Newman
Universal Amphitheatre
Universal City
Los Angeles, California
8.18.1978
01 tuning
02 Naked Man
03 Little Criminals
04 band introductions
05 Birmingham
06 Jolly Coppers On Parade
07 Short People
08 Political Science
09 Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear
10 Sail Away
11 Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein In America
12 God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)
13 Linda
14 I Think It's Going to Rain Today
15 Rider In the Rain
16 You Can Leave Your Hat On
17 Louisiana 1927
18 A Wedding In Cherokee County
19 Kingfish
20 Baltimore
21 Rednecks
22 Lonely At the Top
23 Guilty
24 Mama Told Me Not to Come
Total time: 1:11:30
Randy Newman – vocals & piano
Fred Tackett - guitar
Willie Weeks - bass
Bill Payne - synthesizers
Michael McDonald – Fender Rhodes & vocals
Andy Newmark - drums
Bobby LaKind – congas & percussion
Ted Templeman - percussion & vocals
sounds like a 1st or 2nd gen cassette off-air capture of a mono FM or TV broadcast;
repaired, remastered and denoised by EN, November 2018
404 MB FLAC here
Randy Newman, born this day in 1943, is 75, so I dug out this -- perhaps the only bootleg of him performing with a full band -- and tried to improve on its admittedly flawed sonics. The spectral indicates an FM broadcast of unknown capture, but judging from the days I spent in the headphones with it, I'd guess it's a gen or two from a master cassette of some indeterminate origin.
It gets tempting on these FMs, where there's nothing above 15k anyway, to break out the demonic Noise Reduction, but I avoid that like The Plague so none was used here. Honestly it's not so much hissy but buzzy, with amplifier noises drifting about and maybe a microhint of tape flutter on the piano.
The performance is so tremendous -- and the between-song patter from The Maestro so hilarious -- that none of this really matters, but it is what it is until the coveted pre-FM of whatever broadcast this comes from surfaces.
Heck, it could even be from some lost TV thing, who knows? This is all we have, so I made some (IMO) necessary modifications trying to get it sounding less dull, and to get it to leap from the speakers a little more without taking the noise profile into the upper ionosphere.
Anyway it'll never be perfect until that mythical pre-broadcast source surfaces, but I hope what I've done here -- this is probably my favorite circulating show of Randy's and I wanted it to sound at least measurably closer to its best -- is satisfying and made this set sound a bit more upfront and center as we celebrate the man's big day here.
Enjoy, and that goes for all you rednecks and short people too!--J.
