Oil Well Bootlegs - RSC CD: Pink Floyd – California Sun Oil Well

Pink Floyd – California Sun
Oil Well – RSC 068 CD

1. Grantchester Meadows 6:37
2. Astronomy Domine 9:26
3. Cymbaline 9:35
4. Atom Heart Mother 21:22
Total duration: 47:00

Note:
All songs by Waters/ Wright/ Mason/ Gilmour unless noted.
~~Live in San Francisco, CA - October 21, 1970 - Vol. 1~~
Recorded live at San Francisco's Fillmore West - April 29, 1970

Lineup:
Nick Mason (drums)
David Gilmour (guitar)
Roger Waters (bass)
Richard Wright (keyboards)

This album is a clone of: "Live At Winterland" CD1 - The Swingin' Pig – TSP-CD-170-2
On the front cover a close up of Rick behind keyboard in some kind of neo-1970ish looking red vinyl or leather jacket with a paper cup and a pack of Marlboros on laying on the top of the keyboard. Border of CD cover is about 1/2 inch of red all around. CD back is plain white with setlist written. CD is plain with song listing and oil wells to the left side and "PINK FLOYD" "CALIFORNIA SUN" written at top. Back cover says "Live in San Francisco, CA - October 21, 1970 - Vol. 1". but this is from the April 29, 1970 show at San Francisco's Fillmore West.

Very plain white packaging, says that it is Vol 1. Gets a little bass distortion from time to time.
This is a very clean recording. If you are looking for a good version of the 1st show on April 29, 1970 this is the one to look for. It is far better than any other I have heard. Less audience noise plus the interaction that Roger has with the audience is left intact. Roger is very communicable with the crowd during this show.

Some years ago, "Oil Well" company bought out "Swingin' Pig Records". Then, several "new" RoIOs appeared, under the "Oil Well" label, but some of them were in fact digital copies of old "Swingin' Pig" RoIOs. Some examples: "Echoes" is a reissue of "One Of These Days", "Green Is The Color" is a reissue of "Amsterdam 69", "Black Wizard" and "White Witch" are a reissue of "Live In Montreux".

Audio quality:

Quality content:

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Live at San Francisco's Fillmore West - April 29, 1970
Recorded on Pink Floyd's third American tour, this show introduced San Francisco to some of the newer material from the Ummagumma LPs, and a taste of things soon to come on the Atom Heart Mother LP, to be released later that year. This San Francisco audience is particularly quiet and attentive, a fact that seems to have facilitated a more intimate, unique and focused performance than other dates on this tour.Before Atom Heart Mother, David Gilmour says "when we're in England, we're making a new album, at the moment, and this thing we're going to play is going to be one side of it." Instruments are tuned, then "

Also we're taking a break when we finish this, it seems to have gone very quickly this evening, maybe we've been playing really fast. Anyway we are, don't go away when we leave the stage we are coing back, it won't be very long. Ready?" Then AHM begins with airplane engine noises.
Back to the Fillmore show on April 29, 1970, the subject of this new release from the folks at Sigma where they revisit one of their earliest titles, Westworld (Sigma 4). The concert has been released many times, the first title I bought was Black Glass (Eclipsed NK-008), much to my disappointment the sound was hidden under a deep layer of hiss but thankfully I was able to upgrade to Live At Winterland (The Swingin’ Pig TSP-CD-170-2) and later Interstellar Encore (Pigs On The Wing OMS002/3) a title I ditched as it was CD-R that was thankfully copied as Pink Pigs Over Fillmore West (Euro Boots EB-30), and finally Westworld (Sigma 4).

What I have always found frustrating about this concert is the lack of real information about the tapes themselves. What is known is that the circulating bootlegs are two source mixes, the soundboard portion many to believe is an Open Air Mic recording, the audience portion being just that, an excellent audience source. Why was the soundboard recorded? Possible radio broadcast? Bill Graham’s people? Who knows, the recording is excellent mono yet sadly incomplete. The audience recording is even more frustrating, first off, is what circulates complete or is the entire concert sitting in someone’s attic, some even believe that the same person is responsible for both, while others believe one got a hold of the other and made the mix of both. I for one would love to hear this concert in the quality captured by the audience tape, certainly the work of someone with really good equipment. The last item with this concert is the channel chirp that plagued latter releases, most attribute it to a faulty reel in its earlier analog days.

Atom Heart Mother review

What is universally known as "the cow disc" came out in October 1970, after a period of feverish activity by the band. The four Pink Floyd seem to fall prey to an uncontrollable creative craving that sometimes leads them to embark on ambitious projects with swinging and never completely convincing results. Among those never completed, the soundtrack of an animated film which they worked for some time in the mid-1970s should be mentioned. Among the at least partially gratifying, the soundtrack of "Zabriskie Point" stands out, which they worked for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the year in Rome, under the direction of Michelangelo Antonioni; a very hard period of work for the band, frustrated by the director who was never fully satisfied with the result, so much so that, at the end of the exhausting work, only three songs were used - one of which was used for the famous villa explosion scene, the other not is that a readjustment of the classic "Careful With That Ax, Eugene". To close the overview of the band's recording activity in that 1970, it should be remembered how Gilmour worked on the production of both albums by ex-Floyd Syd Barrett: the first, "The Madcap Laughs", released at the beginning of the year, which also sees bassist Roger Waters in co-production; the second, "Barrett", released in December, which was also attended by keyboardist Rick Wright.

Pink Floyd's live activity was equally intense. Here it is worth mentioning the date of January 23, 1970 when, for the first time, an embryonic form of the song was presented in concert in Paris which would have transformed over the months into the "Atom Heart Mother" suite which gives the title to the disk. Initially presented with the name of "The Amazing Pudding", the song finds the definitive title casually, on the occasion of its presentation at the famous transmission of John Peel. The starting point was provided by the newspapers of those days which reported a pregnant lady kept alive by an atomic cardiac stimulator.

Initially the song did not include a section with orchestra and choirs. The idea of giving the suite a symphonic shape was also quite random and came to the group before leaving for the United States tour, which was undertaken in April. The Irish composer Ron Geesin was called to work on the orchestrations, to whom the group delivered a demo with rhythmic base and basic lines of keyboards and guitar. But until the band's return to London in late May, Geesin's work remained almost stationary, since the composer had not received any precise indication of the sound direction to be given to the piece. The recording work of the disc, which began in late spring at the Abbey Road studios, was very painful, both because of pressure from EMI (which had foreseen the release of the disc before the summer) and because of the objective difficulty of the band. work with an orchestra and a choir for a total of a hundred elements. Only Wright, within the group, was able to read a score, but his lazy nature did not help him to unravel the impasse.
In the following years, Ron Geesin revealed that he had worked in almost total autonomy in all the orchestrations and that he had serious difficulties in guiding the orchestral ones, all prominent professionals, chosen among the best in England. It seems that, to exhaustion, the conductor of the classical choir, John Aldiss, took matters into his own hands to complete the recording.

A turning point
On the stylistic level, "Atom Heart Mother" is sometimes labeled as a turning point towards a progressive matrix. If it is true that the shape of the suite and the use of symphonic orchestrations are among the characteristic principles of progressive, it is equally true that the affinities between Pink Floyd and this genre, as we are used to codifying it through historical bands like King Crimson, Genesis, Yes etc., end here. Meanwhile, at the voice of the band members themselves, surrounded in those years by an at times almost unsustainable aura of innovators at all costs, "Atom Heart Mother" represented a parenthesis, the beginning and end of an experiment with strong doses of randomness.
In addition, the Pink Floyd's habit of dilating the times of the songs is very antecedent to the record, and even dates back to the mythical performances at the Ufo club, when the band, led by Barrett, used some rock-blues classics as an excuse to digress towards long "psychedelic" experiments.

The same songs of "Atom Heart Mother", which were to represent for the band a long-awaited substantial renewal of the live line-ups, were soon lost on the street. Only the suite of the same name, with all the difficulties that its live re-presentation with choir and orchestra entailed, and "Fat Old Sun", presented in beautiful live versions with ample instrumental tails, remained for some time in the concert schedule. For example, the songs "Echoes" and "One Of These Days" (from the subsequent album "Meddle" from 1971) had a much more fortunate fate, which ideally linked to the path taken with "A Saucerful Of Secrets" from 1968 appeared, together with the classics of the live of "Ummagumma", in 1972 within the film-concert "Pink Floyd At Pompei", sort of summa or compendium of the post-Barrettian phase of the group.
No song from "Atom Heart Mother" was played in the Pompeii concerts, and in the same way it is interesting to underline that no song on the disc appears in the double collection "Echoes" of 2001, which presents the beauty of twenty-seven songs carefully selected by the four members band historians across the discography.

An atypical record in the band's path, but not for this minor, "Atom Heart Mother" aroused enormous impression on its release and is in perspective as perhaps the most ambitious attempt to combine rock and classical music. In this sense, the live performances with orchestra and choirs - the first one dating back to June 27 at the Bath festival - were highly applauded and contributed to further increase the interest of the cultured arts towards the group (think, for example, of the project that shortly thereafter he involved the band in a ballet with the participation of Rudolf Nureyev and choreography by Roland Petit). Even Leonard Bernstein, intrigued by the echo that had the cow disc in America, went to listen to the band live but, ironically, it seems that he was very bored listening to the suite, remaining instead enthusiastic about the rest of the concert.

The album, referring to the vinyl support for which it was conceived at the time, is structured in a facade entirely dedicated to the suite composed collectively by the band supported by Ron Geesin and in a facade where we find three songs written respectively by Waters, Wright and Gilmour and one last long collective track, "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast". This "democratic" approach reminds us of the "Ummagumma" studio album, in which the four elements, including the drummer Mason, were able to give vent to a composition by balancing on their own instrument. The structure with suites on one side and shorter songs on the other was instead taken up in the next "Meddle".