[Slowhand] Paddington Dominos Fillmore set

[Bryan Reid]

Luke wrote:

"...what's the deal with the 10/23 *early* show soundboard?"

"I know Bill Levenson has said only the late shows were recorded for 
possible release. I'd suspect *if* the early shows exist they are from some
type of tape made by Bill Graham."

Tracks from the early show on 10/23/70 have circulated for years - for
example, some of them are on one of the Substance bootleg sets. I have been
researching this topic for a number of years. My current understanding is
that the decision up-front was that they would tape both late shows in their
entirety to form the selection pool for a live album. The first half of the
early show on 10/23/70 was taped to allow Eddie Kramer (the recording
engineer) and Tom Dowd (I'm still trying to figure the amount of his
involvement with this project) to listen to the tapes and make decisions
about how they were going to set recording levels, etc for both of the late
shows. Apparently, Atlantic had a very tough time EQing and particularly
balancing the tapes used to make the Live Cream LPs because they were taped
in different locations, different days, different recording levels, etc,
etc, and the lesson was learned from that experience, leading to the
decision to make the early show tape, listen to it (quickly in this case),
make final decisions about recording levels, settings, etc, and then once
they were set not to touch the soundboard again during the recording of both
nights. While I have not documented this to my complete satisfaction, this
does make sense and it also explains why no soundboard tapes exist from the
early show on 10/24/70.

The 10/23/70 early show tracks are not from any of Bill Graham's two-tracks,
in my opinion. The sound quality is way too good and the mix is much too
complex for a two-track hooked up to a mixing board. I have a number of
recordings of other artists that are sourced from Graham's tapes (a number
of the KSAN boots, for example) and there's no comparison to what's on the
Paddington release. These are as good as the legit recording releases.

~Bryan~