Month: October 2020

Since the middle of 2019, we’ve been recording shows at Byron’s Bar, Pomeroy, IA and a few other locations nearer by (Byron’s is 65 miles away from us). Byron’s is a gem of a listening room, to which many performers have attested. Ever since yours truly discovered the place in August 2018, I’ve sat there thinking: somebody ought to be archiving this stuff. By the following July I’d acquired a little Zoom recorder and a little bit of stuff to go with it and already had the editing software since we already edit samples of records we’re selling here on our site. Since then I’ve missed a show or several due to the inevitable opposing circumstances that can come along, but I’ve recorded everything I’ve heard, which has to be something in the neighborhood of thirty-six shows. I’m a Deadhead and that’s what we do. A couple of artists have requested that I not distribute those, but otherwise they usually go to Archive.org, which is a sharing site for all kinds of stuff.

A guy has to be prepared for somebody telling him “no” when he asks if the recording thing is ok. There are various good reasons for that, and this past Sunday, November 25, 2000, Maurice Vaughn did say “no” when I asked if recording was ok.

That kind of pulls the rug out from under my feet if I define myself as “the guy that’s there to do that”, but after all, in the first place, we only posted set lists on Facebook, and it was still possible to do that.

So, first of all, here’s the set list:
Set 1
01 Travelin Man (Vaughn)
02 Garbage Man Blues (Vaughn)
03 Baby What You Want Me To Do (Jimmy Reed)
04 A Computer Took My Job (Vaughn)
05 Sitting In The Park/I Do Love You (Billy Stewart)
06 I Got The Blues (John Watkins)
07 The Feeling Is Gone (Bobby Blue Bland)
08 Sweet Home Chicago (Robert Johnson)

Set 2
01 I’m So Proud (Impressions)
02 If I Hadn’t Been High (Emory Williams Jr.)
03 Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke)
04 I Just Want To Make Love To You (Muddy Waters)
05 Don’t Take My Monkey (John Watkins)
06 As The Years Go Passing By (Fenton Robinson)
07 Keep On Sleepin’ (Vaughn)
08 I Don’t Care (Vaughn)
09 Kansas City (Wilbert Harrison)
10 Going To New York (Jimmy Reed)
11 It Serves You Right To Suffer (John Lee Hooker)
12 Mustang Sally (Mack Rice)

Set 3
01 Ooh Baby Baby (Smokey Robinson)
02 I Got My Mojo Working (Preston Foster)
03 Help Me (Rice Miller)
04 Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday’s Just As Bad) (T-Bone Walker)
05 Money (That’s What I Want) (Barry Gordy & James Bradford

Maurice Vaughn seemed quite interested in the fact that there was a guy taking notes, which has happened a time or two before (notably when Jon Dee Graham played one time), and he was enthusiastic about helping me with the correct titles and attributions. That’s fun. Especially if you’re me, and you’re note-taking about a genre with which you’re not particularly familiar and artists’ names and songs’ titles can shift over the years. Because I wasn’t concentrating on the recording thing, I could think about what I was hearing and I came to the realization that both Vaughn and John Watkins really knew the historical stuff and the fabric of the pieces that they were playing.

That’s all on a ten dollar ticket.

Maurice said it was ok to do a track or two but not a whole show. I think he thought I was using some million dollar camera and producing some gorgeous HD thing, so I shot no photos or video at all, and got to a nearby cell phone recording which should remain anonymous or else it will appear that I did it, and maybe I did.

So I gave it the same primitive treatment that I’ve used on all the Byron’s stuff – simple low-tech fan production with mostly free software, things you can do at home with Windows or whatever.

This isn’t in the spirit of piracy. It’s archival – somebody ought to be keeping track of this stuff….