Judas Priest 31 October 1990 Pacific Coliseum Vancouver, BC, Canada Painkiller Tour
2 CDs Audioarchivist Audience Audioarchivist Sony ECM-PC62 Stereo mic in hat > Sony WM D3 Professional Cassette Recording Walkman Lossless 102' C
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CD 1
1. C-Fox concert announcements 2. Blood Red Skies Intro 3. Hell Bent for Leather 4. Grinder 5. The Hellion 6. Electric Eye 7. All Guns Blazing 8. The Sentinel 9. Metal Gods 10. Night Crawler 11. The Ripper 12. Beyond the Realms of Death 13. Riding on the Wind (with drum solo)
CD 2
1. A Touch of Evil 2. Victim of Changes 3. Painkiller 4. The Green Manalishi 5. -Encore- 6. Breaking the Law 7. Living After Midnight 8. You've Got Another Thing Comin'
Taper's notes : Recorded from half-way back and half-way up on the left side (stage right). Upper part of the lower section, I was close enough to have a view and see all the crazy stuff happening everywhere. At times it was like there were 2 shows happening - the band, and the crowd gathering for them! I only had 2 tapes and really wanted to make sure I caught all of Judas Priest, but I tried to record the opening acts Testament and Megadeth. I couldn't get to my seats in time to catch all of Testament, and Megadeth has a missed beginning and nasty tape flip, but I got all of JP...
Halloween Heavy Metal Mayhem! What a crazy show this was. I mean, think about it - metalheads in costume! Hard rock shows always bring out the rowdiest people, but when you add all hallows eve and a bunch of firecrackers to the mix, things could have gotten out of hand really easily! I remember seeing bottle rockets and roman candles getting shot across the whole length of the floor from the stands behind the soundboard in the back, and watching the roadies running around on stage with wet towels and water bottles putting out the little fires that were getting started when the missiles hit the guitar amp stacks and got into the speaker grilles! Lots of little fights in the crowd too, punch outs and scuffles that didn't amount to much. The security was ready for a fight, too, causing a few incidents of their own by mishandling situations...
My walkman was working pretty good at this point, after buying a broken demo unit from The Sony Store they replaced it with a new one, so it was just a few months old. The little ECM-PC62 mic was okay for what it was (small) but gave a bit of a thin sound lacking in bass response. EQ helps to fix this but it also boosts the tape noise underneath. Leif did his best to get the sound a bit closer to a balanced sound without overloading the noisefloor with bass that just isn't there in the first place. His EQ'd CD ready version isn't perfect, but it's less brittle and tinny and brash than the original tape. Grab the HiRes version that's pretty much raw from my master tape if you wanna play with the sound yourself! My seats weren't great for taping, but it's certainly better than blank tape!
I haven't been having much luck lately with doing my own mastering work on shows that I loved, and I have several shows that I recorded that I don't have that much knowledge of (or even interest in... sorry). I work slowly, and only really get at it on things I really like... But, I realize as time goes on that my recordings need to get out to the public, and that I captured quite a few cool things that not many other captures exist from that time. I've been very happy to let LeifH12345 have a go at getting a few of my recordings ready to post after all this time. So, I've been making some tape transfers and sending the files to him for processing. It's great to finally get these things out to people after 3 decades of sitting in a drawer...
I did lower the levels on the big badda boom's from the band's pyro explosions, which basically clipped on my tape! Far louder than the music, they clipped on the raw tape transfer while the music was well below thresholds. They're a little less overwhelming now, but still sound natural. I also played with a few of the most closeby "audience pyro" firecrackers in and around my section popping the mic a little bit too much! You can still hear plenty of stuff blowing up everywhere though so don't worry. It's still a crazy night caught on tape!
I think I may have made a couple of tape to tape copies of this show for a few people way back when. They never did anything with their copies. As well, I think I tried to get the tape digitized back before I knew how to do it, letting a dude I knew with a recording studio who was a major Priest fan do a CDR transfer, but it sucked and he did a rotten job and I lost the CDR's ages ago. So, this recording has (almost) never been heard by anyone for 30 years now! Happy Anniversary!
Big thanks to LeifH for helping me get another garbage tape transfer out the door!
