I’m moving the posting of GNM to Sundays. My Mondays are getting hectic, and this is an easy Sunday-night activity. This week, I’m back to processing bootlegs, and gracious, I have a bunch of them: I have 90 bootlegs sitting on the computer to my left, and most of those aren’t burned off to CD! I probably have another 30-40 bootlegs on CD in the filing cabinet. Yes, I have a problem.

• 3 Feb 2006 [Portland, OR, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy.
• 12 Sep 1998 [Lawrence, KS, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco.
• 24 Mar 1994 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Uncle Tupelo. One of their last shows, and their last one at Lounge Ax.
• 15 Oct 1967 [Detroit, MI, USA] concert bootleg of Cream.

Last week was a couple unexpected CDs joining some bootlegs:

• Tom Brosseau’s What I Mean to Say Is Goodbye. Brosseau has a high, reedy sound to his voice. It’s a sound that takes a bit of getting used to, but I like it, on the whole. I know that this is a re-issue of an early CD in his career, and it shows; too much of the music uses the same chord structures and strum patterns; all the similar criticisms of Derek Webb’s Mockingbird ring true here. Like the Webb, though, this is on the whole a very good disc. It gets four stars from me, and “Wear and Tear” is, to my ears, the highlight of the disc.
• Over the Rhine’s Live from Nowhere, Volume One. This disc is simply lovely: live music lovingly played. I look forward to the succeeding years of this. This disc gets five stars and is, at this point, the best official release I have purchased this year. I cannot say enough about this disc.
• 29 Feb 1992 [Boston, MA, USA] concert bootleg of Uncle Tupelo. This is a good-but-not-great show; only the rendition of “Gun” stands out to me. It’s a solid effort overall, although the first bits of it aren’t great [and to be fair, the tape does cut off the first track]. This gets four stars from me.
• 10 Sep 1998 [Seattle, WA, USA] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith. This is a mediocre recording: not a lot of passion, unfortunately. I give it three stars, with highlights being “Sweet Adeline”, “Bled White”, and “Say Yes”.
• 22 Oct 2005 [Rio de Janeiro, BR] concert bootleg of Arcade Fire. Last week, I called it “almost unlistenable”. Let me revise that to “unlistenable”. One star. Just horrid. Ugh. I left this starred and checked in iTunes for a week, and I shouldn’t have.
• 22 Oct 2005 [Rio de Janeiro, BR] concert bootleg of Wilco. The Wilco taping from the Tim Festival is pretty decent. Nothing really stands out, and nothing truly sucks. The only complaint that I have is that the final encore isn’t that great, but that could be fatigue from doing a world traveling thing. I can’t fault the boys too much for that. It gets three-and-a-half stars from me.
• 17 Nov 2005 [New York, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy. This is a great little bootleg. No track gets less than four stars from me, and “Lost Love”, “Sugar Baby”, “Not for the Season”, “War on War”, and “Heavy Metal Drummer” all get five from me. Four-and-a-half stars. This specific recording is no longer available that I know of, but there is a bootleg of this show on Via Chicago.

As always, I’m generally uninterested in doing B&Ps when you can grab stuff via BitTorrent. That’s why I make links, folks.