Little Feat
1978-07-08
Nakano Plaza Sun Hall
Tokyo, Japan

-Recording Information-
  Source: FM - Little Feat Radio Hour broadcast
 Lineage: FM > Mcas > cdr > wav > restore > flac(lvl8)
Transfer: Nakamichi CR-7A > TASCAM CD-RW750
 Runtime: 89:06

SHN-ID# 121231

Lowell George - guitar, vocals
Paul Barrére - guitar, vocals
Bill Payne - keyboards, vocals
Kenny Gradney - bass, vocals
Richie Hayward - drums, vocals
Sam Clayton - percussion, vocals

CD1 [71:14]
01 ..Skin It Back > (5:02) [fades in]
02 Fat Man in the Bathtub (5:05)
03 Walkin' All Night (4:07) //
04 Rock and Roll Doctor (4:04) //
05 Time Loves a Hero > (4:21)
06 Day or Night (6:25) //
07 Oh Atlanta (4:03) //
08 Day at the Dog Races ^ (12:21) //
09 All That You Dream (5:21)
10 Old Folks Boogie (3:52)
11 Dixie Chicken > (12:13)
12 Tripe Face Boogie (4:15) //

CD2 - Encore [17:51]
13 Willin' > band introduction > (4:21)
14 Don't Bogart That Joint > Willin' (1:40) //
15 Feats Don't Fail Me Now (8:15) //
16 Rocket in My Pocket (3:33)

^ Lowell George out

------------------------------
Editor's Comments:

This is a pretty clean FM broadcast recording and a nice upgrade to the commonly circulating source, as found on the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/lf1978-07-08.shnf). That version has some severe synchronization errors and digital glitches particularly in the second half of the concert. Here is a fresh transfer from an off-air master cassette, recorded and played back on a great cassette deck. 

The usable signal is up to 19 kHz, and no FM pilot tone is present. I think the Little Feat Radio Hour broadcast material was sourced from a radio broadcast. The broadcast is not live-to-air, but from an edited pre-FM reel by Nippon Broadcasting Corporation. During the 1970s, channel inversion and reversal was a common practice of their live concert broadcasts. Whether this was done to foil bootleggers, or to provide stereo widening is uncertain, but such processing splits the soundstage in two, and with the slight FM phase offset of 2 samples, has a sort of overdubbing effect. On the negative side, it also cancels some frequencies and emphasizes others. For this release I inverted and swapped the two channels and virtually eliminated the phase offset.

The edits ("//") shown in the set list are as broadcast by LFRH where much of the applause between songs was removed or voiced-over with commentary. I removed the remaining commentary. Some of the transitions are a little abrupt, and there are a lot of them in the first half of the broadcast, with edits between all but 2 tracks.

There were periodic light clicks throughout the left channel of the first two songs of the encore (tracks 13 and 14). I could not coax any automated processing tools to do what I wanted, so these were edited individually. The reason for the noise in this track was that the gain on these first two tracks of Fragment C were boosted about 10 dB. After removing the clicks, I brought the gain back in line with the rest of the material by cutting it down by 9 dB.

Restoration:
- corrected DC offset errors
- restored clipped peaks
- balanced channels and gain normalized
- swapped and inverted channels (there was interference between the 2 channels)
- shortened long fade-in at start
- removed LFRH commentary
- lightly decrackled and declicked
- phase offset correction: -0.06 ms (right channel trailed by 2-3 samples)
- repaired clicks and pops
- decreased gain of tracks 13 and 14 by 9 dB
- joined fragments and tracked
