The Meters
Showboat Lounge
Metarie, Louisiana
7.25.1977

01 No More Okey Doke
02 My Name Up In Lights
03 Be My Lady
04 Look-A-Py-Py/Let Me Have It All
05 They All Asked for You
06 Funkify Your Life

Total time: 46:24

Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste - drums
Willie West - vocals
Leo Nocentelli - guitar & vocals
David Batiste Sr. - keyboards & vocals
George Porter Jr. - bass & vocals
Mario DeMaurier - guitar & vocals

sounds like an off-air FM master reel; taped from WNOE-FM in New Orleans
remastered and restored by EN, Dec. 2018

original notes from Freezer:
It's the Meters WITHOUT any Neville participation, as Art and Cyril had already left to be the Neville Brothers Band. Its a very short-lived edition of the Meters (early on billing themselves as The FUNKY Meters....years before the 'official' date for the use of that name....)

notes on the remaster:
This ridiculous tape is one of those things that makes archival music what it can be: unrecorded lineup of a seminal band, an incredible capture from a legendary radio station (even before the sonic issues I'll explain about)... and Holy Toledo! the performance is just well the hell out into the Funkosphere of several higher dimensions. The big drawback with this tape was always the earcrushing, unbelievably intense clipping issues... there were literally thousands of megaclips in the 46 minutes and change that comprise this 1st Degree Assault With Intent To Funk. That mess was just evaporating the lower end of the sound and generally squishing it all up as if the whole band was trying to break through some invisible ceiling or somesuch. Once I remediated these issues with a healthy dose of the Sound Forge 11 Clipped Peak Restoration tool, the ambiance and audio spectrum really opened up into a gorgeous and transparent capture, with tons of funky detail that just wasn't audible when it languished in its previous, clipfest form. Then there was the first track... the bass began badly buried and the engineer didn't really get the bottom presence into the music until halfway through the song. I used the Sound Forge Graphic EQ and Graphic Dynamics tools to bring out the lows until the point where that presence entered, and worked to smooth this transition out so the surge of bass when it hits wouldn't be quite so obvious and disconcerting.

There was also quite a bit of channel fluctuation, in terms of passages where one channel would become slightly lower than the other over the course of a song, so I balanced all this out to try and make this 3/4th of an hour of asswhipping all it can possibly be, unless of course a pre-FM source mystically appears from the Sacred Holodeck of Pre-Broadcast Sources. I shifted all the track markers to begin with actual music and made a cute, sorta Nawlins-themed cover thumbnail (font: "Metermiser"), and of course I titled and tagged the files. A set of new fingerprints, this message I'm typing, and the most arduous task later -- which turned out to be figuring out who exactly is playing in this short-lived version of The Meters -- and here it is to Funk you to Death. This, in dual honor of both George Porter Jr.'s 71st birthday a couple of days ago and the 70th birthday of perhaps the greatest and most important drummer of our lifetimes -- the man they call Ziggy -- today.

Like I said, this is one of the craziest and best recorded 1970s Meters shows and is perhaps the very first recorded instance the distinction "Funky" started to get added to the name to distinguish it from the original group, several of whom at this point had just recently split to form another, equally as unbelievable and essential group: The Neville Brothers. Anyway, play it loud at your New Year's Eve parties, and of course the best of b'day wishes to both George Porter and Zigaboo!--EN, 12/2018

lineage: FLACs from another tracker > WAV via DB Poweramp > Sound Forge 11 remediations and remasterizzations > FLAC 8 via DB Poweramp > DIME > funkifying your life
