Bill's Basement Tapes | Stevie Wonder

This evening I went to an old fashioned neighborhood block party and had a good time catching up with folks I knew and meeting the ones I didn't know. One of the guys I saw was my friend Bill who is a fellow music nut. The difference is that Bill is an archivist of live music. The guy has hundreds of tapes and thousands of hours of music in his basement.

However, he isn't hording the stuff. He's sharing it with the world via etree and similar sites. The problem is I don't use bit torrent or FLAC files because I'm a bit of a technophobe and they seem complicated to me. That's why it's nice to know Bill because he can give me stuff on CD. Old school style.

He took me through the process of how he records the shows on DAT tape, brings it onto his hard drive, uses Wavelab to clean up the sound, and then about a half-dozen other software packages to prepare the shows for sharing. It was all pretty confusing to me but impressive. He said it takes about two hours to go from having a show on tape to having it ready to be shared.

Here's the cool part, he lent me a few discs of his shows and said he could convert my old bootlegs from indie shows in the 90's to discs (after cleaning up the sound). So, every once in a while, I'm going to try to share a few tracks from Bill's Basement Tapes. The downside is that I only have a cruddy little 100MB EZArchive account for sharing music. So, it'll only be a few tracks here and there but it's still worthwhile.

One of the shows Bill lent me tonight was Stevie Wonder at The Wang Center in Boston from 1995. He had it blaring out the speakers and it sounded great rolling across the lawn; even over the din of kids yelling.


Stevie Wonder | Singed Sealed Delivered, I'm Yours (Live) | Buy
Stevie Wonder | Sir Duke (Live) | Buy

Here's a video of Stevie Wonder performing "Uptight" with The Rolling Stones in 1972: