The new month begins with what would have been the 70th birthday of one of the formative, bedrock artists of all times.
He struggled with drink-n-drugs for much of his too-brief life, but that didn't stop him from helping to invent much of what we now take for granted as the musical world around us.
He is often termed the Godfather of Rap, but he hated that assignment and wasn't all that fond of Rap either, which he found too heavy on empty posturing and too light on insight.
If anyone could ever be termed an American griot, it would be he. If you listened to every song and spoken-word piece he ever created back to back, you'd never get to the part where he compromised his values and his message.
One time 20 years ago, I was depressed and ready to end my life, but couldn't because my favorite record of his was making its CD debut in weeks and I had to hang on some kind of way.
His songs transmit eternal, common sense concepts and truths our colonized minds wouldn't really be prepared for if we all were to live to be 10,000.
Every musician-activist since he emerged at the start of the 1970s owes him the debt of their pulpit, simply because no one crossed the boundaries of the musical and political quite like he did, and no one likely will ever again if the CIA-controlled music "industry" has anything to say on the subject.
For me, there are two pillar poets of the music of our age, who emerged from the literary firmament to set unreachably lofty standards for the merging of word, sound and power.
One is Leonard Cohen. The other is Gil Scott-Heron, born this day in 1949.
If not for the apocalyptic allure of the freebase pipe, he might be still here to celebrate, and who can even speculate upon what he might say or sing about our current, rapidly dehumanizing human condition? But celebrate we must.
And to do so in the appropriate style, we have what the 100 Greatest Bootlegs site has at #58 on their all-time hit parade, itself surely one of the most essential unauthorized live recordings ever made.
The story of this one is a technological tale of legend in its own right, and has this two hours of unalloyed musical truthtelling getting captured by one of the first prototype digital PCM recorders to feature 16/48 resolution, made by Denon in 1977.
As usual, I tweaked its blemishes -- there were 270 separate instances of digital clipping that I manually removed, for instance -- to place it into a state virtually indistinguishable from an official live thing and worthy of its well-documented and multivarious blessings. ***NOTE*** see below for explanation
Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson
Bottom Line
New York City, New York USA
8.20.1977
01 GSH introduces the concert
02 New Deal
03 Gumbé
04 Racetrack In France/band introductions
05 95 South (All of the Places We've Been)
06 Hello Sunday, Hello Road
07 It's Your World
08 Home Is Where the Hatred Is
09 We Almost Lost Detroit
10 Vildgolia (Deaf, Dumb & Blind)
11 Winter In America
12 Under the Hammer
13 The Bottle
14 Johannesburg
Total time: 1:53:51
disc break goes after Track 08
Gil Scott-Heron - electric piano & vocals
Brian Jackson - piano, electric piano, clavinet, synthesizers, flute & vocals
Allan Barnes - flute, tenor saxophone, synthesizer & vocals
Reggie Brisbane - drums & percussion
Siggie Dillard - bass & vocals
Tony Duncanson - timbales, percussion, djembe & vocals
Delbert Taylor - trumpet & electric piano (on "95 South," & "Home Is Where the Hatred Is")
Barnett Williams - djembe, congas & vocals
256/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault
spectral analysis is essentially lossless to 20 kHz, making this as close as we may ever get to a preFM source of this unbelievable concert
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, repaired, tracked & slightly remastered by EN, November 2025/direct link
***EDIT*** The esteemed Pervfesser Goody instigated me streaming this from the superior Bill's Boots source and remasterizing it, so I've replaced the old crappy version with the new, better one!-EN, Nov. 2025
I'll be right back at it tomorrow with another big tribute to another artist without whose output life would in no way be worth living, but right now you gotta grab this definitive edition of Gil's most beloved bootleg and play it as loud as you need to overthrow the existing, corrupt and unsustainable order in honor of his birthday. And no, your inner Revolution need not be televised.--J.
4.1.1949 - 5.27.2011
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