But SWS generously shares some insights into what went into this pull, via a comment at the Archive fileset, and they are so valuable for the historical record that I wanted to reproduce them here. Thank you, Sean Webber-Small and all the tapers, including
Marcus Buick and
Tom Hughes, good ol' Campolindo buddies and members in good standing of the elite Bay Area taper community of the day, who are namechecked here.
This was the first year since the 1980's that there was no Greek and Frost shows, which was a bummer. Fortunately Uncle Bill booked the band into Cal Expo. It was not the Greek, but it was good.
For me, these shows were stressful, but that was somewhat normal. I always felt the pressure of making the best recording at the show. It was not as much of an ego thing as much as it was that I believed I was capturing "the record" for the show. This was especially true when I knew that none of my Schoeps / Digital posse was going to be there. And that was the case for Cal Expo in 1990.
The stress and planning for these shows started the day mail order was announced. I had just had knee surgery and knew I was going to be on crutches in June. Worse, I needed to plan for who was going to help as the show was general admission and I wanted to run spaced omi-directional capsules which would require managing a large territory. I would need a plan and of course help. While I might have owned the gear, positioned the mics and hit play/record, good recordings were a 100% team effort. And I needed a team!
For me, the key to making a good recording always seems to come down down to a few key things:
- Having the right gear for the application.
- Placing the microphones in the right spot to get the best balanced sound in the venue.
- Controlling the people around the microphones so that talking and extraneous noise is not heard or only minimally heard on the recording.
From my knowledge of the venue, basically an open field, Schoeps MK2s spaced omni-directional capsules were my first choice. I would be using them with my Doug Oade built microphone power supply and a relatively new recording device: a DAT. Sometime in 1989 the PCM crew made the jump to using DATs. At these gig's I was using the Panasonic SV250.
Location, location, location.... From my show experience and listening pleasure, I always wanted to be as close to the Front of House console as possible. If you think about it, the band's audio engineer, Dan Healy, is mixing first and foremost for himself. Is he making it sound good in the entire venue, sure. But the nature of mixing a room has it that the sound is naturally best where the engineer is standing. My goal: get in front of, but as close to Dan as possible without making it too easy for security to come in and get us. As a reminder, although taping in 1990 was allowed, it was only allowed BEHIND the front of house console. Recording in front of the console was a big No No and as such, put us at risk of being thrown out every time we recorded there. Risky business every show for me.
For spaced omni's I would need two areas (blankets), one for each mic between 8' and 12 ' apart - with each mic being equidistant from the stage. Today I would do this with a laser measure, but in 1990, not an option. So I had to triangulate using the front of house console and the side grandstands. More "feel" than exact science.
To pull this off I would need 4 to 6 people around each microphone and stand and two to three blankets. That's roughly ten people and two mic stands to coordinate and manage.
The bad news was that I was on crutches - which, was also the good news as I was able to enter the venue early with the blankets, the gear and a helper. We laid out our spot and waited untill friends and people sympathetic to our recording arrived.
As I was always trying to figure out how to make a better recording, I decided to try and move the microphones from closer to 8' on the 8th, 10' on the 9th and 12' on the 10th. I know the notes on this say the mics were spread at 8', but I just checked my notes and this night we were closer to 9.5'.
While I hate to leave people out that helped at the show, and there were many - I need to special thanks a couple of peeps. First and foremost, my helper extraordinaire Cindy R. Calling her a helper is not quite right. These days I would call her a co-producer or associate producer. She helped in the planning, standing in line, getting friends over to help stand near the mics and telling them all to be quiet. I should probably mentioned she also put up with my crazy "taper" idiosyncrasies - and I had many. Thanks Cindy R! I also remember our friend Marc T. was also there. He was there with B&K 4011's in the middle of our spaced omni's. Also there an of huge help was Marcus B. and Tom - my old roomies! Thanks Dudes.
The recordings for all three nights turned out pretty fine. I would say some of our finest. So fine in fact, a friend of shared them with his pal who was tight with Dan Healy. The next thing I know he had digital soundboards of all three nights! Of course the SB's became the "goto" recordings for the shows for a while. But upon further review from the officials in the booth, these recordings get me closer to what it was like being there on those warm summer nights in 1990.
On the 9th, I can still remember Garcia rocking back and forth during lovelight looking offstage at someone, playing his heart out with an energy that filled us all up.
It was good.