(CD & LP, Owsley Stanley Foundation, 2017)
Presumably everyone who knows anything about American music knows something about Doc Watson (1923-2012). If they don’t, they should. Blind from the age of two, he was self-taught on the guitar and became one of the great masters of folk/ bluegrass/Americana. He won 7 Grammys and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award – quite an accomplishment for any musician, much less a blind one. His influence on numerous other musicians was amazing, as is recounted in this album’s accompanying liner notes.
Owsley Stanley was a famous (infamous?) San Francisco counter-culture figure and audio engineer, responsible for many recordings of the Grateful Dead. As a concert sound engineer he would often record live concerts of different bands, which he called his “sonic journal.” This practice resulted in an fantastic musical trove of some 1300+ live concerts, including those of many of the greatest groups of the 1960’s and 70’s. The Owsley Stanley Foundation was formed after his death in 2011, to bring at least some of these recordings to the public.
The album under consideration here was the Foundation’s first product, recorded by Owsley over 5 performances of Doc & Merle Watson in 1974, at the Boarding House in San Francisco. Owsley apparently knew what he was doing at his job, and the sound quality on this and his other recordings, while not being the absolute last word in sonic perfection, was very good indeed. And the Foundation has taken that sound he recorded and transferred it with obvious care and skill into this production. The sound quality of both the CD set and the LPs is excellent.
Doc and his son Merle are in great form here, with both their pickin’ and Doc’s vocals. The songs vary from the obscure to more well-known, the latter including many standards as “Wabash Cannonball,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Poor Boy Blues,” and one of Doc’s ‘signature’ tunes, “Tennessee Stud.”
Both versions, the 7 CD box set and the 2 LPs, are currently available online. (I see only the LP at Acoustic Sounds and only the CD on the Foundation website.) As you might guess, these versions are not the same. The CDs are a fairly complete record of the concerts. As well as the pretty much all the songs you get the whole experience – side remarks and jokes, count-ins, discussions of which songs to play in what key, audience reactions, all of it. Doc and Merle seem to materialize in the room, and you are there...
The CDs are great, but in purely sonic terms (did you see this coming?) the LPs are better – all analog production, half-speed mastering, 45 RMP speed, on 180-gram vinyl. The catch is that this is NOT the complete concerts, but a collection of excerpted songs. Some of the best songs, mind you, but not nearly the whole experience. But all the ones chosen for the LPs are excellent.
This album has sufficient musical and audiophile cred that there is also a 2-reel tape version done by The Tape Project, which I have not had the pleasure of hearing but have no doubt would raise the sonic bar even higher.
Not familiar with Doc’s music and not sure you’d really want to play 7 CDs or pop for the $37 or so for the 2 LPs? Try one or two of his other albums first – there are 40+ to choose from, and there is good stuff on all of them I am familiar with... which is more than half of them. I often come across different ones in used bins, in folk or country sections.
The Owsley Foundation has since produced a number of other albums from the same source, including ones by the Allman Brothers, the Chieftains, and more. I have one by Johnny Cash that is also very good. Google the Foundation if you are interested.