9 years ago tonight I saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor (again!) at the Warsaw in Brooklyn. Jackie-o Motherfucker opened. Although the setlist wasn’t as good as the first night of the band’s two-night stay at the club, it did include a great rendition of “The Dead Flag Blues (outro)”. During the encore, members of the band left the stage to walk through the crowd playing their instruments, which added a unique element you don’t see at a lot of shows.
I don’t remember if it was the first night (April 3rd) or the second night (April 4th) when I got up the courage to ask the enterprising fellow who set up stereo microphones on each side of the stage if he wouldn’t mind burning a CD copy of the show for me when he had transferred it. This was before the days of the Live Music Archive on Archive.org, and before websites like MediaFire or MegaUpload. People who wanted to hear live concert recordings actually had to work to obtain them! I had to send the guy blank CDs and a self-addressed and stamped return envelope. So the next time you kinds complain about how your fiber-optic cable connection only downloads at 3 megabytes per second, remember the plight of the late ’90s early ’00s music fan. We had to work for our bootleg collections.
Most of which are on CDs, the majority of which have rotted or oxidized during the last ten years. Some timeless format THAT is! So, at least in regards to modern bootlegs, thank God for hard drives, which can only become corrupted or die, causing aggravation over the loss of hundreds of gigabytes of your music as well as your archive of nude photos chicks have sent you through the years.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
April 4th, 2003
Warsaw; Brooklyn, NY
MediaFire DL Link
01. Monheim
02. Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls
03. Albanian
04. 9-15-00
05. Motherfucker = Redeemer
06. The Dead Flag Blues (outro)
