I was there
Joseph L. Kolb | harris, mn USA | 06/18/2010
(3 out of 5 stars)
"over the decades, i've seen hawkind about 7 times in their various incarnations. this show had the brock/bainbridge/chadwick/davey line up. the performance was excellent as well as the song selections. problem is, the sound is very muddy. this is a fans only release. as popular as first avenue is for shows, their sound system is really bad and how this disc sounds is how the show sounded. no editing was done so "back in the box" is split between the 2 discs. the booklet has the titles and personnel listed and that's it. i don't recommend buying this release unless you're a hawkwind collector. they have dozens of live releases that sound much better."
The Packaging For Minneapolis 1989 Is Gorgeous!
David Lord | Clemons, Iowa United States | 10/08/2009
(3 out of 5 stars)
"The inventive typeface, the Arabic styled art that integrates so well with the space photo on the back and the fifties style pulpish painting on the CD cover; all carry over to the interior booklet and inner back sleeve - even to the two CDs themselves. What a beautiful package.
The arbitrary song breaks are a bit of a problem and start to bring down the number of stars for me. On the first CD there is no track break between Time We Left This World Today and Heads, or between Heads and Time We Left's reprise. Most annoying is the fact that Back In The Box is listed as starting on CD 2 and it does not. The beginning of the song takes up most of the last track on CD 1, the vocals for the song actually begin, and a fadeout follows requiring you to change CDs to hear the rest of the song! Assault And Battery does begin the second to the last track of CD 1, as the liner notes and back cover suggest, but The Golden Void begins awhile before that track ends and the break to the last track actually occurs before it has ended - and then the last track ends with the segue into Back In The Box as noted.
When one does begin listening to CD 2 there is a track split between Back In The Box and Arrival In Utopia, which I appreciate, and again between Arrival In Utopia and the reprise of Back In The Box. Later on, however, Damnation Alley takes a break to give us the first available recording of the unlisted Your Secret's Safe With Me on CD. (An earlier rougher version can now be found on the 'official bootleg' DVD Treworgey 1989 from that July. The sound quality is a bit rougher there as well.) Again, there are no track breaks between Damnation Alley and the unlisted Your Secret's Safe With Me or between Your Secret's Safe and the reprise of Damnation Alley.
The songs themselves are not my favorites (or my favorite versions) but there is some interesting fooling around with technology courtesy of some of Brock's solo work on Church Of Hawkwind. Your Secret's Safe With Me is an interesting reggae precursor to Captain Rizz's Hawkwind In Your Area track that would appear almost a decade later on the In Your Area CD. Xenon Codex had been Hawkwind's most recent studio album and had some great tracks including Lost Chronicles, Sword Of The East and The War I Survived, but Hawkwind only chose to play a bit of the mediocre Heads from that album in concert.
This show was October 4, 1989 at the intimate First Avenue club in Minneapolis. The small boost Hawkwind had gotten from its brief association with The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal seemed to have disipated. Line-up changes had hit the band just before Xenon Codex, drummers had been replaced and more changes were soon to come. To my mind, while Hawkwind toured extensively in the late 80s and early 90s they were casting about musically for direction, only finding it again with Love In Space and their tongue-in-cheek embrace of ET abduction 'culture' in 1995.
Knocking this package down lower to three stars is the sound quality. This does not have the crisp sound of the live tracks of In Your Area, let alone the brilliantly remastered space Ritual Live. Surprisingly, what is muffled are the bass and drums - they sound like they are being played in a barrel! The cymbals, guitars and higher range keyboards do seem crisp and the vocals are clear. I have to wonder if the synthesizers they were using at the time added some kind of electronic hum to the soundboard that just can't be filtered out, as I hear this to a lesser extent on other Hawkwind DVDs and CDs from the era.
It pains me to write a bad review of Hawkwind, as Brock and his coherts are true innovaters that really HAVE reinvented themselves almost completely over at least three times, if not more. So to end this review on a high note - Once again, the packaging is gorgeous! If you are new to Hawkwind immediately grab the new remastered Space Ritual Live. For something rewarding and a little more obscure, check out In Your Area."
Track Listings (8) - Disc #1
