U2unes - U2 bootlegs for your iPod | 1982-02-11 New Orleans "Riverboat President" Soundboard Silver CD

Sunday, July 13th 2008

1982-02-11 New Orleans "Riverboat President" Soundboard Silver CD07/13/2008 08:52 AM

October has received perhaps the least amount of attention from U2unes in it's three years with only three shows from that tour appearing here. Unlike the Lovetown tour, it has nothing to do with a dearth of quality recordings. Indeed, the October tour provides us with a wealth of excellent soundboard, broadcast and audience recordings, and I think it's time to balance things out a bit. So I hope you like material from October because it's what you're going to get for the next couple weeks.

I had a rare problem selecting this week's bootleg. Normally, I try to find something good in a mountain of okey-dokey-ness. The proverbial diamond. While digging through my October tour archive, the problem was sorting through a mountain of diamonds for the one I would be most excited about out of many that amaze me. In the end, I whipped up a list of over a dozen recordings, blindfolded my oldest boy, and told him to just touch the screen at random. After wiping off the smear he left on the monitor (I didn't think that through very well), I found "Riverboat President" for this week. Pretty scientific, huh?

Let me start with the technical difficulties. The first track, "Gloria", has some noise and drop-outs in the right channel. That disappears after the start of the second track. After that, you are left with clear sound for what is very nearly a studio-quality performance, unless you count a minor drop during "I Will Follow". All instruments and vocals are perfectly clear. The audience really only shows up between tracks and does not interfere with the music at all; it almost seems as if whoever was working the soundboard had a mic to pick up the audience and did an admirable job turning that mic on and off at the best times. All things considered, it's an impressive show made unique by being perhaps the only U2 concert performed on a boat. The silver CD included two tracks at the end from a gig in London, and I kept them in here for you to enjoy. You can use the link in the box at the upper right, or you can simply CLICK HERE to grab the torrent. And, yes, the Red Rocks show is still available. Wow.

Oh yeah, my wife and I are expecting.

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