Thin Lizzy - 1976-05-14 - Detroit, MI (FM/FLAC)

(FM broadcast FLAC)

Thin Lizzy 
Ford Auditorium 
Detroit, MI 
May 14, 1976 
WABX-FM Broadcast 
JEMS Master 

JEMS 2017 Transfer: master cassettes recorded live off-air > Nakamichi CR-7A azimuth-adjusted playback > Sound Devices USBPre2 > Audacity 2.0 (24/96 capture to .wav) > iZotope RX and Ozone (16/44) > Peak Pro XT (edit / index) > xACT 2.37 > FLAC 

Phil Lynott - bass, lead vocals 
Brian Downey - drums 
Scott Gorham - guitar, vocals 
Brian Robertson - guitar, vocals 

01 Jailbreak 
02 It's Only Money 
03 Emerald 
04 The Boys Are Back In Town 
05 Still In Love With You 
06 Warrior 
07 Rosalie 
08 Suicide 
09 Sha La La 
10 Baby Drives Me Crazy 
11 Me And The Boys 

Known Faults: Last minute of “Me And The Boys” patched from Live In Rock City bootleg. 

Another excavation from the newly relocated JEMS Archive is not one but two masters of Thin Lizzy’s 1976 Ford Auditorium show, broadcast live on WABX in the Motor City. Jared lived in Detroit at the time and surely recorded one of the tapes himself. I presume he obtained the second master because his first cuts about five minutes early. His was a 60-minute cassette; the second is a 120. 

The broadcast is a well-traveled document of the band in the prime of their career, perhaps best known by the bootleg title Live In Rock City. That release utilized an off-air recording at least a couple generations removed from a master and suffers from FM noise issues perhaps related to station tuning. 

For this release, we composited the best of Jared’s two recordings, augmenting where needed to fill in gaps and upgrade particular songs. We also left some of the on-air deejay chatter intact which is missing on the bootleg. 

Jared’s cassette masters offer a material upgrade of the broadcast, though still not quite perfect. To my ears, overall sound quality improves a bit after the first couple of songs. If Live In Rock City was locked in 80% of the way, Jared’s is closer to 95% but still has a touch of noise on the margins and vocal sibilance that may have been there in the broadcast no matter what. However, the whole performance now sounds substantially better than the circulating version as you can hear in the samples below. I was also able to remove a considerable amount of the feedback in the opening track, “Jailbreak,” that’s in the broadcast; modern software makes it relatively easy to remove such defects. 

The only thing Jared’s tapes were missing was the very end of “Me And The Boys” which has been patched in from the Live In Rock City source. 

The 1976 'Jailbreak' tour was the epitome of a hard working band finally breaking out. It officially began on March 5th at Sheffield University headlining 29 shows in 31 days ending with a show at the New Victoria Theatre in London on April 4th. After a two week break, the band landed stateside hopscotching between headlining and supporting at least eight different bands (Aerosmith, The Tubes, Be Bop Deluxe, Journey, Rush, Golden Earring, Slade and Nazareth).