Stevie Wonder January 31st, 1974 London, England @ Rainbow Theatre SBD > ? > "Funkafied Rainbow" Big 'Fro Bootleg (BF-001/2) CD > EAC > FLAC > CDR Disc One: 1: Intro + Contusion [17:49] 2: Higher Ground [5:52] 3: (Mary Wants To Be A) Superwoman [3:12] 4: To Know You Is To Love You [7:11] 5: Signed, Sealed, Delivered [3:03] 6: Visions [9:58] This show is often labeled 4/4 or 7/4/1973 - Brighton, UK, but it has also circulated as 2/24/1974 at the London Rainbow. Carefully listening to track 13 reveals the truth when Stevie, thanking his audience for coming, mentions "the Rainbow". Disc Two: 1: Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing [4:48] 2: Living For The City [10:58] 3: You Are The Sunshine of My Life [12:00] 4: Superstition [7:28] 5: Encore (improvised!) [6:05] ------- July 16th, 1975 Bremen, Germany @ Musikladen TV/SBD > ? > CDR 6: intro jam 7: Contusion 8: Higher Ground 9: Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing 10: I Can See the Sun in Late December 11: He's Misstra Know-It-All 12: Living for the City 13: Superstition Someone's comments on the Rainbow bootleg: I had been collecting bootlegs since late 1971 when I stumbled across this strange Led Zeppelin album for $2.99 at the record store I bought most of my records at as a kid. The album was called Live On Blueberry Hill. Ever since that day I was addicted to bootlegs. Over the years I amassed what I have been told by various bootleggers was (at one point) one of the largest collections of bootlegs by somebody not directly involved in the manufacturing of them. Unfortunately that changed a few times over the past two decades when first my entire "H through L" section got ripped off in 1984 - which was especially sad as I had a near complete Zep vinyl and a complete Hendrix vinyl collection of which the Hendirix included 5 items which allegedly did not exist :-( Parts of my collection (by now mostly the cd's) got ripped off AGAIN in the late 1990's and 2000. Bizarrely enough the late 1990's rip off included YET AGAIN most of my Zep collection! In any case I got briefly involved with supplying tapes for bootleg cd's in the late 1990's. After about 2 years of it I started to get really frustrated by the constant requests for "Stones, Beatles, Zep" etc. The stuff I really wanted to see released was not getting done. Most importantly the ONE thing I personally as a collector wanted was not getting issued by anybody: a great Sly & The Family Stone bootleg. All there was were an ancient (but great) LP entitled "Greatest Hits Live" that I bought in 1972, the Dallas Pop Festival LP and CD and an absolutely godawful thing called "Everything You Ever Wanted To Hear By Sly & The Family Stone But Were Afraid To Ask", which to this day remains one of the worst and most completely useless bootlegs issued by anyone, anywhere, ever. Over the years interest in seeing a cd's worth of unreleased material by Sly together that honored his genious instead of insulting it became a small personal obsession. In the seemingly endless process I also realized that there was an insultingly glaring hole in the bootleg market: Basically unless your last name happened to be Hendrix or Kravitz and you were black, CD bootleggers were going to roundly ignore you. I kept asking my Japanese people who I sent tapes to why this was and the answer was always a variation of "It won't sell", "No market for this" etc. I refused to take no for an answer and just pestered the hell out of every last one of them. Finally I stumbled across an employee of one of them who was a soul fanatic and who was as disgusted with the caucasian bent of the bootleg cd market as I was - and he started nagging his boss trying to convince him that such a thing WAS a viable proposition and not a money pit. And he was also as hot for Sly as I was. He agreed that my idea for a bootleg cd label devoted exclusively to Soul, Funk and R&B was something worth trying for at least 3 or 4 releases for starters. BUT: The first release must be a Stevie Wonder and I have to get the lead out of my ass and get that Sly completed and ready for a 2nd release. The only thing (at the time) I had by Stevie was a slight upgrade of the Rainbow concert that had seen a previous release in the very early 1990's on the European Chameleon label as "First Rainbow" and "Second Rainbow". Personally I never felt that this show was as earth shattering etc as some people seem to think it is, and I always felt the Chameleon issue was really flat sounding. What I had was a little better and something I could work with. In any case while this was not exactly what I would have preferred as the first release for "my" label, the Japanese were all over me about it and so I tweaked the tapes I had as best I could and broadened the stereo image as much as possible in order to give it some more punch and depth. I had nothing at all to do with the artwork beyond the Big 'Fro logo idea and the title of the cd - that was 100% the Japanese's work.