Friday, March 16, 2012

Sleep - 1/30/1994 Live at the Limelight NY, NY


1) From Beyond
2) Dopesmoker
3) The Druid

This is one of the shows from the 1994 Hawkwind tour and a pretty good bootleg from the time. The audio is very clear and you get a good idea of what they sounded like live. The tone alone from Pike's Green's is thunderous!

'From Beyond' is slow and its like Al, Matt and Chris all just wanted to soak up that thick tone of the Matamps! It takes about 5 minutes from the start of the song to get into the lyrics, which is fine for me. If there were a perfect time to listen to this bootleg, it would be right after waking up. Starts slow and gets you nodding your head. After five minutes you chill hard and spend the next half hour drinking coffee and getting ready to chill equally hard for the rest of the day.

'Dopesmoker' is the early version heard on a few other bootlegs and its 22-minutes long and awesome here. It's still strange to me that the song went through such a transformation before they committed it to tape as this version sounds like its was almost done - if not totally there.

The show ends with a great version of 'The Druid', a version more reminicent of the Holy Mountain recording than the Vol. 2 one. It's a clear and powerful bootleg of Sleep on the fabled Hawkwind tour, a must-get for any fan of their live work.