CD 1 & 2 : Chicago, IL, September 20th, 2005


Taper's location : front-row of the 300-level (the uppermost level, right in front of the speaker stack)

Taper's Comments:
Decent audience recording from the band's first Chicago show in September. I debated about posting this, but since no source has appeared online for the first night, I thought I would put this up for the completists. It was recorded front-row of the 300-level (the uppermost level, right in front of the speaker stack) so crowd noise is minimal; the fidelity of the recording is pretty good. I was a little disappointed with the sound given where I was sitting - I would probably conservatively give it a 7 on a 10-scale.

There are two ugly warts in this recording:
* My deck was partly unplugged during the first minute or two of "City of Blinding Lights," which caused several loud pops as I went to plug it back in. I tried to minimize the effect (which was really loud before I adjusted it) but it's still noticeable.
* There is about 10 seconds of diginoise on the master during "One." I found this on three separate DAT decks, so there's no way around it.

If anyone has a better source, by all means post. In the meantime, this is as certainly listenable as anything else posted from the second leg.

This show contains the first-ever performance of "The First Time," I believe, and also the first (perhaps only, so far?) acoustic performance of "Walk On."