HW04 - Student Union Auditorium, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
6th April 1974

Sound editor's notes, from Andrew Skeoch

The concert

This recording is a complete Selling England show from the magnificent second US SE tour of early 1974. The recording documents Genesis at their mature best, playing some of their most evocative music, and features a nice version of Horizons. 

This recording documents the complete concert, from a minute before the first melotron chord of Watcher, to the final applause after Supper's Ready. The show is performed impeccably. It is interesting to note the audience's extended applause after The Musical Box. I suspect the band left the stage after this number, leaving Steve to do his solo - a gesture that was interpreted by the audience as the end of the show, and thus cause for much foot stomping and hollering. I have this picture of Phil having to come back on and rescue him!

The taper of this concert gives a running commentary to a friend throughout the show, which may be annoying, amusing or entertaining, depending upon your point of view. Certainly some of his comments give an interesting sense of what is happening on stage. His conversation at the beginning is particularly informative -  and "totally shredded" has now entered my vocabulary :-)

The Source

Master of 1st gen sources of this show are unknown. There are 2 CDR versions of this show in circulation (that I know of):

Source 1: This set has Watcher to Horizons on disc 1, and Epping Forest to Supper's Ready on disc 2, plus bonus tracks from 13th June 1977 (these are poor quality (high gen) soundboard recordings from the Palais des Sports, Paris recordings that lead to 'Seconds Out'). Tracks are indexed at the songs only, not the intros as well. This version sounds muffled, has a noticable hum throughout, and is pitched about a half tone sharp. 

Source 2: This version comes from what is accredited as being a 2nd gen source, and has the same disc tracklist as above, but with Peter's stories seperately indexed. This version sounds better than source 1, but has quite a bit of hiss, although the highs are clean. It is pitched about a quarter tone flat. 

Instead of either of these sources, I have chosen to remaster from a tape of this show, which is marked '3rd gen'. Whilst the actual generation of this tape is unconfirmed, two things are known. 

Firstly, it is the tape that was used to make the source 1 CDR version above, although listeing to it, you wouldn't guess it. By the owner's own admission, the transfer of his source tape to digital left a bit to be desired. 

Secondly, this '3rd gen' tape sounds much better than the Source 2  '2nd gen' CDR. Although the highs are similarly clear, the hiss is less, and the mids show the tape to come from a lower gen source. There is much more detail and depth on the tape. Also the lows on the tape are richer and fuller than on the CDR. 

Of the actual recording; the master tape appears to run from Watcher through to "To see reflected there..." in Firth of Fifth, thus one side of 90min tape. The second side seems to stop only 17 mins later, in the middle of The Musical Box. The last minute of this section of the recording has increasingly loud mechanical bumps indicating an ending tape side. However this edit may also be a result of the copying, as the last tape side (which appears complete) runs for 46 mins until the end of the concert. 

Thus there are only two apparent edits in the recording, but both result in the omition of short sections of the concert. To fill these gaps I have edited in sections from the Detroit 16th April tape, from ten days later. 

There was a third edit at the conclusion to the introduction to Supper's Ready, but this came from a copying edit, and, whilst it was missing from my tape, I was able to include the missing section from CDR source 2. If you listen closely, you can hear the slight degredation in quality resulting from using this source. 

The Restoration

The primary problem with this recording, and the greatest challenge for me in restoring it, is immediately evident to anyone who knows this recording - microphone bumps!!  The taper must have been hand holding his microphone, but it sounds as though he's eating his dinner off it. There are low bass bumps all the way through the recording. On several occasions (at the beginning of the loud instrumental in Musical Box (5:55), and also during Suppers Ready (at 2:32)) he actually taps out rhythms on it!!  And on a few occasions, just for good measure, the taper blows on the mic.  

Getting these bumps and scratches etc out, took over 500 edits. I've approached this not by cut editing, which would have removed sections of the music, but by using a denoising program. In what I call 'inverted' mode, with the 'audition noise' button in, DINR will remove sounds above a threshold, rather than below it, as normal with noise floor attenuation. Thus in many cases I was able to set the music as the threshold, and remove the bump at frequencies were it was louder than the music. This technique works remarkably well, although sometimes you can hear a slight dropout, simply because there is no music left under a hefty bump. In other cases, where the music is louder and more complex, and the mic fumbling quieter, the bumps were not loud enough to isolate and remove, so you'll hear a few of those moments still remaining. If you are listening on a good stereo, you may also notice a few occasions during Peter's intros where the noise floor goes a bit 'digitally' - these are probably the scars left after bouts of mic fumbling were removed. 

So having removed extraneous noises and bass rumble, the next task was to clean up the treble. This was achieved with only 6Db of broadband noise removal, which is quite modest, thanks to a clean source tape. 

The second significant issue with this recording is that the treble contains significant harmonic distortion. There are times when Phil's cymblals become a wall of hard, 'fizzy' treble, with little definition. I eventually settled on an equalisation curve which attenuated the worst of this, but as it was a 'quality not quantity' issue, there was little I could do to totally remove it. The choice was either correctly balanced treble with distortion evident in places, or muffled and still distorted. 

So if you find the top end a bit brash in places, sorry, but its on the source. Be reassured, the final mastering has smoothed some of this and revealed more definition. If you have a copy of source 2, it may seem that the treble is smoother, but this is an audio illusion created by the hiss which does have a smooth white noise texture. Remove it and the fizzy treble is revealed. 

Finally, this is a mono recording. I have used early reflections to open up the stereo stage a little. 

                          ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes for HW04, Toledo Ohio, 6th April 1974,
from Mike Sirofchuck, who attended the concert the night after, at the Agora Ballroom, Columbus Ohio.

On April 7, 1974, my college roommate Doug Abbuhl and I, set off from the little town of Athens Ohio, and headed for the Agora Theatre in Columbus to see a band we'd read about in Melody Maker; Genesis.  We really wanted to see them, yet we had never heard their music.

Even though it was a 90 minute drive, we managed to arrive at the venue three hours before the show in order to be sure and get good seats. While we were waiting outside the theater, a scraggly, heavily-medicated fan regaled us with descriptions of Genesis's songs, that were in no way related to what we eventually heard that evening (or any other evening, for that matter). One thing was for sure though - this guy wanted to hear 'The Return of the Giant Hogweed'.  Unfortunately, he was one tour too late.  He may have been disappointed, but we were not.

As we stood in the early spring Ohio chill outside the theater on High Street in downtown Columbus, five bundled figures approached us and asked in very un-Midwestern accents if the doors were open.  One guy was tall and rangy and another was really short and had a most bizarre haircut; we chatted amiably with them about the cold for a couple of minutes while they tried to get in to do their sound check. Eventually they went around back to find a stage entrance.  So now we had met the band in person, all that remained was to hear them!

When the doors opened an hour before the show, there were four of us waiting to get in - being early had really paid off! We grabbed seats at the first row of tables, about fifty feet from the stage; close enough for a great view and far enough back for great sound.  

Finally, the lights went down, the mellotron swelled with the opening strains of 'Watcher of the Skies', and a caped figure with bat-winged head and fluorescent eyes appeared in black light.  Four ghostly figures in white were seated at their instruments, totally unlike any stage arrangement I had ever seen.

The lights came up after 'Watcher' while Phil reminded us that it was 8: 15 on a Sunday Night.  Lots of tuning of guitars and mellotrons while Peter told the story to introduce 'Dancing With the Moonlit Knight'.  He was fussing with his 'armor' which didn't seem to be fitting all that well and he looked a bit self-conscious as well.

A concise rendering of the remainder of the show based on the existing poor recording of this Columbus concert, and even worse memory:

Peter told a little story, they played 'The Cinema Show' and then went straight into 'I Know What I Like'. A story of water and then 'Firth of Fifth', followed by the story of Henry which introduces 'The Musical Box' - this song received the strongest ovation up to this point.  Phil then stepped out from behind the drums to sing 'More Fool Me' with Michael on guitar accompanying him.  'The Battle of Epping Forest' was next, then Peter makes some cryptic remarks concerning 'totally rehearsed episodes with Geoff', before relating the classic tale of old Michael and the worms which is, of course, the intro to 'Supper's Ready'.  On this evening, he and Phil sang the words to 'Jerusalem' rather than whistle the tune.  I can't remember if there was an encore, but the crowd was so small that I suspect there wasn't.  

Never the less, Doug and I were newly converted Genesis freaks. I now know the set list we heard that evening, but at the time EVERY SINGLE SONG WAS NEW TO US!!  Can you even remember the first time you heard various Genesis songs? From the plaintive cry of 'Moonlit Knight' to the grand march of 'Apocalypse in 9/8' to Phil's rendition of 'More Fool Me', I was inescapably hooked as a Genesis fan.  I remember that we kept saying to each other "which song is the Musical Box?", as it was the song most often mentioned in articles, and we were not disappointed when we finally heard it.  

But for me, the most memorable passage, the part of the show I have relived most often over the years, is the instrumental section from 'Cinema Show', when Peter and Steve left the stage and Mike, Phil, and Tony soared through that piece. I was listening to what I still believe is one of the greatest seven minutes of prog every written.

Writing this little essay, listening to that godawful Columbus tape and reliving that night, gives me great pleasure.  I realize that I've said very little about the actual concert - it was a mostly impressionistic experience for me and my words are inadequate to describe it.  The band probably made mistakes and played some songs a little differently than they did at other gigs, and perhaps Peter's stories had a few unique details - I suspect the 'Geoff' episode is one.  What I do know is that it was a superb show in every aspect - absurd, humorous stories and masterful progressive music from one of the tightest live bands I've ever seen.

Hard to believe that the crowd that night was only a hundred or so, and that in a few years, Genesis would be filling stadiums as they moved in a more 'pop' direction.

I am looking forward to the Hogweed remaster of the Toledo, Ohio, April 6th show.  I know you can never 'go home again' as Thomas Wolfe said, but I hope you can experience some of the pleasure I'll get from listening to this excellent recording from the 'Selling England By the Pound' tour.  I suggest that you try to approach it with 'new' ears, as if you were hearing the music for the very first time.

Oh, and we returned to Columbus in November to see 'The Lamb', but that's another story for a another time.

Mike Sirofchuck, Kodiak, Alaska.   7 March 2002