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adorup's Collection

R.E.M.   12/13/1985

Park Center, Charlotte, NC
Media FLAC
J-Card Comment R.E.M.
Last Show of the Reconstruction Tour
13 December 1985
Park Center
Charlotte, NC

TDK SA 90 -> MOTU 828MkII -> PowerBook G4 (AlBook) 1.25 -> flacs -> You

0c Crowd
1a Feeling Gravitys Intro
1 Feeling Gravitys Pull
2 Harborcoat
3 Pills
3b intro
04 Maps And Legends
5 Sitting Still
6 Fall On Me
7 Green Grow The Rushes
7b Gringos
8 Hyena
9 So. Central Rain
10 Swan Swan H
11 Ghost Riders In The Sky
12 Can't Get There From Here
12b Mike thanks the Crew
13 Seven Chinese Brothers
14 Dream (All I Have To Do Is)
14b Caroline
15 Auctioneer (Another Engine)
15b Story of Kensey
16 Old Man Kensey
17 Gardening At Night
18 9-9

lost:
Pretty Persuasion
Little America
encore 1:
Second Guessing
Time After Time (Annelise)
See No Evil (w/The Minutemen)
encore 2:
ust A Touch
Driver 8
Life And How To Live It


Notes:

"This is our last night; very seldom do I get to explain songs in such a manner as this."
There is another show claimed for the next night, in Augusta, but I choose to believe that this was actually the final show of the tour. My reason for believing this is three-fold. One is the quote from Michael Stipe which opens these comments. Another is that they appended "Re" in the obvious spot to the "End of Construction" road sign they pulled onstage at the close of the evening's performance. The third is that I seem to recall it being mentioned as the final show of the tour in issue #27 of The Bob which reviewed the show (although I cannot verify that as the Bob in question is in storage).

My best friend and I attended this show the evening after our final exams our first semester in college. We borrowed a portable recorder from a friend for obvious reasons and came home from the show with a tape so poor that I never got my own copy of his tape of the encores and he never acquired a copy of my tape of the body of the show (being poor college students at the time we each recycled a cassette). As you will notice upon listening, the recording was so poor that when I asked to borrow his tape a couple of years (or months? it seemed a long time when I was in college) later to finally copy it, he was surprised by the request and explained that he'd again recycled the cassette - he considered the recording unlistenable. Perhaps the best indication of the quality of this recording is to note that I'd recorded the Hib-Tone single after the tape flip of side one and it, mildly crackly though it is, sounds dramatically better than what precedes.

I don't know the source of the online setlist for this show - it may come from The Bob or it may come from another recording of the show; if there is another recording extant, it nearly certainly sounds better. As I recall it two decades after my sole visit, the Park Center is an auditorium, with a long open floor and a balcony of seats around the edge. We very foolishly thought our recording purposes would be best served if we were seated and if our seats were directly facing the stage, which meant we were at the rear of the long, wide, open space with its hard(wood?) floors and high ceiling. To our ears, the sound was much better than when I saw them at the Omni in Atlanta on the Green tour, but to the recorder we'd borrowed the sound was boomy and muddy. To the cheap recorder with no high end which we'd borrowed, that is. To the cheap recorder which didn't completely erase the existing recording on the left channel of side two and which also didn't record the left channel of side two at full volume (perhaps this was an alignment issue?). Actually, there is too much high end on the recording; apparently the microphone didn't pick up anything past the upper mids while the recorder itself recording plenty of sound above that point; I decided to leave the hiss in the recording rather than use a high pass filter, though.

I recommend the purchase of the aforementioned issue of The Bob, available at http://www.thebobmagazine.com/, as it contains a great article on R.E.M. including a review of the show from someone writing about it hours or days later rather than decades. It also includes a very cool flexi of R.E.M. performing Femme Fatale.

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Owned by adorup · Last Updated May 23, 2023