Buffalo Springfield - The Salty Cellar, Huntington Beach, CA, August 11 and 12, 1967

Alas! It's a drag that no live Buffalo Springfield album has ever been released. I think they're a great band, and it's said they put on a killer live show. Even the bootlegs that exist are very few, and generally suffer from poor sound quality. Almost none of them are worth listening to more than once, in my opinion.

But this bootleg is a very big exception. It's an audience recording. There are no good soundboards of the band, except for their 1967 Monterey Pop Festival performance (officially released as part of a box set for that concert), but that's less than 20 minutes long and Neil Young wasn't there. This is the best bootleg of them by a mile. It turns out that some fan asked the band if they could set up a reel-to-reel recorder right on the stage, and they were granted permission. So, while it's not a soundboard, it's far better than the usual audience bootlegs of that era.

The one disappointment about the concert though is that Neil Young isn't on much of it. He had a habit of quitting the band and rejoining. (His above-mentioned Monterey Pop Festival absence is another example of that.) The August 11, 1967 concert happens to have taken place during one of the many times he'd quit. Young was replaced by guitarist Doug Hastings for this show.

Still, hearing the band without Young has some silver linings. It means more chances for everyone else in the band to shine, especially the singers and songwriters Stephen Stills and Richie Furay.  One even gets to hear Stills sing Young's "Mr. Soul," which he never did on record.

I've looked over the set lists of the band, and the vast majority of the time, they played a short set as an opening act. So we're lucky to get an unusually long performance by them. (The recording is an hour and 16 minutes long.) They played two sets, and "Bluebird" was the end of the first set.

There's a lot of fun talking between songs. It's clear the band members are having a good time. There also are some interesting song selections. "Nobody's Fool" is a Richie Furay song that was never recorded by the band. It would later appear on Poco's first album. And other than this concert, there are no recordings of the band playing Wilson Pickett's classic soul hit "In the Midnight Hour," with a rare lead vocal by drummer Dewey Martin.

I've edited down some of the dead air between songs. Especially in the second set, there was very little talking between songs, but a fair amount of boring guitar tuning. I got rid of most of that. I didn't remove any instances of them actually talking.

Ironically, Neil Young rejoined the band very next day, August 12th, and they played another concert at the same venue with him.About a week after I first posted this album, I discovered that songs that appear to come from that second evening: "Go and Say Goodbye," Mr. Soul," and "Bluebird." Thus I've added them to the very end. Even though they're all duplicates of songs earlier on this album, I feel it's worth it having both versions, due to the rarity of good live recordings by this band, as well as the presence of Young. We know for sure Young is there on those three songs, because he can be heard talking between songs, and he also sings (especially on "Mr. Soul") and plays lead guitar some.

The good news is these three extra songs also have very good sound quality. I'm not entirely sure if they're really from that evening, since they've been posted with various competing claims of location and date, but the mere fact that they sound so good is strong evidence, because virtually all other live recordings from the band sound noticeably worse.

There were some problems with these three songs as well, in terms of volume. The overall volume tended to rise and fall for no apparent reason, and the volume of the two stereo tracks also changed in relation to each other. I did what I could to fix these problems. It so happens the recording has fairly wide stereo separation, with most of the vocals on just one channel. So by fixing this, I've made the vocals in particular sound clever than they ever were before.

In conclusion, don't be afraid of the sound quality issue. Yes, the sound is a bit rough. But it's pretty much this or no live Buffalo Springfield recordings at all. Personally, I think it sounds just fine. It's actually better than many soundboards from that era.

By the way, the same day I fist posted, I've also updated my collection of all their unique non-album songs. I found a very rare unreleased song called "Raga III." It's an instrumental that's really just a long guitar jam, but it's a good one. You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/01/buffalo-springfield-stampede-various.html

UPDATE: On January 23, 2020, I edited the mp3 download file to add the three songs mentioned above that feature Neil Young and hopefully come from the second night, August 12th. Additionally, I've changed the title. I did some research, and I no longer believe this was recorded at the "Teen and Twenty Club," the Huntington Beach location where all bootleg versions of this claim it was recorded. That's because there was no such club known as the "Teen and Twenty Club," either there or anywhere else! There was a long standing series of concerts at the San Leandro Rollarena in the San Francisco Bay Area that continued through the end of 1967 known as the "Teens N' Twenties" concerts. Buffalo Springfield played there in March 1967, so maybe there was some confusion with that. But this can't be from March, because it was clearly done when Neil Young rejoined on the second night, and that was in August.

So where was the concert held? If it was in Huntington Beach or thereabouts, there was one very popular club location at the time: the Golden Bear. However, I've looked at the setlist of Buffalo Springfield concerts, and the generally weren't popular enough to be the headliners. They typically only played opening sets of about half an hour or so. If they'd played at the Golden Bear, I think they either would have just played an opening set, and/or there would be more evidence of them playing there in the form of handbills or concert posters or the like.

I think there's a better candidate that could help explain the "Teen and Twenty" name. Right next door to the Golden Bear, there was another club known as the Salty Cellar. It was literally in the basement of a burger restaurant, so one can only imagine how small a venue it was. known as a teen club, probably due to not serving alcohol. So it could well have had a "Teen and Twenty" subtitle or nickname. I got lucky with a Google search, and found a quote in a book from famous musician Alejandro Escovedo, in which he said, "I got to see the Buffalo Springfield in a teen club that was right next door to the Golden Bear." That perfectly matches the Salty Cellar, and there's no other known date when the band played there.

So I think there's strong evidence that's where these concerts took place. Thus, I've changed the location in the title. But if anyone has new evidence to confirm or change this, please let me know. I'm very flexible to make additional changes.

01. Pay the Price (Buffalo Springfield)
02. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
03. Nobody's Fool (Buffalo Springfield)
04. Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Buffalo Springfield)
05. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
06. Rock and Roll Woman (Buffalo Springfield)
07. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
08. My Kind of Love (Buffalo Springfield)
09. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
10. For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield)
11. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
12. Bluebird (Buffalo Springfield)
13. Mr. Soul (Buffalo Springfield)
14. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
15. Go and Say Goodbye (Buffalo Springfield)
16. Hung Upside Down (Buffalo Springfield)
17. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
18. In the Midnight Hour (Buffalo Springfield)
19. Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It (Buffalo Springfield)
20. Leave (Buffalo Springfield)
21. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
22. Go and Say Goodbye (Buffalo Springfield)
23. talk (Buffalo Springfield)
24. Mr. Soul (Buffalo Springfield)
25. Bluebird (Buffalo Springfield)

https://www90.zippyshare.com/v/39mI5syV/file.html

I've found very few good photos of the band in concert, and none of them playing in the brief period when Doug Hastings replaced Neil Young. I some really cool Buffalo Springfield artwork that looks like a concert poster from that time period, but I'm guessing was actually done much later. Anyway, I liked that so much that I used it for the band name and the framing around a central photo. I had to do some tweaking and cropping to get it to fit the square shape.

For that center photo, I found a photo of the band playing at a small club called the Cellar in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in 1967. It's a low res photo, but I think it does a good job of showing what they probably looked like during this concert. I can only imagine the "Salty Cellar" was a similarly small venue.