Point Of No Return | 1998-10-17 | KVHW

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3:47:55

Taper:

Scott Bernstein

Transferrer:

Scott Bernstein

SHNID:

kvhw1998-10-17.tlm170

Source:

FOB Audience

Lineage:

Original master recording: Neumann TLM-170 (carloads in the tapers corral) -> Sonosax SX-M1 -> Tascam DAP1 (master @ 16/48) DAT playback: Sony R-500 -> Sound Devices 722 digital input (@24/48) Mastering: Spectralayers Pro 12 unmix function. Wiped out crowd chatter from the "vocals" channel and then mixed the channels back to stereo. Small volume fixes to compensate for some recording level changes on the master, and dithering from 24 to 16 bit in Adobe Audition 2026. Tracked in CDWave 1.98.

Taper Notes:

View Notes* = w/"Down At The Wetlands" improv lyrics

Melvin Sparks Band opened.  I posted my recording of their set as BARN147 in 2013 here: <A HREF="https://archive.org/details/melvinsparks1998-10-17.tlm170.flac16">https://archive.org/details/melvinsparks1998-10-17.tlm170.flac16</a>.  Steven Bernstein's Sexmob played in the lounge (I did not see any of that set, nor did I record it).

Note:  there are some strange volume issues with the guitar at 3:44 in "5 B4 Funk" -- this is due to an issue with onstage gear (confirmed by a loud POP when the issue ends) and not a flaw in the recording.  I have done a bit of work to make this problem less jarring than it was in the original recording.

Also note that there is a little bit of audience clapping missing between the end "Poonk" and the following banter track as that was when I stopped my deck to put in a fresh DAT tape when it was clear that the show was going to go over 3 hours long (which was the length of a 90 meter computer DAT tape).

Also note that there is a short amount of crowd cheering missing during the encore break as I had already powered down my pre-amp when the house music came on -- but I quickly powered back up when the band was coming back on for the encore.

Steve Kimock - guitars
Bobby Vega - bass
Alan Hertz - drums
Ray White - vocals and guitar

Recorded, transferred (6/22/2012), tracked (10/19/2019), mastered (2/26-3/4/2026), tagged (3/4/2026) and posted (3/4/2026) to The Internet Archive by Scott Bernstein

Taper notes:
For BARN275, I present to you an absolutely STELLAR highlight from my archives -- among the best concerts I've ever seen -- surely in my top 10 nights at Wetlands...and presented in an absolutely pristine wonderful recording as a bonus.  The second night (I didn't attend the first) of KVHW from October 1998.  Already well-familiar with Steve Kimock as the guitarist of Zero, I decided to hit this show to check out his new band KVHW -- and with Melvin Sparks Band opening as a huge bonus.

This was a quartet with Bobby Vega -- a truly A-list bassist (among my top 5 favorite living bassists and a master of playing funk style with a pick), drummer Alan Hertz (mostly known for playing with Fareed Haque in Garaj Mahal), and Ray White, who made his name singing in several iterations of Frank Zappa's bands.  The combination of these 4 individuals was magical in a such a way that the whole collective of these band members was FAR greater than the sum of its parts.

Typical of shows at The Wetlands -- this was a marathon show that ended VERY late.  Given that KVHW started at 11pm and they played around 3 and a half hours of music with a setbreak, this definitely went until the 4am curfew that they had there.

The setlist is chock full of interesting stuff -- Kimock originals (Five B4 Funk, Poonk, It's Up To You, Tangled Hangers), Zappa covers (City of Tiny Lites, Illinois Enema Bandit), random funk & blues covers (Express Yourself, It’s Your Thing, Just A Little Bit), and songs Ray White had seemingly cooked up on his own or with the band (Ring Around the Moon, Spring Water, Point of No Return, Rocco, Roy and Dale).  As mentioned by Ray, he cooked up the tribute song to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans that night -- and it's beautiful (as a side note, it appears that this song was only performed one other time -- on 12/6/98 in Vancouver, BC, as can be seen in a mislabeled recording here on the archive).

On top of everything else that was ideal about this performance, the band brought FOH sound engineer Howard Danchek with them. The Wetlands was always a great sounding little room -- but Howard had the room absolutely perfectly tuned and the instrument levels in exactly the right proportion.  And given that the fact that us tapers had already set up in the ideal location in the room (which just happened to be right next to the soundboard location), this resulted in a warm, crisp, clear, well-balanced recording that envelops you in its lushness.  To add to this, I also threw it into my favorite new mastering toy of 2025/2026, Spectralayers 12. I figured that since the show had many long jazzy instrumental passages, it would benefit from an unmix pass, a muting of the vocal channel whenever Ray wasn't singing, and then a mix back to stereo.  Well, I can say that it unquestionably did improve an already spectacular recording!  While there wasn't an overwhelming amount of crowd chatter, there certainly was quite a bit of it.  And I've wiped a significant portion away -- with a bit of tedious work.  (Not all of crowd chatter is 100% gone because Spectralayers occasionally mistakenly puts it into the "Other" or "Drum" or "Guitar" channel and I didn't scrub those unless it was really prominent).  Also note that there were some portions that I very specifically left it in (during the audience call-and-response segment of "Illinois...", for one).  I deeply enjoyed hearing Ray's beautiful isolated vocals while working on this!

You may ask -- what took you so long to get this out?  Well I transferred this top-notch show way back in 2012, started work on it by tracking it out in 2019...but then stalled on it when I noted how much crowd noise I wanted to manually scrub....and frankly, when I saw the sheer number of excellent other sources for this show up on the Internet archive of this same show...I figured it'd be better for me to focus on other, uncirculated gems from my archive.  But since I wanted to hear this awesome music again, I finally got this pumped out in 2026.

I hope you enjoy listening to this wonderful performance as much as I did working on it!  There will be more Kimock recordings (beyond the one I'd previously released from <A HREF="https://archive.org/details/skb2001-05-06.tlm170.flac16">New Orleans on 5/6/2001 as BARN38</A> in 2010) released in my BARN series eventually.

Enjoy!

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