Today being Memorial Day, and with live music not really being much of a thing at the moment, I suppose there's likely no better time to let folks listen to a recording Major Stars made exactly ten years ago on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010.

There's probably a lot of random Major Stars live recordings floating around, and I've heard a handful of them here and there, and even recorded a few myself. Mostly, they aren't much to listen to for a variety of reasons. The most common reason being sound quality, of course. Also, sometimes it just wasn't our night, and the performance was merely great but not spectacular (it happens). And even when the recording quality is good and the performance is better than average, well then there’s the fact that this is a band with ten full length albums plus a variety of odds and sods already out there in the world. Why add to the noise with yet another recording, when it is comprised solely of songs that have already been released before?

This particular recording has always stuck out to me though. It sounds good, thanks to whoever happened to be engineering that day at WMBR (maybe Ramsey?). The balance might not be exactly perfect at all times, but it’s pretty darn good, and captures the feel of the band live in a room a way studio recordings rarely do. Also the bass is really loud, so I like that. The performances are good, too! A lot of things can go wrong in songs that go on and on, but there’s some serious shredding on this one the whole way through. Maybe my bass solo on Low Grade is a little pathetic, but it makes me laugh. Wayne’s unaccompanied solo on Run From Me Devil totally rips but it also makes me laugh. And everyone soloing together during Turning For Home and The Space You Know is just wild. So yeah, this one passes the sound quality and performance quality tests for me with flying colors.

As for that other and perhaps most important test, there’s an especially compelling reason why I think it’s worth putting this recording out into the world when we already have so much stuff out there already already. That reason is Amanda Bristow. Amanda may have been the shortest tenured member of Major Stars, but even still she was in the band for a couple of years. Like all of Major Stars singers, past and present, she’s great! I especially love her use of vibrato. We never toured with Amanda so unless you happened to catch us in Boston in 2008-2010 or saw one of the three or four out of town shows we would have played during that period, the only evidence of her time in the band are two tracks on Return To Form, a record mostly recorded with Sandra Barrett on vocals before Amanda joined the band. One of those songs, The Space You Know, is included here, and Amanda slays on the vocals as might expect. But this is The Space You Don’t Know! So three of the other songs performed on this radio show (Better Stay Down, Run From Me Devil, Low Grade) were songs that Major Stars had recorded when Sandra was still in the band. These are songs we had been playing live for quite some time at this point. So it’s cool to hear Amanda’s very different sounding voice over top of material the band is extremely comfortable with, maybe even too comfortable with (looking back at old e-mails, though we managed to practice the week before this radio show, we had actually skipped practice three weeks in a row prior to that one rehearsal). Conversely, the other two songs on the recording (Turning For Home, No Attraction) were both still pretty new (hence the laughter at the beginning of No Attraction as we consistently messed up the opening to that one in practice). So there’s a fun, raw spontaneous (and perhaps a bit sloppy) element to the musical performances there than the more polished and road tested versions of those songs that were eventually recorded for the Decibels Of Gratitude album with Hayley Thompson-King on vocals.

Anyways, there you go. Have a listen. I haven’t made this available for download because, well part of me sort of hopes this comes out on record some day. And as to why it’s being posted on the Life Partners bandcamp page as opposed to the Major Stars one, truth be told I don’t even know who runs the Major Stars bandcamp (I hope it’s Drag City! Or Wayne. Probably Drag City). Not sure how long this is gonna stay up here on the internets so have a listen while you can. Stay safe everyone and rock on.

-Dave Dougan 5/25/2020