Any fans of The Ship: A Contemporary Folk Music Journey (produced by Gary Usher 1971)

A couple of other 1972 Elektra releases:
Jubal (Elektra EKS 75033)
Casey Kelley (Elektra EKS 75040)

I was hoping that the lot would also have safeties of "Curt Boettcher's There's an Innocent Face" (Elektra EKS 75037; the next Elektra catalogue number after "The Ship"), but no such luck.

Lee

 

The "archives" when we finally began searching for some a couple years ago, consisted of a couple old reels that Roger Francisco had, one of which had the Francisco mix and the other had the individual tunes, most of which eventually went on the "One More Night Like This" CD. There was a period when the folks at Wounded Bird weren't sure that they could even find the old Elektra masters for "The Ship" re-release, but in the end, they must have found them. We don't have a copy of the Usher mix. One thing that hasn't changed much in the big-time record biz is that the artists are still pretty much kept in the dark. We knew that it would be re-released, but not when it would happen. I found out that the digital version was finally available one night while surfing the web and we didn't know that the CD version had been released a few months later until I saw it for sale on Amazon. At one point, I even sent them updated plug and play files for all the CD cover art that were substantially better quality and a better adaptation to the small CD format than what they ended up using, but never heard a word from them.

Our other "archives" came out of a cardboard box of old studio tapes that had been sitting untouched in Hamby's basement for 30 years. Most of the "Left In The Wake" CD tunes came out of that box and Jim converted them to digital format in his studio. The two live cuts were recorded in 1974 by a guy we didn't know. He smuggled a small Sony cassette deck into one of our concerts and sat in the first row of the balcony with the mics hidden in his gloves on the balcony railing. A couple days after the show, he contacted us to see if we wanted a copy because it was pretty good and we said "sure". I still had a copy of that tape on three old 8-tracks! I went on eBay and bought the best used 8-track deck I could find. Luckily, it was cheap - because well...er... because it was an 8-track deck and they're even more worthless today than they were back then. I hooked the deck up to my Korg 16 track digital recorder and managed to get copies of a few tunes that could be tweaked and cleaned up enough to be presentable.

We also found a lot of these....
go to the "shipcom" folder at:
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/Music stuff/

 

I won The Ship album off my local radio station back around '73 or '74. I remember it wasn't spectacular on initial listening but it was kind of addictive after a few plays. Never thought I'd see it mentioned anywhere since it's such an obscure oddity.

 

Here are links to photos of the tape boxes:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44160692@N04/4386544380/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44160692@N04/4385770887/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44160692@N04/4386537780/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44160692@N04/4385776301/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44160692@N04/4386543142/

To confirm what Todd said, the two boxes that say "REVISED MIX" are the ones that say "Francisco Mix" on the spine. They are dated 8-14-72, whereas the "Usher Mix" reels are dated 7-26-72. I just never realized that the "REVISED MIX" was the one that made it to vinyl.

The "Keith H." up in the corner would seem to indicate that these reels were prepared for Keith Holzman, Senior VP of Elektra and Jack Holzman's brother.

Lee

 

Before anyone inquires regarding copies of the above tapes, let me fire "a pre-emptive strike": I've been asked by the members of The Ship not to make any copies of the unreleased "Usher Mix", as it does not represent their original creative intent for the album. I will honor their request. And since the released "Francisco Mix" is available on a commercial CD, there's no reason to make copies of that as well. So the tapes will go directly back to the safety of my enormous tape vault -- well really just a bedroom cabinet, but "tape vault" sounds so much cooler!

May "The Ship" keep on sailing!

Lee

 

That's unfortunate, to say the least because I, for one, would have dearly loved to have had an opportunity to compare the two mixes. While I'm quite certain that the familiar mix is definitive, the news that there was a rejected lost Usher mix in the first place---let alone an extant one---comes as nothing short of a revelation. My curiosity could not be more piqued. For fans of Gary's who had no prior knowledge of this, it is a historically significant development.
I would almost prefer not to have known about its existence, but that bell cannot be unrung.

 

And I almost forgot, many thanks to Todd for posting.
I hope you'll be back.

It's nice to see this thread finally have some life forms in it. When I started it about 2 1/2 years ago it didn't make much of an impact here.

 

Glad I received it at last today in the mail. Second listen : I happen to love it, sweet harmony vocals not far from Sagittarius "Blue Marble" era mood songs. And moreover sound seems great to me (but I can't make a fair comparison as I haven't got the very expensive LP.) Could someone make a A/B here ?

 

Glad to hear you got it. Still waiting for mine.

 

Bravo to Wounded Bird for releasing The Ship 'A Comtemporary Folk Music Journey' on CD. I'd describe it as a concept album. It has wonderful vocal harmonies somewhat similar to CSNY but lacking the distinctive individual voices of that group. To me the CD's sound quality is exceptional. Now all I have to do is search for the lyrics so that I can better follow the story, as they are not provided with the CD, any help is appreciated.
Regards, Trevor.
P.S. now onto the 'Floating Opera' release, I'm hoping it's another Wounded Bird gem.

 

The lyrics to The Ship" (as well as those to all the songs on our other three CDs) are posted as small PDF files on our website. Click the "lyrics" tab on the nav bars on just about any page and they will take you right to them. The website address is:
http://www.theshipmusic.com

T.B.

 

Thank you for the link. I suggest this cd to all forumers, great sound and wonderful music.

 

Thanks, Todd, I found the site and imported the lyric PDFs into Word and created a columnised double-sided lyric sheet.
Regards, Trevor.

 

F.Y.I. on December 6th. The Ship released our first CD of new music in almost 35 years! Lots of variety and pretty good examples of the types of songs that we've been playing and writing individually since the old Ship days, but I think you will hear some parts that remind you of the original albums. We're quite happy with it. Samples are up on our website (www.theshipmusic.com) and the title song "All Come Home" is a Christmas song which is also available as a free download for the holidays on the very first page of the website.

Todd