Beast Of Burden (Siréne -191)
Miami Baseball Stadium, Miami, FL – April 22nd, 1977
Disc 1: Sheep, Pigs On The Wing 1, Dogs, Pigs On The Wing 2, Pigs (Three Different Ones)Disc 2: Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 1-5, Welcome To The Machine, Have A Cigar, Wish You Were Here, Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 6-9, Money, Us And Them
Pink Floyd’s first US date on the Animals tour in Miami has two complete audience recordings extant. The first tape is the most common, being utilized for Ayanami’s Dog Day Afternoon (022) and several fan produced ROIOs like Hurricane Floyd Hits Miami. Beast Of Burden, according to the Sirene people, is closer to the master and is slowed down to be closer to the actual pitch. There are several tape flips and it fades out at 7:40 in “Us & Them”.
There is slight upper end distortion in the guitar and the occasional “whoosh” from being taped in an outdoor arena. Some of the versions of this tape like Hurricane Floyd are missing the encores and use the second tape source but Beast Of Burden is definitely complete with “Money” and “Us & Them” coming from the first source.
The musical content is very loud and clear and had the potential to be one of the best tapes from the tour. What really ruins the recording are the people sitting around the tape recorder. Their shouting and comments occasionally drown out the music and the tape opens with one of them loudly shouting “Sit your fucking ass down, you dumb motherfuckers!!!”
Other comments include “Hey, we didn’t come here to listen to no record, I can go home to hear the record” before “Wish You Were Here” and mistaking the piano interlude in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond parts 6-9” is “The Great Gig In The Sky.” The opening chord is similar but you would think he was familiar with the record. Another distraction during this song is a loud commercial airliner flying overhead at 17:30 with a second jet a couple minutes afterwards.
Sometimes these distractions add ambience to a recording but they become a real distraction from what otherwise is an excellent recording. The second audience recording has never been given an official release and is very good with much more dynamics and has less audience interference. One hopes that tape would sometime see the light of day.
The show itself is excellent. Roger’s voice is a bit weak but the band play well. They rested a month between playing in the UK and the start of the American tour and the performance comes off without a hitch.
Roger shouts out “30” during “Pigs (Three Different Ones)”. Snowy White plays a searing solo in “Have A Cigar”. The transition between that song and “Wish You Were Here” is not smooth with the former ending abruptly and the backing tape not being played in time. Also the usual scanning of the FM frequencies as a prelude to the ballad is absent.
After “Money” Roger says, “Sorry we didn’t manage to get the screen up, so you didn’t see all our wonderful pieces of movie, but fuck it! Anyway, this something else from Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s called ‘Us And Them’, and thank you for coming…”
Sirene package this with the excellent and beautiful glossy color inserts. The pictures they chose are the standard ones they trot out for 1977 tour releases. The cover picture was used for their recent release of the June 27th Boston show Boredom And Pain and the back photo was used for Dortmunds. Also the title is more appropriate for a Rolling Stones release. With all of the excellent titles from this tour available this release is good but not essential.
