Live at Watkins Glen

Live at Watkins Glen is a 1995 album by the Band, presented by Capitol Records (without the band's involvement) as a live album from the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen rock festival held outside Watkins Glen, New York, on July 28, 1973 in front of 600,000 people. Garth Hudson's organ solo, "Too Wet to Work", and the plainly titled "Jam" come from the actual Watkins Glen concert, as does the introduction of the group by Bill Graham. The former track appears on the out-of-print 1994 box set Across The Great Divide, but the latter track is only present on the Watkins Glen disc. Other than those two tracks, the remainder of the tracks are actually outtakes from various studio sessions by the Band with overdubbed crowd noise to create the impression that the material was recorded at the Watkins Glen concert. "Back to Memphis" and "Endless Highway" are available on the 2001 re-release of Moondog Matinee, without the crowd overdubs. The rest of the tracks are available on the 2001 two-CD re-release of Rock of Ages as "previously unavailable" tracks, with the exception of "Don't Ya Tell Henry", which is replaced with an alternate cut featuring Bob Dylan.

Contents

• The band live at watkins glen
• Rare concert footage of the band 1970
• Track listing
• Personnel
• Songs
• References

The true background of the album was revealed in the liner notes of the remastered Moondog Matinee CD. The following quote is from the 2001 liner notes, "Chuck Berry's Going Back To Memphis, on the other hand, was completed and ready for inclusion on the album Moondog Matinee but ended up being shelved in favor of Promised Land. This version has been released before complete with overdubbed audience sounds as the opening track on the fraudulent Live at Watkins Glen CD. No one in the Band was connected with that particular release which had been originally mastered sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, although not released until 1995. The outtake of Endless Highway included here, which was recorded sometime between Cahoots and Moondog Matinee, was similarly included on the Watkins Glen CD with overdubbed audience."