Patchwork

In keeping with my interests, one of the things I like is media where you can "hear the join".  One finds this a lot with bootlegs from a certain era.  Obviously, if someone in the audience is surreptitiously taping a concert, the band is not going to stop so the audience member in question can change out his reels or cassettes.  For that matter even professionally taped concerts aren't immune to this.  The second King Crimson album I got was an official cassette of "Starless and Bible Black" that was for some reason for sale at the campus convenience store.  This album, for those who don't know, was mainly made up of overdubbed live recordings, including one, at the end of side one, that ends abruptly when the tape runs out.  When I heard it I assumed it was a manufacturing error, and was only persuaded otherwise with great difficulty.

These days the band has officially released the complete concert it came from, patched with an audience recording.  Whoever prepared it for release made the creative choice to present the concert as performed, without overdubs, so the entire section of the performance that was on the "Starless and Bible Black" album is taken from an audience cassette.  I'd actually been meaning for a while to edit in the overdubbed version and I guess this is my opportunity to do it!

That was a fun learning experience!  Not perfect but I think it went OK.  Anyway this will occasionally pop up on "official bootlegs" by bands of a certain era but mostly it's something that happens in the bootleg community.  I'm most familiar with it through the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.  Usually what happens is that a "line" or "soundboard" recording is patched in the gaps with an audience tape, like in the King Crimson example, but sometimes it does happen the other way around.  My favorite performance of "White Summer/Black Mountain Side", for instance, from Montreux 1970-03-07, is an exceptionally good audience recording patched with an exceptionally poor line recording.

And then there are the _really_ weird patchwork cases.  I have a really enjoyable six minute performance of "Satisfaction" from a 1966 French radio performance.  It's been rebroadcast a number of times edited in various ways - the recording I have stems from at least three different sources of dramatically varying quality.

It's not always live recordings, too.  Numero Group put out, some years back, an archival disc of recordings of the group 24 Carat Black.  One of the things they hoped to include was a 4-song acetate, but in the event they deemed the acetate to be too badly damaged with too many drop-outs to be widely releasable.  They put one track, a fantastic performance of "What I Need" with amazing bass, up on their website; later the whole acetate was released in a very limited edition; I haven't heard the other three tracks.  I'm a little obsessed with "What I Need" though - it's a first-rate performance but one that's inseparable from the irreparable damage and loss the physical recording has suffered.

As per usual this also links in with Doctor Who.  One of the most fascinating parts of the "missing episodes" is the little fragments that are recoverable.  A six minute chunk of "Four Hundred Dawns", the first episode of the terrible Season 3 serial "Galaxy Four", with a cut in the middle where a clip was taken out for the pro-Doctor Who propaganda documentary "Whose Doctor Who".  Most famously, the regeneration sequence from the final episode of "The Tenth Planet", which exists as a short clip from a 1970s episode of "Blue Peter" and a longer off-air 8mm video taken by a fan from a rebroadcast.  This tracks well how I think of Doctor Who; some scattered photos, a second here or there popping out of blind nothingness, a substantial stretch of poor-quality 8mm cine bursting into brilliant, pristine quality at the crucial moment, and then the fade back into oblivion - an accidentally captured partial trailer, more short cine clips - the new Doctor looking in a "mirror" at a photo of his old face.  After that occasional clips of the Daleks from lighthearted arts & culture review shows of the era - one of them making a menacing threat undercut slightly by Dalek operator bumping right into the camera, three Daleks milling about in front of an army of obvious cardboard cutouts, an interminable (yes, one of the only surviving clips of an otherwise missing six episode serial, and it's still fucking interminable!) sequence of an "army" of Daleks - actually the same three, as is obvious from the long gap between the emergence of the third and fourth Daleks while the first Dalek finishes circling to the back of the set out of camera view - massing and preparing for conquest, which in typical Dalek fashion primarily involves shouting.

Plenty more in this vein.  A home movie made by the effects crew on "Evil of the Daleks" showing the "final end" of the Daleks - since it's a home movie everything on screen is even more obviously a model than was typical for the show, but one gets some idea of how it might have looked.  Fury From the Deep, one of the most fascinating episodes to me.  A one minute sequence censored from the Australian broadcast - rightly so, if you ask me, because it is _terrifying_, but which also makes me more curious.  There are plenty of attempts at fear in the show - it's part of the meta story engine - but most of them are, shall we say, less than fully effective.  Most of the censor clips, like for instance the ones from the Macra Terror, it is hard to imagine anybody concluding that these are things that might unduly scar impressionable young minds.  The uncanny effectiveness of this sequence is, IMO, entirely down to two things: The Radiophonic soundtrack, and the work of director Hugh David.

Directors tend to get short shrift in Who fandom.  The fans focus on the writers first and foremost, on the actors, on the makers of the eerie electronic music, of the monster designers.  It has been a long time coming for the role of the director in making a show a success or failure has been acknowledged.  This is particularly true in the case of missing, or formerly missing, episodes.  Before its recovery Tomb of the Cybermen was _the_ most coveted missing episode, the pinnacle of the show's black and white era.  Fandom is still marked by the disappointment of actually being able to see it.  Badly plotted, racist, and poorly directed, the whole of its power over fans' collective memory rested on one admittedly impressive special effects sequence (so impressive, in fact, that the whole thing was later repeated backwards).  Few people pine for the recovery of "The Massacre", an early directorial effort by the uncommonly good director Paddy Russell.  Nobody pines for the work of Hugh David, because none of his work for the show exists.  He directed two serials, both missing in their entirety save for some brief clips.

The other bit of Fury From the Deep that sticks in my memory is the attack of the weed creature.  Like the censor clip, this is something that exists because it was deemed unsuitable for public broadcast - in this case, it is because the existing footage is film trims, cast-offs and rejects from the sequence.  It is hard enough to sell a cheap "seaweed monster" thrashing around in a bubble bath as dramatically convincing.  That I find the sequence convincing in an edit made up entirely of the rejected bits and cast-offs from filming...

Me being who I am, it makes me think of Carl Theodor Dreyer.  Dreyer went to his death believing the finished version his first film lost forever.  He prepared, therefore, an alternate version, made up entirely of outtakes and rejected footage from the original cut.  Since the recovery of his original version in - and this fact is one of the reasons I always bring up "The Passion of Joan of Arc" in relation to lost media - the janitor's closet of a Norwegian insane asylum, the second cut has been a footnote.  I don't know if it's commercially available anywhere, though these days, possibly!

Sometimes these stories do get blown out of proportion, though.  Perhaps the greatest locus for missing episode conspiracy theories involves the recovery of two episodes of the rarest (and, logically, the least likely to be recovered) Doctor Who story, The Daleks' Masterplan, in the basement of a Unitarian church in 1983.  Or perhaps it was a Unification, or "Moonie" church.  Nobody really knows for sure.  You hear the story and you wonder: What on earth were those episodes doing there?

The short answer, the long answer, all the answer there is: We don't know.  We won't ever know.  Back in '83, if someone called and said they had some old Doctor Who episodes and would you like to take a look, the policy was to say "Yes, sure, thank you", and not ask too many questions.  (Note that after the return of the original cut of the Passion of Joan of Arc, it sat around in a film archive for three years before anybody bothered to look at it to see if it might be interesting.)

It is interesting.  The missing episode junkies all seem to want to know how those episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan survived, but nobody cares about the survival of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs".  That story had its master tapes accidentally wiped almost immediately after broadcast, and it is honestly a fucking miracle that the entire story survives today, and these days in colour no less.  I guess I understand why.  It's an amazing story, but there's no mystique to it, no Pertwee episodes left to find... no hope for more!  All we can do is appreciate what we have, which is to say a very entertaining Doctor Who episode with some truly awful special effects.

Well, that was quite a ramble.  This post was a bit of a patchwork itself I suppose!