Live at Montezuma Hall

Live At Montezuma Hall is the first live album from singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury, recorded at Montezuma Hall at San Diego State University in 1973. Featuring Newbury performing solo with an acoustic guitar, the album is notable for touching renditions of many of Newbury's excellent songs and for his personable and humored performance. The set was not edited for the album.

Live At Montezuma Hall was collected for CD issue on the eight-disc Mickey Newbury Collection from Mountain Retreat, Newbury's own label in the mid-1990s, along with nine other Newbury albums from 1969-1981.

Background

Newbury's performance was broadcast simultaneously by FM radio station KGB in San Diego. Newbury was promoting his recent LP Heaven Help the Child, the last of three critically acclaimed albums he had recorded since 1969. However, although Newbury's albums were widely praised, they did not sell very much nor receive much airplay, so Elektra Records launched a major promotional drive, sending the singer all over the country for interviews and performances.^[2] Such jaunts would become less frequent as Newbury soon acquired an aversion to touring. The album was not a planned release but when Elektra found out that an employee of radio station KPRI-FM, who had taped the broadcast, was planning on releasing it as a bootleg, it decided to package it with a rerelease of Newbury's 1969 Mercury album Looks Like Rain, and eventually issued it as a single album.^[3]

Live at Montezuma Hall contains two of his frequently covered works, "An American Trilogy" and "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye". Newbury also sings "I Came to Hear the Music", which would become the title track of his next studio album. The singer introduces his composition "Cortelia Clark" by paying tribute to its namesake, a blind street singer who Newbury had befriended in Nashville:

He won a Grammy, believe it or not. A few years ago RCA-Victor went out on the street with a tape recorder and taped him while he was out there...It didn't mean much to him as far as his pocketbook. Matter of fact it didn't mean that much to him at all...I was in San Francisco playing at the Boarding House one week and when I got back home I picked up all the newspapers and I started reading through 'em and found out he had burned to death in his trailer while I was gone.

Newbury introduces several songs with amusing anecdotes, sounding very much at ease and in terrific voice. Performing alone with only a classical Ramirez guitar, the album gave fans an opportunity to hear many of the songs from his previous three albums stripped of embellishment and without the accompaniment of Nashville's top shelf musicians, underscoring how good the songs were and the emotive ability inherent in Newbury's voice.^[4]

Reception

AllMusic: "Newbury has recorded numerous live records since Montezuma Hall, but none have come even close to matching its power and intensity. In fact, there are few live records by anybody that can hold a candle to this classic." Peter Blackstock of No Depression observes, "Newbury is somewhat surprisingly revealed to be a rather jovial personality, a dimension often lost amidst the exquisitely moody depths of his most moving moments as a songwriter."

Track listing

All tracks composed by Mickey Newbury; except where indicated

"How I Love Them Old Songs" - 2:11
"Heaven Help The Child" - 5:27
"Earthquake" - 4:11
"Cortelia Clark" - 5:47
"I Came To Hear The Music" - 5:07
"San Francisco Mabel Joy" - 5:52
"Bugger Red Blues (The Truck Song)" - 6:21
"How Many Times (Must The Piper Be Paid For His Song)" - 4:41
"An American Trilogy" (Mickey Newbury/Traditional) - 4:33
"Please Send Me Someone To Love" (Percy Mayfield) - 2:53
"She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye" (Mickey Newbury, Doug Gilmore) - 4:45

Personnel

Mickey Newbury - guitar, vocals

References

External links

Mickey Newbury Website

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