Rhino Records will release Stone Temple Pilots’ deluxe edition reissue of ‘Purple’ on October 18. Included in the deluxe release is a cd with a live recording of one of the shows from STP’s 1994 summer tour in support of ‘Purple’. The set is labeled to be from the band’s August 23 show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, Connecticut.
Here’s the full set list:
- Vasoline
- Silvergun Superman
- Crackerman
- Lounge Fly
- Meat Plow
- Still Remains
- Gypsy Davy (“Woodie Guthrie Song”)
- Pretty Penny
- Creep
- Andy Warhol
- Army Ants
- Big Empty
- Interstate Love Song
- Plush
- Unglued
- Dead & Bloated
- Sex Type Thing
Exciting! We know only the shows in Worcester and New Haven from this tour have been professionally recorded. We already have the full show from Worcester in great quality on the ‘Interstate Love Songs’ bootleg and various Westwood One Radio Show promos. It’s great news that we get to add New Haven to the list as well. But… is it?
When you listen to it, you’ll find that the recording now being put out under the ‘New Haven’ label is exactly the same as a show that we’ve known since 1995 to be recorded at The Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts the day before…
Since the band played the same songs in the same order every night of that tour, it’s impossible to identify shows by song order. So which is it now? Worcester or New Haven? Let’s find out.
Research on official releases
The confusion set in over the last couple of days as we got closer to the release of the ‘Purple’ reissue. Copyright claims started popping up on YouTube, stating that certain videos contained the music of the New Haven show. Here are two examples:
Audience video uploaded in 2014, labeled Worcester ’94.
Same show, pro-shot video (from STP’s 2003 “Thank You” DVD), also labeled Worcester ’94:
Both of the above get a copyright notice that says:
Music in this video:
Song Interstate Love Song (Live at New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum)
Artist Stone Temple Pilots
Album Purple (Super Deluxe) [Remaster]
Licensed to YouTube by WMG (on behalf of Rhino Atlantic)
Interesting that even on the full concert, YouTube singles out ‘Interstate Love Song’ as the only song in the set to be recognized as ‘Music in this video’. Maybe that’s just because Rhino released the live version of ‘Interstate Love Song’ from the deluxe set as a teaser/promo to social media on August 22. It’s very possible that other songs will be ‘recognized’ by YouTube as we get closer to the release of the full set.
But it’s strange. The videos are labeled ‘Worcester’. And the audio is the same as on a 1995 Westwood One Radio Promo CD that clearly states on the paperwork that accompanies it that the recordings were made on August 22, 1994 at the Centrum in Worcester:
Almost all subsequent releases and uses of these audio recordings have been labeled ‘Worcester’ since. Originally on bootlegs and original ‘tape trading’ sites, more recently on a number of “licensed” STP live recordings on both CD and vinyl:
- https://www.amazon.com/Centrum-Worcester-STONE-TEMPLE-PILOTS/dp/B01LEV1UZW/ (note: watch out with this one, it’s missing ‘Army Ants’ and has two songs, Wicked Garden & Sin, from the 1993 Lowlands Festival show mixed in.)
- https://www.amazon.com/Live-Centrum-Worchester-August-VINYL/dp/B07MT1VRSV/ (note: edited even more; Pretty Penny, Creep, Andy Warhol and Army Ants are missing from the set, they also included Wicked Garden from Lowlands ’93.)
I wrote ‘Almost all’, because there’s one release that stands out. One of the November 1994 cd single releases (there were multiple configurations with different b-sides) of ‘Interstate Love Song’ features two live tracks (‘Vasoline’, ‘Interstate Love Song’) that are the same as the Westwood One Radio Promo, but they are labeled as “Tracks 3 & 4 recorded live on 23 August 1994 at The Centrum in New Haven, Connecticut.” on the disc itself:
This is confusing in and of itself, because it lists the venue name as ‘The Centrum’, which is the name of the Worcester venue. But the date (8/23) and city (New Haven, CT) match each other. Two out of three makes one assume that New Haven is correct for this recording. But why has Westwood One labeled the same recording as ‘Worcester’?
One other official Stone Temple Pilots release to feature a song from the same concert is the Japanese edition of 1996’s ‘Tiny Music…’, which features the live version of ‘Meat Plow’. Unfortunately neither the disc nor the artwork for this release sheds any light on when and where this live version was recorded. ‘Meat Plow’ here is identical to the one on the Westwood One show labeled ‘Worcester’.
Research on audience recordings
When you research audience recordings and bootlegs, you will find tons of information on Worcester. An audience recording of ‘New Haven’ was posted online in March 2018, but I didn’t think much of it at the time, because it sounded the same as the soundboard recording I knew from ‘Worcester’. I thought it was mislabeled. Only today I checked the information file that came with it to read a lineage that says “Aiwa M30A Mic > Sony TCD-D7 > CDR > dBpoweramp Flac Uncompressed”. It’s a different source than the full show video on YouTube, but definitely the same performance.
In terms of video bootlegs, there’s really only one bootleg collection website that lists an audience recorded DVD from the New Haven show. Conveniently, it also lists a DVD for the Worcester show.
Below Empty Forum user Blue was quick to compare screen shots from both recordings, to find that they are basically the same recording. Just compare the stills from the acoustic set:
Worcester:
New Haven:
On the anteroboots.com site, ‘New Haven’ is listed as a master copy, whereas the ‘Worcester’ has a note saying it’s a “low generation” copy. It would be quite safe to assume (but no guarantee) that a listing for a “master copy” has the right label. Since both recordings are visually identical, that would mean that a lesser generation copy of the New Haven show has been mislabeled ‘Worcester’ early on.
Hartford Courant article clues
There’s a concert review (see below for scanned image) of the New Haven show from the Hartford Courant, which states in the second paragraph in the second column: “‘Hello People’ barked Weiland to the enthusiatic [sic] crowd”. If you listen to the audience recording of ‘Worcester’ on YouTube at 7:42, you will hear Scott say exactly these words. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I’ve listened to audience recordings from Miami (7/1/94), Houston (7/5/94), Milwaukee (7/10/94), Chicago (8/12/94), and Scott’s first banter with the audience is always after ‘Silvergun Superman’ and he doesn’t say ‘Hello People’ at any of those shows.
Verdict
Combining the research on the official releases and the audience recordings, I’m pretty convinced that the New Haven, Connecticut show from August 23 was mislabeled early on as ‘Worcester’. It looks like what we’ve seen and heard so far as ‘Worcester’ has been ‘New Haven’ all along, but why did Westwood One label it ‘Worcester’ back in ’95? The ‘Interstate Love Song’ single from November 1994 says it’s New Haven. Rhino Records (in 2019) says it’s New Haven. And that seems to match that master copy audience recording of the video that’s floating around, but then again that’s one source and an unofficial one. The newspaper article quote adds further evidence that ‘Worcester’ is in fact New Haven.
25 years later it’s hard to figure out what happened exactly, but one thing is certain: these recordings got mislabeled somewhere along the way.
Fact of the matter is that we now have the same recordings labeled differently on a number of releases. I guess only one thing will solve the issue once and for all and that would be a ‘master copy’ of the Worcester show that looks and sounds like it’s a different recording altogether, but what are the chances of something like that surfacing after all this time? Maybe some more things will see the light of day with the 25th anniversary of ‘Purple’.
For now, we know that the upcoming release of ‘New Haven’ on the ‘Purple’ deluxe edition is the same recording as the one we’ve known as ‘Worcester’ since 1995, but remastered for this 2019 release. With several different mixes and masters of this show available over the years, let’s hope this one is better sounding than all the previous ones.
To add some context to this blog post, here’s the show review for the Worcester show from the Boston Globe:
And here’s a photo of Scott from ‘Boston, MA 1995’ that you can purchase at dreamstime.com. Note: STP did not perform live in 1995. This shot is most likely from Worcester, which is 100 miles closer to Boston than New Haven.
Lastly, here’s a photo of Scott labeled as “backstage at the Centrum in Worcester”:
source: Tumblr.com