Sleeping On The Sidewalk Live (NOTW Box) Version

If that's the case, I wonder if Freddie was even present at the recording?

Have to say, I love the track, but it does seem just a bit too perfect for a one-take jam.

Very good point. That version of SOTS wasn't recorded onto a C90 that the sound guy had lying around on his desk like the recordings of 'every show' I surmised Brian might have been referring to. Who knows though. That they didn't say which particular show it was from was telling. Perhaps it was one of the fragments I suggested they might have kept for reference and they don't have a clue where it was from? Perhaps shows weren't done on a C90 in the desk but on a good quality reel to reel and this is a surviving fragment from that? Either way, release the whole tape! 

I was the one who pointed that out when it first came out

EDIT: about a million posts down this thread (sorry, had to check for my own sanity, was quite a mission)

Some of us on The Queen Discord discovered this a few years ago. Spectrally, there's evidence that the speech at the start and the audience at the end comes from Boston, while the rest of the song comes from a different show.

Those lines only pop up during the speech before the song, and as the song ends. Those lines are often found on analog recordings, but they don't just disappear like that. Especially not for the SOLE runtime of one specific song. Keep in mind the odds of that, the line going throughout the entire show, and then disappearing SOLELY just for the 3 minute duration of Sleeping On The Sidewalk. I don't buy that. I've looked at hundreds of different Queen shows' spectrograms, and it just doesn't happen like that.

It's more likely that soundboard X, used for the speech, has that line. QPL merged it with soundboard Y, which doesn't have that line. I was actually able to replicate this a few years ago with Houston and Earls Court's recordings, I'll take a look and see if I still have that later.

What we've put together from this, is that QPL took Boston's speech and put it onto a different, unknown NOTW show. It's possible that Boston's speech just worked better, while this other show had the better performance of the song itself.

How we know the speech is from Boston, is because Gary Taylor transcribed the entire speech onto his News Of The World book before QPL even released the Sleeping On The Sidewalk performance. Yes, Gary Taylor isn't the most reputable of sources (he said Hangman was played at March Rainbow lol) but, the speech matched up perfectly word-for-word, and if I recall correctly, Queen Productions actually gave him a cease and desist for that book for sharing information that was taken from the soundboard collection. It's generally safe to assume that he was telling the truth about the speech.

I also personally wouldn't put much stock on a tempo change being evidence of merging two performances into one. Queen's tempos fluctuated a LOT when performing live, and even in the studio before they started using click tracks. Roger's fill at 2:38 drags the tempo, but he's also doing 16th notes with both hands hitting different drums, not alternating between the two hands. That's not too easy at 130~ BPM, and it sounds to me like he was just getting tired or something.

Yes, it was played more than the one time. We know from audience accounts, Gary Taylor's book, and Newspaper reviews from the time. We don't know exactly how many times it was played, but generally it's considered to have been played at atleast

• Portland 11-11-77
• Boston 11-12-77 (This is definitely the one used for atleast the speech on the official release.)
• Detroit 11-19-77

There might be another one, I'm forgetting.

This seems plausible to me, since it's a soundboard recording, they can't really do much traditional "mastering" of individual tracks, so I'd say it'd make sense for them to sort of shift the EQ of the entire thing to fit an instrumental section as soon as Mercury dips out.

This may actually explain the tape hiss getting slightly quieter at that part for seemingly no reason, too.



Personally, as a drummer who's studied Roger's playing for years- I find nothing suspect with the awkward fill. it's 2 bars of a semi-difficult fill at a fast speed, and Roger's not really a "chops" player. There's plenty of examples of him slightly losing the beat in ways like that, so it's never sounded particularly suspicious to me.

I still personally believe the solo section was brought in from another show. The differing levels of hiss line up perfectly with the tempo changes.

Regarding the inference lines at the beginning and end, I think it could have a lot to do with the audience noise being patched in (possibly from other parts of the same show)? Wherever they've grabbed it from, they've likely had to raise the volume immensely which would explain why the line is so prevalent. There's a lot of whistling going on in the audience at the beginning, which would suggest they've probably fetched that part from one of the encore breaks...

I don't have time to fetch a screenshot at the moment (it's nearly 3am here in NZ and I've got work tomorrow 😅), but on whatever source they used for the solo section, I could swear I saw the most faint remnants of that line in places. I suppose the best example I could give is the remnants you'd see after removing it with NR. I could be totally wrong and looking too far into it! The audience snippets may have been brought in from some other show entirely. But I only saw remnants of the line during the source used for the solo (which if you look close enough, they cut back to that source a 2nd time when Brian's 2nd mini solo starts and that source remains until the end of the track)...

This is what I mean, really hard to see unless you're zoomed right in. I could still be looking too far into it, but each of these instances line up exactly where the line would've been:



Regardless of whether or not the line thing is true, you can actually see a slight difference in EQ where the cuts were made:

Of course not, that's silly. But you can learn a lot about the production side of things by taking a look at spectrograms.

Ahh alright, I could be looking too far into the line thing.

On that 2nd screenshot, I was referring to the EQ patterns horizontally looking different, especially the 13-16KHz range. I know tape speeds could have something to do with that. If it all turns out to be from the same show, then they've manually altered the speed for those portions of the tape. Which from the outside looking in makes no sense to me, but who knows...

To your point though, we may never know the answer. I suppose speculating about it any further is a waste of time 😅

Is this a post about possible releases on 2024? I'm lost...

Thank you!

Sounds interesting. It’s difficult to understand by ear, and considering that these concerts are not on bootlegs, it becomes even more difficult