Toadies New Years Eve 25th Anniversary- Dallas Bomb Factory 12-31-95
The hottest New Years Eve ticket in Texas twenty-five years ago was The Toadies live at Dallas’ Bomb Factory. The Ft. Worth band’s Rubberneck album had just been certified gold on its way to a million in sales, and even though the Bomb Factory held thousands, the concert sold out in advance, so my radio station Q102 enlisted the “A”-team of Chuck Conrad’s Crossroads Audio remote recording truck and my personal sound engineer, Doug Hall from Showco, to broadcast the Toadies live. This is the original band of lead singer/ rhythm guitarist Todd Lewis, lead guitarist Darrel Herbert, bass player Lisa Umbarger, and hammerhead shark drummer Mark Reznicek.
Among the many high points of this high-quality live performance recording by the original Toadies line-up is the ultra-rare hypnotic “Paper Doll“, which never appeared on any Toadies album. The only version extant was a studio version on The Crow: City of Angels original soundtrack, but that didn’t surface until a full six months after this New Years Eve ’95/’96 performance in Dallas, making this not only possibly the first time the band ever performed it for an audience, but the earliest recording of “Paper Dress” as well. What was unknown until end of the feverish set that night was the fact that lead singer/ songwriter Todd Lewis was so sick that he received IV fluids in order to do the gig, and could not perform an encore due to being administered medical attention backstage. Ah, the glamorous life of a rock star…
Remastered 2020 by Redbeard. Sound recording copyright 2020 RedbeardRocks, all rights reserved. –Redbeard
