Greetings,
Yes, your suggestion put us on the right path. The mysterious Bonnie was indeed Bonnie Pointer. She and her sisters were the vocalists I was having trouble identifying. I recently completed the logging notation on this jam session from the first night of closing week (June 30, 1971). Unlike the final night jams, when numerous musicians were involved, this night the core band is basically a quartet, with numerous singers involved. The core band is:
Elvin Bishop - guitar, vocals
Stephen Miller - piano, organ, vocals
David Brown - bass
Michael Shrieve - drums
The singers involved are:
Taj Mahal- vocals, harmonica
Boz Scaggs - guitar, vocals
Linda Tillery - vocals
Lester Chambers - vocals
Jo Baker - vocals
Bonnie Pointer - vocals
June Pointer - vocals
Anita Pointer - vocals
Ruth Pointer - vocals
The closing week has been and continues to be an ongoing project here, as there are quite a few sources for this material. Much of it has been reconstructed from reels of the in-house line feeds, but we continue to find superior quality sources. These line feed reels had room microphones blended into the mix for ambiance. This signal was also the one fed to KSAN. It gave one a feel for the excitement inside the Fillmore, but also muddied up the music considerably. Since then, we've located some of Bill's soundboard masters and quite a few preproduction reels from initial work on the album and movie soundtrack. As these pieces of the puzzle surface from The Vault, I've been upgrading many of the sets, including some that you mention. The Santana set is the only one still causing some confusion (as we seem to have several more songs than the official release), but otherwise we do have all the sets in good to excellent condition. You can look forward to more of this legendary week appearing here down the road.
Thank you for your input. It proved very helpful and is grearly appreciated! MrBB
