Giant Sand, Live at Mad Dog Studios/The Atlantic Session (01/30/90)

I don’t know if it’s still around, but when we lived in KY (roughly 2002-2005), I was part of The Sandman Series. This was a CDR series of bootlegs organized by Jim Blackman and Howe Gelb. Basically, the way it worked was that CDRs were sent out to “seeders.” I was a seeder. The seeders committed to recording and mailing the CDRs to a certain number of people (I think it was around 10 but I really don’t remember). I seeded several different discs, but the one I still return to most was called The Atlantic Session.

The core group (at that time) of Howe Gelb, John Convertino and Joey Burns recorded this set as a demo for Atlantic Records at Mad Dog Studios in CA. It was never officially released until the Sandman Series helped bring it to the light of day. As the name suggests, this is a studio recording. The band is tight and the tunes are bitchin.

The set is available at the fantastic Archive.org.

Dive right in.

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Fruit Child, Large, 1991

From Howe Gelb on Facebook:

“didn't know there was any evidence of this fun run in ninety one. the band "fruit child, large" featuring #evandando on guitar, #julianahatfield on bass, #johnconvertino on drums & #howegelb on guitar”

The Youtube post for the video of this show says:

“Once upon a time, Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando went on tour with Howe Gelb and John Convertino of Giant Sand. They named the band Fruit Child Large and played songs from all of their catalogs.”

Juliana Hatfield talked about the tour in a 2010 interview with Magnet:

MAGNET: Howe Gelb once told me about an ad hoc band you, Evan Dando, John Convertino (Calexico) and he had back in the early ’90s called Fruit Child Large. I don’t think I ever saw you play, though.
Hatfield: Yeah, that was hilarious, this weird thing we threw together and somehow we pulled it off. It was Howe’s genius idea to incorporate something from the Lemonheads, which was the “Fruit,” something from my band, the Blake Babies, which was the “Child,” and then Giant Sand was “Large.”

Howe sent me some great photos from a European tour.
Yeah, that’s all we did. I’m glad he kept a record of it, because I sure didn’t. I think it was my first time in a lot of those places in Europe. I remember this dark tiny town in Bavaria, and we just had the best time. The club was packed with people, and it had this low ceiling. People were buying us tequila shots. It was just a really, really fun night.

Did you play songs by all three of you?
Yeah. Then we did a bunch of covers also, and we kind of improvised. We did some jamming. I remember we did a really slow version of a Blondie song. I think it was “Shayla” from Eat To The Beat. She was a great singer.

• Visit Juliana Hatfield’s official website

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• Visit The Lemonheads official website

• Purchase The Lemonheads music on Amazon

• Visit Howe Gelb’s official website

• Purchase Giant Sand’s music at Amazon