Earthquake Relief Benefit, Watsonville High School Football Field, Watsonville, CA, 11-26-1989, Part 1 - Square Roots

I finished posting a bunch of albums from an Earthquake Relief Benefit concert at the Cow Palace venue near San Francisco in 1989. But that actually was just one of three concerts for the benefit that took place on the same day. Now, I'm starting to post the concert that took place at Watsonville, about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. I've found enough for three albums. This first one features the band Square Roots.

As I mentioned in a previous write-up, these benefit concerts were in response to an earthquake that took place in Loma Prieta, California, near Santa Cruz, about 40 days prior to these concerts. Watsonville is about an hour south of Santa Cruz. I suppose it was decided to hold a concert for a different crowd of people, who would have found it difficult to go all the way to the other concerts in San Francisco or Oakland, which were about two hours away. 

About 80 percent of the population of Watsonville is Hispanic. As you'll see, the musical acts chosen were meant to appeal to the Hispanic community. This concert begins with a short talk by Bill Graham, the famous Bay Area music promoter who led the organization of these benefit concerts. Then there was a speech by comedian Jose Simon. I cut the vast majority of it, because it was in Spanish and I don't speak that language. I just kept enough for the introduction to the first musical act. (That's why that track has "[Edit]" in its title.)

That act was Square Roots. This is probably one of the most obscure music acts I've posted at this blog. They don't seem to have either a Wikipedia page or a rateyourmusic.com page. I was able to find out from the discogs.com website that they were an "American ska band from Santa Cruz, USA, active between 1983 and 1995." I also found out that they only released on album, which was self-titled, and was released in 1991. That means that, at the time of this concert, they hadn't even released an album yet. They probably were chosen because they were popular with the locals. 

But for an obscure band, they sounded very professional and good, in my opinion. For instance, they had a horn section, which is not something a lot of bands can afford to have. Just listening to this, I would have figured they were much more popular than they apparently ever were. So please don't pass this by just because you haven't heard of them before.

Generally speaking, the sound quality of this bootleg is excellent. However, the vocals were low in the mix. I fixed that with the help of the UVR5 audio editing program. I put in some extra work on the song "Every Little Step" because it has male and female vocals, and the female vocals were loud but the male vocals were extra quiet. It sounds a lot better now, though still not ideal.  

This album is 33 minutes long.

01 talk by Bill Graham (Square Roots)
02 talk by Jose Simon [Edit] (Square Roots)
03 Program Zero (Square Roots)
04 Steady Action (Square Roots)
05 Rude Boys (Square Roots)
06 Try (Square Roots)
07 Every Little Step (Square Roots)
08 talk (Square Roots)
09 Pleasure Point Posse (Square Roots) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/zkLPrAnz

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/JP7jVOopLejfwwb/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from a video of this exact concert.

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