The Rising Sons - Ash Grove, Los Angeles, CA, 5-30-1965

The Rising Sons were a band in the mid-1960s that looked like they were headed for big things. But they broke up and never even released an album. However, the two main band members, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, both went on to have long successful solo careers. In 2021, I posted a short concert bootleg of this band recorded in 1966. Now, here's another one from 1965.

Given this band was only in existence from 1965 to 1966, and never achieved any commercial success, it's a miracle we have any live music from them at all. But it turns out there are multiple bootlegs with stellar sound quality, due to the fact that the often performed at the Ash Grove, a small club in Los Angeles, and the people running that venue often made soundboard recordings of the concerts there.

However, there was one big problem: these in-house recordings were often done in a sloppy manner, probably someone just turning the recording device on and walking away. As a result, the balances were usually off. For instance, with the Rising Sons concert I previously posted, the prominent harmonica playing by Taj Mahal was buried in the mix. That was the same problem here, with the harmonica sounded like it was recorded several rooms away from everything else. That's why, even though I had these recordings, I only posted the 1966 one.

Happily, now it's 2026, and audio editing technology has improved by leaps and bounds since 2021. The bad mix of that 1966 concert bugged me. So I went back and fixed the buried harmonica problem. Here's a link where you can get the fixed version:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-rising-sons-ash-grove-los-angeles.html

Then I did the same thing here: I used the MVSEP program to separate out just the harmonica from everything else. Then I boosted that volume relative to everything else. While I was at it, I made some other fixes. For instance, Taj Mahal did most of the singing, but sometimes he would sing little asides with his mouth away from the microphone. In many cases, I was able to fix those so you could clearly hear those bits. Now, in my opinion, the sound quality here is really impressive, especially for 1965, when bootleg recording was rare and usually poorly done.

This recording is actually a combination of four different concerts. Most of it, tracks 1 through 20, is from May 30, 1965. But I had a few extra bits from partially recorded sets on other nights, so I added those in at the end. Tracks 21 through 24 are from May 29th. Tracks 25 to 30 are from May 31st. And the last two tracks, 31 to 32, are from June 29th.

All the studio recordings by this band were finally released an album in 1992, with the title "Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder." But quite a few of the songs here were not recorded for that album, including an original by band member Jesse Lee Kincad, called "I'll Always Be There." (There actually were two versions of that song in these recordings, but I only included one. It was the only case of there being a duplicate.) 

These concerts used to be available at Wolfgang's Vault. But that site stopped working a few months ago. And they never spread very far. For instance, none of this music can be found at SoulseekQT as a type this, and SoulseekQT has an amazing amount of stuff. So hopefully this post will put this music into wider public circulation. 

If you aren't familiar with this band, you should check this out. Their sound doesn't seem that unique today, but that's because so many other bands went on to make music in a similar vein in later years. According to AllMusic, Rising Sons' "languid, bluesy, folksy sort of sound anticipated future recordings by outfits like Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead, and even the southern rock Allman Brothers, and the country-rock Byrds."

This album is an hour and 21 minutes long. 

01 Crawling King Snake (Rising Sons)
02 talk (Rising Sons)
03 It's All Over Now (Rising Sons)
04 talk (Rising Sons)
05 Statesboro Blues (Rising Sons)
06 talk (Rising Sons)
07 Walking the Dog (Rising Sons)
08 talk (Rising Sons)
09 Hambone - Band Introductions (Rising Sons)
10 Meet Me in the Bottom (Rising Sons)
11 talk (Rising Sons)
12 Baby, What Do You Want Me to Do (Rising Sons)
13 talk (Rising Sons)
14 I'm a King Bee (Rising Sons)
15 talk (Rising Sons)
16 I'll Always Be There (Rising Sons)
17 Fanny Mae (Rising Sons)
18 Corrina, Corrina (Rising Sons)
19 talk (Rising Sons)
20 Dust My Blues (Rising Sons)
21 talk (Rising Sons)
22 Too High to Fall (Rising Sons)
23 talk (Rising Sons)
24 Hush Hush (Rising Sons)
25 Who Do You Think You Is (Rising Sons)
26 talk (Rising Sons)
27 Blues in Three-Four Time [Instrumental] (Rising Sons)
28 talk (Rising Sons)
29 So Fine (Rising Sons)
30 Little Red Rooster (Rising Sons)
31 talk (Rising Sons)
32 Grown So Ugly (Rising Sons)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Fv7xM9z6

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/LRYE8EbaSG5vtjx/file

The cover photo is from a photo shoot either in 1965 or 1966. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. Taj Mahal is the Black man wearing a hat, and Ry Cooder has a hand on his shoulder.

The Rising Sons - The Ash Grove, Los Angeles, CA, 5-9-1966

Yesterday, when I posted a Jorma Kaukonen concert from 1964, I commented that it's amazing how one can sometimes find some rare stuff on the Internet that one can barely believe even exists. That got me thinking about a couple of bootlegs I have featuring the Rising Sons. 

If you're not familiar with this band, they are most famous for having Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder as members before they got famous. Their style of electrified folk blues was ahead of its time in the short period they were together, from 1964 to 1966. They recorded a bunch of songs in the studio, but only one single was released while they stayed a band. However, an excellent archival release came out in 1992. 

None of the band's live performances have ever been officially released. However, I have two bootlegs, one from 1965 and the other from 1966. Both are from the Ash Grove, a folk club in Los Angeles. The Rising Sons were ahead of their time in that they had a mix of black and white band members. Apparently, this meant that many clubs were afraid to book them, so they didn't get the kind of exposure they needed to break through. But the Ash Grove liked them, and let them play there quite a lot. Thus, both of these bootlegs are from that club.

Unfortunately, these bootlegs both sound great and terrible at the same time. They're great in that they're pristine soundboards, which certainly is unusual for the time. But they're terrible in that only part of the band was properly recorded. The lead vocals (all by Taj Mahal) and some of the instruments come in clearly, but other instruments are barely heard at all. That's why I've never posted either bootleg here. However, today, it occurred to me that now I'm using the sound editing program Spleeter, I could drastically improve the mix. So that's what I did for this 1966 concert.

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that the mix is much improved. In particular, I was able to boost the guitar to make this sound very listenable. The bad news is that the harmonica playing in particular was so faint to begin with that I didn't have much to work with, and it's still very faint. One can tell the harmonica should be quite prominent, with some solos here and there, but it sounds like it's coming from two rooms away... or maybe two planets away!

Anyway, if you can tolerate that, I think the rest sounds great for a 1966 recording. Minus the harmonica problem, and maybe the bass being rather low, this could easily be worthy of an official release.  It's a bummer that there's only 30 minutes of music here, but that's 30 minutes more than you probably ever expected to hear of this band live (if you've been aware of them at all).

By the way, an interesting fact is that Taj Mahal mentioned between song that blues legends Lightnin' Hopkins and Son House were in the audience. That's almost certainly true. There are many more bootlegs from the Ash Grove in the 1960s (unfortunately the vast majority having the same mixing problems). There's one of Lightnin' Hopkins from this same date, and others on different dates of Son House. The Rising Sons must have been in awe playing in front of some of their musical heroes.

UPDATE: On February 24, 2026, I updated the mp3 download file. The song list is the same. However, I was able to use recent technological advances in audio editing (specifically the MVSEP program) to finally fix the problems I mentioned above, especially of the harmonica being too ow in the mix.

01 Hi-Heel Sneakers (Rising Sons)
02 talk (Rising Sons)
03 Who Do You Think You Is (Rising Sons)
04 talk (Rising Sons)
05 I Got My Mojo Working (Rising Sons)
06 talk (Rising Sons)
07 Walking Down the Line (Rising Sons)
08 talk (Rising Sons)
09 Walking the Dog (Rising Sons)
10 Little Red Rooster (Rising Sons)
11 talk (Rising Sons)
12 Statesboro Blues (Rising Sons)
13 Hambone (Rising Sons)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/oLCyXAao

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/2g7qej7FQosrTKy/file 

There are very, very few color photos of the Rising Sons. I couldn't find any of them in concert. I did find a nice one of them which I've used here. But there was a problem: it's a rectangular shot, with Ry Cooder way far from the from the rest of the band. So, using Photoshop, I moved him so he's sitting on his butt in front of the others. (Taj Mahal, with hat, is now standing directly above his head.) 

I also found a playbill advertising the Rising Sons playing at the Ash Grove, though for a different date. I used the exact font from that for the text. Finally, just for fun, I added the stereo and record company logos to make it look like a released album from the 1960s.