In late 1971 or early 1972 we recorded this at the band practice house (Bill's house in El Paso), using a Sony two-track reel-to-reel to record most of the instrumentation simultaneously on one track. We then added the vocals and any remaining instruments on the second track. Hence, it sounds live, being more or less the same performance we were doing in local venues like military clubs, night clubs, high school dances, frat parties, whatever came along. I (Dalton) am playing lead guitar and singing harmony. Bill Welsh sings lead vocal and plays organ. Dana Collins plays bass and sings harmony. I think Greg Perry was playing drums at the time (no pics with him, so Robbie is shown in the later photograph above). I was using a variety of equipment on this song, i.e., a Fender Jazzmaster guitar through a Vox Tonebender fuzzbox, a Custom amplifier head (the brand Credence Clearwater Revival used) driving a a 15-inch JBL speaker I installed in a rare white Fender Bandmaster box, paralleled with an external Altec PA horn. The result is some outraged, shall I say, guitar sounds at times on this recording. Bill did a great job of recovering and mixing down the decades-old tape-recording. Bill gave me a CD of that and I later converted the relevant track to the mp3 format heard here.

In 2012 or so, Sheri mailed me some second or third-hand transfers of an original reel-to-reel recording of Blackmoor playing the Copper Penny nightclub gig in Clovis, New Mexico in 1972. I massaged the recording of Only the Beginning a bit and put it up here in mp3 format. Rick and Sheri were the primary singers in the group, but to give their vocal cords a break, they made me sing lead on this one (and their background harmonies really made the song). I play the guitar solo also, fighting with a Fender Strat a bit trying to get some sustain with my 50-watt Marshall head necessarily at lower levels (this being a pop-rock dance club venue) than required even were I using my Les Paul (I soon dropped the Strat, which our manager Charlie Teitsworth, had wanted me to try, and returned to my 1971 Les Paul). Mike had some fun on the drums, as did Sheri on the organ, playing a part Rick mapped out as I recall. We had local fans that always came out to hear us and hang out and the club owner provided us with a house during our stay, so we enjoyed playing here, though a pretty out of the way place.

I found a 37-year-old audio cassette (transferred from a Teac 4-track reel-to-reel recording off the PA system mixer at the time) of a gig Gorilla played in El Paso in 1973 at a local bar called the Silver Poodle. It was not a gentle place---I watched the burly bouncer drive an unruly patron's head into a 2-foot cement column supporting the roof on one occasion (might have been the night of this recording, in which the house was packed and couples filling the dance floor all the way up to our slightly elevated stage). The mp3 features our cover of the Deep Purple song, "Lazy." I'm playing a 1971 Les Paul straight through (no effects) a Marshall 50 watt bass amplifier dimed driving 4 12" speakers in an Ampeg cabinet. Mike's lead are slower, but more nuanced (I admit now that sometimes less is more), his Gibson ES-135 hollow body guitar with quite a different sound than my Les Paul. Doug sang lead on the song and played his usual great bass. David was superb on the drums.

A few years ago, Chas gave me a 37-year-old audio cassette (transferred from a Teac 4-track reel-to-reel recording off the PA system mixer at the time) of a gig Coyote played in El Paso in 1975 at a local bar called the Lariat Club. As Wheat (shown in the picture) we had played to packed houses at the Lariat in 1974. Taking some time off, Chas, Jim (that is Chas and Jim on the sinister vocals in the recording), a new drummer, Loren Chavez (not shown in picture), and I reformed the Wheat band as Coyote in 1975 and after a brief stint playing country-rock, went back to our rock roots and the Lariat Club. In this recording you can hear me improvise an introduction to the song based on flamenco/classic guitar work by Carlos Montoya. Later in the song Chas and I trade lead breaks, he playing clear Hi-Watt amp leads through his 1955 Les Paul (shown in the studio pics from the Out of Time and Just One More Time album pages) and I going crazy on my 1971 Les Paul bi-amped into a Fender Super-Reverb and Marshall 50-watt, with Morley pedal and tape-delay module brought in at times. Since I am not very visible in the picture above, here is a closeup taken later: