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New Jersey power-pop band The Bongos have added some archival works to their digital catalogue in recent years, partnering with Legacy Recordings on expansions of their RCA recordings (including the 1983 EP Numbers with Wings, a pair of 12" mixes and 1985's Beat Hotel, and even a holiday track in 2023). This spring, they'll go back to the label where it all began - New Jersey's own JEM Recordings - to put some of that vault material out on CD for the first time.

The Shroud of Touring: Live in 1985, available May 23, offers a set the group put on in support of Beat Hotel at the Jersey shore club Tradewinds on May 24 of that year (almost exactly 40 years before this release!). Eight of these tracks appeared on Legacy's expanded Numbers with Wings, with the others - all restored from 24-track analog tape by co-producer/engineer Steve Addabo and restored by Steve Rosenthal - issued for the first time anywhere.

It had been an incredible few years for The Bongos (founding singer/guitarist Richard Barone, bassist Rob Norris and drummer Frank Giannini and guitarist James Mastro). After the buzz of 1982's Drums Along the Hudson collection, featuring single and EP material recorded since the group's inception in the buzzy Hoboken, NJ scene two years earlier, the quartet made the jump to RCA Records, which issued the EP Numbers with Wings and the album Beat Hotel. The title track to "Numbers with Wings" was a recurrent favorite on the nascent MTV, and was one of the nominees for Best Direction in a Music Video at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. Beat Hotel found the band on a breakneck touring schedule through 1985, augmented by a special touring member in percussionist Steve Scales, who'd been a part of the expanded line-up of Talking Heads immortalized in the previous year's Stop Making Sense live album and concert film.

While The Bongos dissolved under inauspicious circumstances by the end of the decade, their memory was revived decades later when, in 2013, the album they were working on before breaking up, Phantom Train, was released in 2013 by JEM Recordings, a reactivation of the company that first released Drums Along the Hudson through its PVC label and later expanded it in 2014. (JEM was originally headquartered in South Plainfield, New Jersey - the author's hometown - which made for a fun angle when they began releasing music again.) Barone, one of the hardest working musicians in the New York metropolitan area, has since played shows with his Bongos bandmates, and will in fact reunite with them for a show at Asbury Park's Wonder Bar on May 31, just after The Shroud of Touring hits stores.

The Shroud of Touring: Live in 1985 (JEM, 2025) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada)

1. In the Congo
2. Apache Dancing
3. I've Got a Secret
4. Mambo Sun
5. A Story (Written in the Sky)
6. Telephoto Lens
7. Zebra Club
8. Splinters
9. Glow in the Dark
10. Blow Up
11. Come Back to Me
12. Brave New World
13. Totem Pole
14. Numbers with Wings
15. The Beat Hotel
16. Barbarella
17. Space Jungle

All tracks recorded live at Tradewinds, Sea Bright, NJ - 5/24/1985 and previously unreleased physically. Tracks 1, 3-4, 6-7, 9, 14 and 16 released on digital edition of Numbers with Wings (40th Anniversary Edition) (RCA/Legacy, 2023)