Scared me for a minute there Dr, thought I'd missed something
Is it "confirmed" that the audio for the balance of the show has survived?
BG
"When Yes appeared on stage, it was like, the gods appearing from the heavens, deigning to play in front of the people."
Completely agree (although I got my copy in "From The Beginning" box set); the Tarkus version on that disc is stunning, as it is on "ELP Live At Nassau Coliseum", yet another great live album. It was the first show after they fired the orchestra, and they play with such ferocity that even the Works songs sound definitive. I am interested in hearing this before I buy though. I just picked up "ABWH Live At The NEC" on CD and it sounds like a good soundboard rather than an album for release (Dime should have had that as a torrent).
"So...you seek understanding. Then listen to the music and not the song..." - Kosh
I remember watching this on TV back in '74...I think it was on "In Concert" on ABC. I had a friend who was there that day for the whole concert. Apparently he was feeling no pain that day, as he said while he was lying on his back listening to the music someone dropped a full ice chest on his head...he was able to laugh about it the next day. I also remember that during the piano solo, Emerson used as the emcee introduced it "The Amazing Flying Piano" and twirled head over heels in the air while playing!
There was an facebook petition which to released next, the Cal Jam tapes or one of the Works tour set (sans orchestra). The Cal Jam source tape was told to be incomplete but superior in audio to the previous releases. So, how is it? Is the audio quality better than on Then & Now?
A bunch of us were watching this on a reg. tv and I had remembered that there was an FM station that we could tune into that had the channel at 87.5 or something way down the dial,and so we turned the sound down on the tv and cranked up the receiver. OMG! It was glorious. He had these huge speakers and it was so loud. They went to a commercial about this little dust buster thing that could suck up anything inc. tacks. You would not believe the sound those tacks made. We all were ROTFLMAO!
Then I stand corrected. This may have been the second show at The Mausoleum. I actually have a boot (Bootleg Box 3) that has the Nassau Show minus orchestra for the first gig at Nassau.
"So...you seek understanding. Then listen to the music and not the song..." - Kosh
Not to be a drag, but I think that wasn't really the BSS tour proper. At that point the album hadn't been finished; they played the 2nd part of the 1st impression and Still You Turn Me On on that tour, but nothing else off BSS as I understand. I basically want to see film of the WBMFttStNE set, and ABC totally carved up the California Jam footage of that. I was just hoping there was something else out there.
Seriously,just buy Three Fates Project and be blown away-DAMN this album is awesome!!!
I never owned 'Then and Now', so this Shout Factory release is the first I've heard the Cal Jam stuff in stereo. Sounds quite good to me. Better than the 'WBMF' audio. Now they really need to match this stereo audio up with the best quality video they can find.
Btw does anyone know the complete setlist ELP played at Cal Jam in 74? Obviously the broadcast was just a selection.
I thought most of the archived tape was lost when Keith's barn burned down
How's sound quality on this one? Similar to WBMFTTSTNE?
I believe I've heard an interview with Keith and he said that when the roadies stopped the piano from spinning it came to an instant rather than a gradual stop and his face smashed into the keys...of course he soldiered on half dazed...Keith in a stupor was always better than 90% of the greatest keyboardists on their best day
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Your post piqued my curiosity as I didn't remember "Then and Now" sounding very good
To my great surprise, there is a major, (at least to me), difference in the setlist as Live in California has 10:31 of Pictures at an Exhibition that T & N does not....and it does all sound very very good indeed
BG
"When Yes appeared on stage, it was like, the gods appearing from the heavens, deigning to play in front of the people."
It was the same as all BSS shows:
Hoedown
Jersualem
Toccata
Tarkus
Benny the Bouncer
Take a Pebble
Still...You Turn Me On
Lucky Man
Piano improv
Take a Pebble reprise
Karn Evil 9 with Palmer solo
Pictures at an Exhibition
What's odd to me is that no bootleg, as in "someone in the audience with a tape recorder, either cassette or reel-to-reel", has ever surfaced of the Cal Jam show. There were 200,000 people there, not one person taped it and that tape survived > got distributed?
...or you could love
Yeah, I remember Keith giving an interview on the early 90's version of In Concert, when ABC brought it back, and he was interviewed around the time Black Moon came out. He said he yelled for them to stop because he was getting vertigo or whatever, and they apparently slammed on the breaks, as it were. I got into an argument with someone on Youtube about whether or not Keith was really playing the piano or if he was just miming. I'm pretty sure there's no way he could have actually been playing it. Every time the piano would have flipped over, you'd have gotten an 88 note tone cluster, the result of all the hammers hitting all the strings at once!
As for Beyond The Beginning, the thing about that is, I'm aware of the realities of video preservation from the early 70's, so when something like that appears, I'm happy there's anything still available that they could use. One thing you have to remember about that thing is most of the footage probably had to be licensed from someone else, so they couldn't just put full concerts or the full Manticore Special or whatever on it. That's probably why there's only one song from the Beat Club appearance, for instance.
What bugs me is the number of concerts that are excerpted on thing, yet there's no complete Tarkus. It would be nice to see some footage of Keith playing one of those great solos from the end section, I guess the Aquatarkus bit, but we get zip, zero, zilch, nada, none, access DENIED!!! What the frell?! The one thing you want to see in an ELP video, and it's not there!
As for the Tokyo footage, I've got it on the hard drive, downloaded it off Youtube a couple years ago. There's some good stuff in there, but Greg's guitar is out of tune during Tarkus, and I think the Moog goes in and out of tune in a few places as well (but didn't it always do that?!). I'd have to watch it again to tell you how good the performance was. The thing I actually remember the most is the intro with male and female announcers doing this tag team MC thing, over a snippet of one of the songs, I forget which one. It just seemed like one of those quintessentially weird things you always get with Japanese television.
Last edited by GuitarGeek; 04-26-2014 at 11:17 PM.
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You are correct, for many reasons. Keith has been pretty upfront that it was a stunt- there weren't even guts in the piano. I don't know if a forklift could have raised a real piano. The micing would have been a fiasco. The rig just to keep the cables from twisting would have been an engineering feat. The hammers would have gone nuts, as you point out. The idea that it was real is ludicrous.
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