It's sad to me that the ELP videography of their 1970-74 period is such a mess. The hideous cartoons in Pictures. The incomplete concerts from Europe in 1970/71. The Manticore documentary having mostly excerpts. No full-on BSS show (Giger curtains/video screen/lightshow). Cal Jam incomplete and with just decent performances. Not expecting for anything to show up from the archives to improve that, unfortunately.
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^^^ and then there's that Japan concert video from 1972 where it is raining so hard Greg's guitar goes totally out of tune, and half the time there is so much water on the camera lenses you can't see much of anything going on. ELP really must have offended the video gods.
The outdoor night concert with no audience reminds a bit of Pink Floyd in the ancient ruins.
Probably the best footage of the great Janis Joplin outside of the obvious Woodstock and Monterrey stuff.
At the peak of their game I think in 75. Both forward and backward looking. Ozzy fully functional which is great to see.
If by "fully functional" you mean "probably snorted enough cocaine during that time to make Elton John jealous", sure.Ozzy fully functional which is great to seeIt was a few years before that show, but they recorded Vol. 4 here in Los Angeles and they rented a mansion owned by John du Pont (the guy the movie Foxcatcher was about) where they allegedly snorted enough blow to fill the Andes. Party like a rock star indeed...... From the Wikipedia article about the album:
And the drug use got worse after that, wow.As bassist Geezer Butler told Guitar World in 2001: "Yeah, the cocaine had set in. We went out to L.A. and got into a totally different lifestyle. Half the budget went on the coke and the other half went to seeing how long we could stay in the studio ... We rented a house in Bel-Air and the debauchery up there was just unbelievable".
Hahaha, totally blanked out on that one.^^^ and then there's that Japan concert video from 1972
By the time they'd played the 4 nights at Wembley Arena on the BSS tour in April 1974, I would think they'd known they were going to take a long break after the tour ended in August. Why not get one or more of the shows professionally filmed so they had a quality concert film to show during the hiatus? I saw the 1970 Lyceum movie (given the horrible title of Rock n' Roll Your Eyes at the time) in the summer of 1975 and even though I'd only been in to them for about a year, I knew that they didn't sound or look like that at all at the time. Oh well......
Last edited by Jeremy Bender; 01-20-2018 at 12:34 AM.
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By fully functional, I meant he wasn't forgetting lyrics, stumbling around on the stage and acting like a total idiot. I think people, even rock stars can get away with doing coke for a while. The band here was looking and sounding great.Originally Posted by Jeremy Bender
If by "fully functional" you mean "probably snorted enough cocaine during that time to make Elton John jealous", sure.
And the drug use got worse after that, wow.
Hahaha, totally blanked out on that one.
By the time they'd played the 4 nights at Wembley Arena on the BSS tour in April 1974, I would think they'd known they were going to take a long break after the tour ended in August. Why not get one or more of the shows professionally filmed so they had a quality concert film to show during the hiatus? I saw the 1970 Lyceum movie (given the horrible title of Rock n' Roll Your Eyes at the time) in the summer of 1975 and even though I'd only been in to them for about a year, I knew that they didn't sound or look like that at all at the time. Oh well......
No, it was MTV who showed it. I remember that distinctly because I rolled VHS on it. I also remember they had this big promotion whereby they occasionally flashed on the screen how many amps were used at the concert, and you had to call a 1-900 number with the correct number to enter a giveaway of some kind, like a home entertainment system or whatever.
Cinemax showed a lot of "newly unearthed" concert footage. I remember they showed Hendrix's Monterey Pop set, they showed John Lennon and Yoko Ono's London Peace Festival set (with Eric Clapton and Alan White, according to Alan the only rehearsal they had was on the Concorde flight from London to Toronto, with Eric and John playing acoustic guitars, and Alan drumming on the back of a seat). I think they also had a couple shows from Janis Joplin and Otis Redding too (the latter might have been his Monterey Pop set), but I really don't remember.
I remember they showed a program called The Doors In Europe, or something like that, which was a compilation of footage from several concerts, with linking footage of, I think, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick (or might have been Marty Balin, I haven't watched the video in so long I don't remember) talking about the tour. Apparently, The Airplane were touring with The Doors at the time, so I guess that's why we have people from "the wrong band" talking about The Doors. I forget who it is who tells this story about how one night, Morrison got so wasted he couldn't perform, so the other three played as a trio, with Manzarek singing, and sounding almost exactly like Morrison.
One thing I find really intriguing is the German TV show Beat Club. OK, so the early Beat Club stuff, from the 60's, they'd have bands lip syncing. But at some point, around 1970 or so, I'm guessing, they switched over to having everyone play live. One of the things that interesting about that, is that they'd apparently have each band play for whichever duration of time, then air just a small excerpt. Larks Tongues era King Crimson (who'd only just debuted at the Zoom Club in Frankfurt a few days earlier) played for like 40 minutes, but only the 6 minute rendition of Larks Tongues I was aired. The Grateful Dead played for over an hour (including two takes of Playin' In The Band, both with jams in the middle, albeit short ones), but only One More Saturday Night made it to air. And I believe similarly, there was some extra Soft Machine footage that surfaced from their Fourth era appearance that hadn't been part of the original broadcast. Makes you wonder what they have on the shelves at WDR of ELP, Kraftwerk, Can, Passport, Deep Purple, Popol Vuh, that we still haven't seen.
Here's one for Guitargeek: The Last Waltz was on TV this morning and at the end, when the Band are playing The Last Waltz Theme, what the hell is that double neck that Robbie is playing? It's almost like a harp stuck on top of an acoustic guitar.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
That's exactly what it is: a harp guitar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harp_guitar
Hurtleturtled Out of Heaven - an electronic music composition, on CD and vinyl
https://michaelpdawson.bandcamp.com
http://www.waysidemusic.com/Music-Pr...MCD-spc-7.aspx
Maybe that's what I recall. I do remember it being on a pay TV channel, which I think was before MTV showed it.
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Well, I suppose this post is a bit redundant, given that the question was already answered, but it's a harp guitar. . The first ones were designed and built at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, which I think includes the one Robbie is playing there. They became popular (relatively speaking) when guitarists like Michael Hedges started playing them in the 80's.
Pat Metheny has a strange looking harp guitar, called the Pikasso, that was built for him by a luthier named Linda Manzer, which has 42 strings, grouped into three sets of harp strings (12 each) and a baritone guitar neck. It also has a guitar synth pickup mounted on it. Manzer later built another Pikasso for a guitar collector named Scott Chinery, and I think she's built a least a couple other vairations on the instrument too.
I saw a photograph on one website, I forget the luthier's name, but it too had a ridiculously high number of harp strings, plus levers that allowed you to raise the pitch of each string by a semitone, which I guess was one way of getting around the issue of retuning the harp strings for different pieces. I think he called it the Chicken or something like that, and said that to build another similar instrument would cost the prospective customer something like 30 grand, but it was a moot point, since he said he was backlogged with work that would take him several years to clear and as such, he wasn't taking any new orders.
^ I saw Michael Hedges play one of those during a concert in Oberlin. Very impressive to watch, but then everything about that performance was impressive.
Sure, I got what you meant, I just took the opportunity to post that stuff about the piles of cocaine and debauchery that went on before that clip was filmed.By fully functional, I meant he wasn't forgetting lyrics, stumbling around on the stage and acting like a total idiot. I think people, even rock stars can get away with doing coke for a while. The band here was looking and sounding great
That is a great live artifact of Black Sabbath, for sure. The Santa Monica Civic where it was filmed was a great venue when it was still used for touring acts, about 3,000 capacity, saw a bunch of great concerts there.
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