Guru Guru - Rockpalast 6/4/76 (video)

The only consistency with Guru Guru in the 70s was Mani Neumeier, obviously, and unless you’re a fan of obscure mainstream mid-70s German rock, you’re, like me, going to find this pretty bad. Their run up to Tango Fango wasn’t too bad, in fact the previous band with Dance of the Flames was pretty impressive, but, nah, Mani was going to try for the gold this time around, reconstituting a band around a somewhat quasi-Allman Brothers type of sound, a little bitta Steely Dan in there too. It’s basically an exercise in the tepid and it’s only my appreciation for better points in their career that made me watch the whole thing, oh, that and it was short.

Robin Trower - “Rock Goes to College” BBC TV 2/25/80 (video)

This has James Dewar on it and about five Bridge of Sighs tracks so I figured it’d be worth it and it was in just those few points. Trower’s pretty much a shameless Hendrix clone in many ways, although he does do some different things with his influence’s pantheon of riffs. But listening to this makes the album Bridge of Sighs seem like the one flash of brilliance throughout, when they’re doing the title track or Little Bit of Sympathy, it’s a great watch, but when it’s one of the later albums, hell even the track from the first album, it’s utterly banal, so this was one of those seasaw events for me. Worth it for the good stuff though.

Dave Liebman - Hamburg, Germany, New Jazz Festival 1975 (video)

This was anticipated as being highly amazing and it took those expectations and completely trashed them, before bringing them back out again for another battering. This absolutely awesome date with Badal Roy and Richie Beirach starts out jamming and then floors it through the set. If you haven’t seen Liebman play during this period, it’s almost like watching the Coltrane of the 70s, he’s just utterly inspired, playing gigantic sheets of sound. The band can go acoustic jazz or the current jazz-rock styles either way and they can burn with abandon as well, Bierach using the ring modulator to do a rather good Jan Hammer impression. Sheer joy watching this, it just rarely ever gets better, with a few more listens I can imagine this gig being in the list of legendary live shows.