Santana - “Eros,” Budokan, Tokyo 7/6/73
Like the Amon Duul II - Munich 69 show I mentioned earlier, this Santana show is basically another incremental upgrade of a very poorly sourced show. It’s even more sad as I believe there’s a laser CD video of this gig that’s long out of print that implies it does exist in good quality. For the time being I have to rely on Jaycee Fairgounds and Winterland performances to document what was one of Santana’s jazziest and finest line ups, the band that did Lotus and (more loosely) Welcome. This was the Santana band following the Miles Davis band to Japan about a week or two later and similar in its genre crunching, giving singer Leon Thomas some time for solo spots (including the Creator Has a Master Plan). In fact to my ears this is Santana at a very high peak with only downhill to go on the other side. A truly cosmic, inspired vision that still seems poorly documented due to the Lotus’s somewhat skewed angle on what happened during this tour.
Trikolon - Cluster
While so many early Germans were spacing and tripping out Kosmische style or following the British diversion on blues rock and hard rock, the occasional true progressive rock unit would raise its head, this time using The Nice and ELP as a very notes-heavy classical rock sort of inspiration. This was an extremely rare album until it was reissued and to some extent it’s not a surprise at it’s likely only to appeal to genre-ists who can take what is nearly an album long, vicious keyboard assault, in fact maybe only Wallenstein’s Blitzkrieg had a similar sort of approach. It all adds up to an album that’s perhaps a bit too one dimensional and certainly on the derivative side; however, there’s a strange psychdelic tinge to the production that you don’t tend to find on classical rock albums that makes it a bit more interesting and in that way you might compare it to the later Ejwuusl Wessaqhan.
Eagles s/t
Three singles on your debut album is definitely going to catapult you to no measure of success and it did start these guys on a tangent that I found strangely timely. I forgot to check the time on the CMT Crossroads performance by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant a couple weeks ago and came in right at the end (no worry, repeat later), only to get an Eagles interview and documentary instead, kind of cool since I’ve been listening to them quite a bit lately. They’re all around 60 now and not doing anything I’d find particularly interesting (I barely recognized Joe Walsh, who used to always crack me up in interviews) but they do talk about this album and “Take It Easy” and ”Witchy Woman” for a bit, an album that would sort of set their varying formulas on the table, with each successive album improving it quite a bit. For the most part, I found most of this debut fairly average, which was a completely different experience than “One of these Nights” but you still have to concede that from a commercial perspective this was a mighty shoe put forward.