LIVE IN CALIFORNIA 74

This concert video shows at the same time some "good" and "bad" things about the early to mid seventies Rock music played by some bands: by one part, some very good musicians playing and singing very well, some very good music, and by the other part, also some musical excess and "make show" excess.

This line-up of DEEP PURPLE also had very good musicians, and this time with the addition of David Coverdale on vocals and Glenn Hughes on bass and vocals. Both have very powerful vocals and the combination of their talents was then a different thing to the band which obviously made it sound a bit different. Hughes tended to sing in a higher register and with some Soul and Blues music influences, while Coverdale had a lower Hard Rock register. Both are very good singers and the band with them in the line-up sounded different but good.

This concert video has some very high points, which are the songs "Burn", "Might Just Take Your Life", "Mistreated" and "Smoke On The Water", all very well played with the combination of Coverdale`s and Hughes`s vocals. But after all these songs were played, musical excess and bad playing started to appear, first with the fragmented versions of "You Fool No One/The Mule" (which also includes a very good drums solo by Ian Paice), plus the very long, very fragmented, very boring and very noisy version of "Space Truckin¨" on which there are several solos by Glen Hughes on bass and vocals (good solos using a wah-wah pedal, I think), Jon Lord playing two synths and the organ (still good in parts but also noisy), and with the "main star" in this song being Ritchie Blackmore`s fragmented guitar solos, making a lot of noise, and finally destroying several cheap copies of "Fender Stratocaster guitars", and also exploding some Marshall amplifiers and speakers. Maybe it was funny for a lot members of the audience and for a lot of fans of the band, and maybe for the band members too, but for me it was not funny to see this done in front of the TV cameras, with one of these cameras being also destroyed by Blackmore. A show of excess, in my opinion. But...it was the typical excess in those times... done by some bands.

Well. It was not a bad concert, but it was marred by excess. And apart from all the excess, this line-up of the band sounded very well in general.