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Part of the British blues explosion (and one of our "top five" finds in 2021), here they are live on the German show Beat Club performing a great number from their debut album:
...in my opinion, anyway. Glad to hear yours in the comments (click on the category, "Great Moments in Obscure Rock 'n' Roll" [in which this post appears] to see this year's selections from which to choose).
British blues rock band of the late 1960s, an earlier incarnation included Paul Kossoff and Simon Kirke, who later found great success with the band Free; the lineup that recorded this number from the band's one-and-only album included only one musician who went on to later fame and fortune: Rod Price, the slide guitarist for Foghat in the 1970s.
Adderley is best-know as a jazz saxophonist, but he did record this live rocking blues number, which appears on the memorably titled album The Black Messiah:
We last featured this eclectic California band last year, and this is another number, an instrumental, from the same album, featuring the versatile David Lindley:
British psychedelic/space rock band, whose style was probably a few years too late. Still, this song surely would have been a sensation in the summer of 1968 (especially if they cut the last few minutes!):
Last featured in 2020, this British band, produced by Bill Wyman, produced several albums in the early 1970s; this song also comes from the best, second album:
Several members of this British band went on to greater fame and fortune with Uriah Heep (Ken Hensley, Lee Kerslake) and Jethro Tull (John Glascock); this is their version of an Elton John song:
Eclectic Welsh rock band, who took their name from the 1966 Bob Dylan album, they did not enjoy much success, but recorded some memorable tunes, including this one:
This will be the final installment of classic blues performances that were later covered by rock 'n' roll performers. The regular "Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll" will resume the first Saturday in September.
Bukka White (1906-1977) was another Delta bluesman, who served time in the infamous Parchman Farm prison in Mississippi, memorialized in his probably best-known song:
In 1957, the blues and jazz pianist Mose Allison did his own version, which had a more direct influence on later covers:
Robert Johnson (1911-1938) may be the most famous of the bluesmen of the first half of the 20th-century, and many of his songs have been recorded by rock musicians from the 1960s onwards. Here's the original of the song Cream made famous for a new generation:
Little is known about William "Big Foot" Harris, who recorded a dozen or so songs in the late 1920s, of which this has become the best-known over time:
The greatest covers of this number are all by Rory Gallagher, of which there are many versions on YouTube. Here's one of my favorites, from 1976:
In summer 2018, I did a series on the blues roots of rock music; as I wrote then: "All the best rock 'n' roll is indebted through and through to the blues music produced by African-Americans, first in the American South in the first half of the 20th-century and then moving a bit north (to cites like Chicago) after WWII." Thanks to the sickness of American apartheid, it largely fell to British and Irish musicians to recapture it and popularize it, although a couple of American bands (e.g., Canned Heat, The Allman Brothers Band) helped. For the rest of the summer, I'll feature some of the classic blues originals, along with some of the more famous covers. We'll start with what was the "Bull-Doze Blues" by Henry Thomas (1874-1930), but became far more famous in the 1960s as "Going Up the Country."
And here's the CannedHeat version (very indebted to the original), which became a hit in 1968:
Foghat emerged from the British Savoy Brown Blues & Boogie Band, and really made it big in America in the mid-1970s, when they were a staple of stadium rock concerts (and, allegedly, one of the inspirations for the rock satire This is Spinal Tap). Here's a terrific live performance of one of their signature songs, complete with the long Rod Price slide guitar intro (the video quality is uneven, alas):
This was the best Deep Purple line-up, recorded live from a tour in Scandinavia after the Machine Head album: Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Jon Lord on keyboards, Ian Gillan on vocals.
Recorded in Stockholm, this is a pretty raw version of the blues classic, the one an unknown Jimi Hendrix played just three years before on a club stage in London, leading Eric Clapton to walk off after being upstaged:
Excellent footage of the whole band on this early performance for Beat Club in 1969, before legal threats by the actual CTA forced the band to shorten their name (big mistake by the actual CTA!). Most of the band members had been students at DePaul University in Chicago. Gives a nice sense of how good a guitarist the late Terry Kath was.
Zeppelin manager Peter Grant generally kept Zeppelin off television programs, but this is rare video of a live recording for a Danish radio program of one of Zeppelin's best blues-ripoffs--complete with Jimmy Page breaking out the violin bow:
As long as we're on a Southern Rock theme, this performance of "Free Bird" at the Oakland Colosseum is basically the epitome of 1970s stadium rock. Just a few months later, lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt and guitarist Steve Gaines (the one with the short beard) were killed in a plane crash. Indeed, now the only surviving members of the band from that day are guitarist Gary Rossington (the one playing slide guitar) and drummer Artimus Pyle. (That huge Confederate flag in the background is certainly jarring now, but it generated little controversy back then, although might have something to do with the striking racial composition of the audience!)
Continuing with our new series of live rock 'n' roll video clips, we turn to the Marshall Tucker Band from South Carolina. Never quite as successful as the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tucker still contributed some staples of "Southern rock," including this rousing live performance of "Ramblin," with the late Toy Caldwell on lead guitar.
We'll take a break for a couple of months from our usual "obscure" fare in favor of some great live performances, mostly of non-obscure songs, but hopefully some readers haven't seen some of these clips. We'll start with a gem from the Allman Brothers, from their famous show at the Filmore East in 1971, not long before Duane Allman (on slide guitar) died in a motorcyle accident. And that's Dickey Betts, of course, on lead guitar.
Israeli hard rock and sometimes psychedelic band, active from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, sometimes under the name "The Churchills." This is a representative number from their harder rock phase:
After Mountain, bass player (and record producer) Pappalardi teamed up with the Japanese band formerly known as Blues Creation to record a forgettable album, except for the lead track, which isn't bad:
Part of the British blues explosion in the 1960s, this is far and away their best-known number, and what a great one it is (you'll have it on replay I predict):
Another great number (this from their second album) from the Philadelphia hard rock trio that deserved to be much more successful than, alas, they were:
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