Live Music On German Television

 

From time to time I come back to a series of live performances in German television I started a couple of years ago. The recent days I found a clip from an appearance by The Byrds in 1971. It is an almost 14 minutes long version of Eight Miles High but frankly speaking it has nothing more in common with the original than a few chords but shows a side of the band that is seldom heard. This version is like The Byrds jamming with Little Feat and or Grateful Dead. What makes this song great is to listen to the superb bass played by Skip Battin and the guitar picking by Clarence White. It is a kind of stuff they don't do in this days anymore.

Uschi Nerke, the little lady appearing at the start of the songs tells the story behind the song: five years before, 8 Miles High had been banned from US radio. The song they're performing is a new version from the album Untitled.

Beat Club Classics

I took me a few days off the road and the bars and I had the time to search for some old music. While I was searching the Internet for the old bands of the 60s I got a link to an old series in German television. You might know Top of the Pops and  we tried to make the same thing on our TV. The monthly series was called Beat Club and they had a mixture of chart music but they always tried to go their own way in presenting some new music. What I found was a special they made. They rented the Marquee Club in London, invited some artists and let them play live. It was a very raw sound it it brought me back to the basics of rock music. Listen to this raw and intensive versions of songs by Geno Washington, Clive Bennet, Jimi Hendrix, The Smoke and The Who. For me it was 30 minutes of pleasure. Sadly that they don't do it in this way today.

Enjoy and have a good week folks.

PS: I found some really good episodes of this series that I would like to introduce to you throughout the next weeks. Most of them played live. It's not only a sentimental journey to a time long gone by but it made fun to me to see this series again I grew up with it and what made me open for a lot of music I didn't knew before.