Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Stamping Ground

In America the golden season for music festivals ended up in late '69 with the Altamont's accidents, a few months after Woodstock. In the early seventies in Europe there was still space for some "good vibrations", as proved by the Kralingen Pop festival, near Rotterdam, on June 1970. The event, documented by the movie Stamping Ground, is often remembered as the European Woodstock, because of the presence of many artists that had already played on that historical three-days concert, like Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Country Joe. But the Kralingen festival also showed how vital was the British scene on that period, offering great perfomances by bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, East Of Eden, Caravan, Fairport Convention, Family, T. Rex...
On this clip The Family play a tremendous version of one of their best tunes, the opening track of the album A Song For Me. The great vocalist Roger Chapman, in particular, offered a memorable, impressive and powerful perfomance.
Tyrannosaurus Rex were at a turning-point in their career. They had just shortened their name, that freaky guy on percussions, Steve Took, had just been replaced by Mickey Finn, leaving Marc Bolan as the only chief of the band. Marc embraced the electric guitar, his success as glam-popstar was just around the corner, but this song still has the naive freshness of his earlier compositions.




Bye

Mirco

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