Canned Heat – Live At Montreux 1973 + The Canned
Heat Story
Picture:
C Sound: B-/C+ Extras: D Concert: C+ Documentary: C+
Though
their peak time was brief, Canned Heat was one of the early Rock/Blues bands
(and white bands at that) and continued to be remembered as more than just a
one hit wonder. Songs like Going Up To The Country and On The Road Again defined the time, but
when their lead singer and friend Alan Wilson self-destructed in 1970, they lost
their momentum and a new feel for the decade arrived.
Canned Heat – Live At Montreux
1973 + The Canned Heat Story (2004) is a new DVD set from Eagle Eye that shows the
band back together in concert recovering from that loss and a too-short program
about them that starts off with superlatives about the band, then goes into a
tailspin only saved by blunt reflections of personal tragedy. Eventually, almost all the band members had
befallen various disturbing fates, but in 1973, they were trying to make a
comeback.
This
concert runs over and hour, is pretty good, but is not just the band in
action. The legendary blues icon
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown joins them for a few songs as a sort of payback for
their commitment to Blues and a big show of support for their comeback. It is very poignant and makes for one of the
better early concerts. I actually
reviewed the single disc before, a review you can find at this link with more
detail:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4241/Canned+Heat+–+Live+At+Montreux+1973+(DTS)
The
latter documentary allows the viewer to see what was next, which is why it was
a smart move for Eagle to include this with the concert for a complete look at
an amazing band.
The 1.78
X 1 image on the concert DVD is from old 1.33 X 1 professional analog video,
likely NTSC, and shows it age. It can be
a little muddy, yet the anamorphic approach ads a solidness and color
consistency non-anamorphic would not have allowed. The 1.33 X 1 image on the documentary is very
soft and sometimes harder to watch, but has rare footage and concert
performances.
Both
offer 2-channel soundtracks, PCM 16-bit/48kHz 2.0 Stereo on the concert,
stereo-boosted Dolby Digital 2.0 from the original mono track. The concert also has Dolby Digital 5.1 and
very slightly better DTS 5.1, but they can only improve on the PCM so much
since the recoding is so old. There are
no extras, but it is a more than satisfactory set of library quality for music
fans and historians with classic music to boot.
- Nicholas Sheffo
