Earth, Wind & Fire In Concert (1982 Eagle DVD/Reissue)
Picture: C Sound: B- Extras: C- Concert: C+
In their
prime, Earth, Wind & Fire was one of the best live bands around and their
reign from 1973 to 1979 made them unstoppable, even during the Disco era. However, things became dicey by 1980 and the
band started to retract in scope, as well as add non-musical concepts that did
not help what would be a decline in the 1980s.
Michael Schultz (Cooley High,
Car Wash) had worked with the band
before on the ill-fated film version of Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978, The Bee Gees/Peter Frampton bomb)
where they were the only beneficiaries pulling off a big hit version of The
Beatles’ Got To Get You Into My Life. Earth,
Wind & Fire In Concert was taped in 1982 for cable and it is not the
band at its best.
Songs
include:
1)
Let Your Feelings Show
2)
In The Stone
3)
Fantasy
4)
Sing A Song
5)
Reasons
6)
Remember The Children/Where Have
All the Flowers Gone/Shining Star/Keep Your Head In The Sky/Devotion
7)
Gratitude
8)
That’s The Way Of The World
9)
I’ve Had Enough
10) Jupiter (The Battle)
11) Let’s Groove
The
voices are there, but too often, they are all playing and singing these songs
too fast, like they have somewhere else they’d like to be than entertaining the
audience and that is opposite of what their reputation had been to that
time. Then they add theatrical bits for
which the Peter Gabriel Genesis would have nothing to worry about. The lamest is the band using the power of
audience participation to zap away an evil Darth Vader-like figure (talking
poor wrestle speak) looking like a Parliament/Funkadelic version thereof,
though the outfit maybe be the actual one used in Brian De Palma’s wacky 1974
Rock Opera The Phantom Of The Paradise,
with Paul Williams in the title role.
Either way, it is cheap, cheesy and way below them.
Then
there is The latest album at the time and its ever-annoying title song, Let’s Groove, a terrible disaster that
lead to the end of their chart success and along with one of the worst Music
Videos ever made (thankfully not included here) a form of professional career
suicide that helped Kool & The Gang overtake them before they
self-destructed on non-soul wrecks like Joanna,
Misled, Fresh, Cherish and Stone Love. Get
Down On It had more edge that Let’s
Groove, both 1982 hits, and that is where the nightmare began.
Michael
Jackson’s Thriller was also the same
year, putting the final nail in the coffin of original R&B that Disco had
eroded, so you can imagine that this is an odd concert indeed. Now, reissued by Eagle as the previous
company handling the DVD had to fold, you can see for yourself.
The 1.33
X 1 videotaped image is soft, hazy, shot on analog NTSC videotape and is just
not that good. The DTS 5.1 and lesser
Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 mixes do their best to boost he older stereo, with
the DTS a little clearer, but the audio is far from the best the band has
sounded between a few SA-CD and one HD-DVD so far. A weak four-frame bio of the band is the only
extra.
For the
band on HD-DVD (a title soon to be issued on Blu-ray) with Chicago, try this
link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4968/Chicago+and+Earth,+Wind+&+Fire+–+Live+At+The+Greek+Theater+(HD-DVD)
- Nicholas Sheffo
