Description

Yes finally. The classing Deep Purple California Jam 1974 concert finally arrived on dvd in 2006. Brilliant Concert no argument about that! The musicianship is unrivalled. This time its complete with the missing song ‘Lay Down Stay Down’. However I have had the California Jam video for 20 years and bought this thinking it would be a major step up in quality but the audio quality is decent, enhanced for surround from a mono or stereo original, but for unknown reasons the video quality is drastically inferior to any previous release. This is ostensibly from the original ABC television 2 video tapes, but, it actually looks like a very poor kinescope (video to film transfer) with a very stutter appearance during rapid movement. There is also a sound/picture synchronisation problem right after the layer change break, I.E. for the first 2 to 3 minutes of ‘Space Truckin’. This release was mastered by Deep Purple's present-day management, which is based in Australia. What were they using as a source? Though original 1980's home video releases (such as the UK videocassette on BBC Video and the Japanese videocassette on TOEI Video) were missing ‘Lay Down,Stay Down’ at least they had the full picture quality. What went wrong on this release? I was alarmed when I heard that Eagle Rock Entertainment was going to be the U.S.A. licensee for this Deep Purple archive series, because a number of Eagle Rock's dvd releases had sound/picture synchronisation problems. My concern was justified. If you don’t have the vhs then you must have this anyway. Ritchie Blackmores blowing up the stage is priceless and his effortless no looking at the fret board guitar playing is astounding- what a champion! Track listing: 1. Arrival At The Airport 2. Burn 3. Might Just Take Your Life 4. Lay Down Stay Down 5. Mistreated 6. Smoke On The Water 7. You Fool No One 8. Space Truckin 9. Burn-bonus material 10. Might Just Take Your Life-bonus material 11. Commentaries