{"id":9452,"date":"2009-05-31T13:57:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-31T13:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=9452"},"modified":"2015-10-24T13:58:42","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T13:58:42","slug":"dvd-review-johnny-winter-live-through-the-70s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2009\/05\/31\/dvd-review-johnny-winter-live-through-the-70s\/","title":{"rendered":"DVD Review: Johnny Winter &#8212; Live Through the 70s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.musoscribe.com\/images\/johnny_winter_live_through_the_70s.jpg\" alt=\"Johnny Winter - Live Through the 70s\" width=\"169\" height=\"240\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The DVD kicks off with a true oddity, a performance that is bizarre in any number of ways. This excellent-quality Danish TV clip from 1970 finds Winter playing with his original blues rhythm section (Tommy Shannon on bass and Uncle John Turner on drums), but they don&#8217;t kick off with a blues tune. Instead they play a new and (then-) unreleased song by Johnny&#8217;s brother Edgar, present on keyboards. The jazz-rock fusion &#8220;Frankenstein&#8221; would eventually become Edgar&#8217;s most popular song, and in its released version would prominently feature Edgar&#8217;s synthesizer playing. But here with Johnny, it&#8217;s all organ and electric piano. The performance is built around a drum duel between Edgar and Turner; Johnny plays an oddly cheap-looking Epiphone electric guitar, not the trademark Gibson Firebird.<\/p>\n<p>The next set&#8211;from a few months later&#8211;finds Johnny in a setting more familiar to his fans. Easing toward his rock phase, here he performs lightning-fast guitar runs on a trio of songs. Footage from a post-concert appearance on a local TV show called <i>Detroit Tubeworks<\/i> is interspersed among the clips; this manner of presentation was a good call by the compilers of this set: the full <i>Detroit Tubeworks<\/i> set airing circulates (in lesser quality) among collectors, but is a bit tedious, and includes some painfully out-of-tune bass playing by Randy Hobbs. Still, fans should be grateful for <i>any<\/i> footage of Johnny speaking. As this writer can attest (and as <a class=\"body\" href=\"http:\/\/www.musoscribe.com\/features\/johnny_winter.shtml\" rel=\"nofollow\">this interview\/feature on Johnny Winter<\/a> illustrates) Johnny is a man of few words.<\/p>\n<p>The <i>Don Kirshner&#8217;s Rock Concert<\/i> footage is of a style familiar to anyone who ever enjoyed that program. The canned applause layered on top of actual audience made for a cheesy feel (did every act really have to get a reception like The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl?), but Winter&#8217;s performances of &#8220;Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo&#8221; and &#8220;Stone County&#8221; are winners. Performing here fronting his rock trio (Johnny Winter And), his take on &#8220;Hootchie Koo&#8221; is fast-paced, owing more to Rick Derringer&#8217;s version than his own studio outing.<\/p>\n<p>In 1979 Winter appeared on the German <i>Rockpalast<\/i> program; he&#8217;s returned to that show a number of times over the years, most recently in 2006. Here he plays a fiery version of &#8220;Walking By Myself&#8221; (from <i>White Hot and Blue<\/i>) plus &#8220;Mississippi Blues&#8221; and a cover of &#8220;Suzie Q&#8221;, Dale Hawkins by way of Creedence Clearwater Revival.<\/p>\n<p>This no-frills disc is a worthwhile purchase for fans of Johnny Winter, as well as a good career-sampling introduction for those interested in learning a bit about this unique and splendid musician.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The DVD kicks off with a true oddity, a performance that is bizarre in any number of ways. This excellent-quality Danish TV clip from 1970 finds Winter playing with his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,19,25,49,62,65],"tags":[1204],"class_list":["post-9452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blues","category-compilation","category-dvd","category-new-release","category-rawk","category-review","tag-johnny-winter","cat-9-id","cat-19-id","cat-25-id","cat-49-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9452"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9454,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452\/revisions\/9454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}