Monday, August 14, 2023

California Jam, Ontario Motor Speedway, Ontario, CA, 4-6-1974, Part 2: Earth, Wind & Fire

This is the second set from the 1974 California Jam festival. If you want to know more about the festival as a whole, read my write-up to the first set, by Rare Earth.

Earth, Wind & Fire were a somewhat unusual choice for inclusion in this festival. In later years, they would have lots of hits all over the world. In fact, just one year after this concert they would have a Number One hit in the US with the song "Shining Star." But in 1974, they were mainly known to black audiences, with a few minor hits on the soul charts. Whereas the California Jam audience was mostly white, largely consisting of hard rock fans wanting to hear the likes of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Still, the TV broadcast of the concert, helped expose Earth, Wind and Fire to a larger audience.

It appears the recording of their set is complete. However, their song selection was rather unusual, since they didn't play their two recent soul hits, "Mighty Mighty" and "Kalimba Story." Their one other soul hit so far was "Evil," which they did play.

This set remains officially unreleased. The bootleg I used as a source sounded very good, but the vocals were a bit low in the mix, so I fixed that using the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is 42 minutes long.

Also, note that I start the track listing with 05 instead of 01. That's so you can drop all the different sets from this festival into one folder to make it one continuous listening.

05 Energy [Instrumental] (Earth, Wind & Fire)
06 People (Earth, Wind & Fire)
07 talk (Earth, Wind & Fire)
08 Time Is on Your Side (Earth, Wind & Fire)
09 talk (Earth, Wind & Fire)
10 Bass Solo [Instrumental] (Earth, Wind & Fire)
11 talk (Earth, Wind & Fire)
12 Evil (Earth, Wind & Fire)
13 talk (Earth, Wind & Fire)
14 C'mon Children (Earth, Wind & Fire)
15 talk (Earth, Wind & Fire)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15571521/CalifrniaJmOntrioMtorSpeedwyOntarioCA__4-6-1974_02EarthWndFre.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

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