Popgala '73, Sporthal de Vliegermolen, Voorburg, Netherlands, 3-9-1973, Part 1: Country Gazette, Chi Coltrane & Kaz Lux

I recently wrote here that I'm putting more effort into posting complete rock festivals, since recordings of those seem to forgotten. Here's the start of another one: Popgala '73. This is a lesser known rock festival, and I'd never heard of it until very recently (as I write this in August 2023). But there are two aspects that make it worthy of posting here: excellent sound quality, and an interesting list of musical acts. This is the first of eight albums, featuring all the music I could find from the festival.

This festival has faded into obscurity so much that I had a hard time finding much written about it. But here's what I've managed to gather. In 1960, an annual music festival called Grand Gala du Disque began in the Netherlands. It was put together by several big Dutch record companies, and included the presentation of the Edison Award, which was a kind of Grammy Award for the Netherlands. By 1973, many considered this yearly festival had gotten too old fashioned. So Popgala '73 was conceived as a kind of rival, with a more rock focus. The audience was small, only about 3,000 people. The main intended audience was TV. About three hours of the festival were shown on Dutch TV a few days after it ended.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of problems with the way the festival was managed. (There would be no Popgala '74.) One problem was the list of performers kept changing. I found an early poster showing the acts originally booked, which you can see here. 

Out of those, Roxy Music, J. J. Cale, and Stevie Wonder were later dropped from the bill. Apparently, Bryan Ferry, lead singer of Roxy Music, came down with a throat infection. J. J. Cale is still commonly thought to have performed at the festival, but I was eventually able to find out that he canceled an entire European tour this was supposed to be a part of, due to fear of flying internationally, after a bunch of airplane hijackings in 1972. I don't know why Stevie Wonder didn't take part. Additionally, Ringo Starr was supposed to be the emcee, but apparently he wanted more money than what the festival backers were willing to give him.

Later on, some other acts were named and then cancelled. Those include Elton John, Donovan, the Temptations, T. Rex, Dr. Hook, Billy Preston, and Wishbone Ash. But after some last minute scrambling, enough big names were included to roughly match the star power of the original billing.

Here are the acts I have at least some music for, sorted into the albums I've made:
Country Gazette, Chi Coltrane & Kaz Lux
Ry Cooder
Eagles
Supersister & Slade
Argent & Colin Blunstone
Livin' Blues & Rory Gallagher
Faces
Who

Additionally, I've seen photos of Gary Glitter performing at this festival, but I haven't come across any of his music. Perhaps he didn't allow any of his songs to be broadcast on TV. I'm not upset at the loss, given how he was later convicted for serious sex crimes.

One problem I've had in putting this together is that I don't know the order of the performers (with a few exceptions). The festival took place over two days, and at least I'm pretty sure which days which performances took place, though there might have been some changes. So I've tried to group the acts together in ways that create albums of reasonable lengths, with hopefully similar musical styles. 

This first album combines sets from three lesser known acts: Country Gazette, Chi Coultrane, and Kaz Lux. You may not be that interested in them. That's why I'm breaking this festival up into eight albums, so you can grab just the ones you want.

Here are their Wikipedia pages, if you want to know more: 

Country Gazette (band) - Wikipedia

Chi Coltrane - Wikipedia 

Kaz Lux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kaz Lux is a Dutch singer, and unfortunately his Wikipedia entry is in Dutch. However, all the songs he sang here were in English, including a cover of a Tim Hardin song ("Reason to Believe").

Another problem I've had is that I gathered the material here from different sources, so I often had to guess about the song order. As an example, I found most of the Country Gazette set from one source, but the song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" came from a different source. I also don't know how many songs I've missed because they got cut from the TV broadcast. It's possible the Country Gazette set is complete, but I think it's highly likely to Chi Coltrane and Kaz Lux ones are missing songs. 

By the way, although the sound quality of all the songs from this festival is excellent, I used the UVR5 audio editing program on the vast majority of them to boost the volume of the lead vocals relative to the instruments. 

This album is 43 minutes long.

Note that I have an extra digit in the numbering of the songs because there's a 100 or more songs from this festival.

001 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Country Gazette)
002 talk (Country Gazette)
003 Don't Let Your Deal Go Down (Country Gazette)
004 talk (Country Gazette)
005 Tried So Hard (Country Gazette)
006 talk (Country Gazette)
007 Fallen Eagle (Country Gazette)
008 talk (Country Gazette)
009 Keep On Pushing (Country Gazette)
010 talk (Country Gazette)
011 Orange Blossom Special [Instrumental] (Country Gazette)
012 I'm Feeling (Chi Coltrane)
013 Thunder and Lightning (Chi Coltrane)
014 talk (Chi Coltrane)
015 I Will Not Dance (Chi Coltrane)
016 talk (Kaz Lux)
017 People (Kaz Lux)
018 talk (Kaz Lux)
019 Reason to Believe (Kaz Lux)
020 talk (Kaz Lux)
021 Alpha and Omega (Kaz Lux)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15645232/Popgla73_01_CountryGzetteChiCltraneKzLux.zip.html

The cover photo of Chi Coltrane comes from this exact concert. The font for the text is based on the concert poster.