Pink Floyd "Colmar" June 22, 1974 Parc Des Expositions Colmar, France 1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond 2. Raving and Drooling 3. Echoes 4. You Gotta Be Crazy* *11-14-74 Harvested's "Colmar" My Rating: 2.5 Piggies (out of 5) No offense to RonToon or the fine folks at Harvested, but I gotta admit...."Colmar" isn't one of my favorite discs. There are much better 1974 shows available. This CD seems like a strange choice for Harvested as they have picked the best of the best so far for the tours that they have archived. Shows like Bowl de Luna (Hollywood Bowl) and Animal Instincts (Oakland Coliseum) are essential recordings that every Floyd fan should have in their collection. I don't feel that Colmar fits into that category. I think maybe 11/14/74 would have been a better choice to document the 1974 tour. Harvested has certainly done better artwork than Colmar's, but then again an average show deserves average packaging ;). I am impressed all the Harvested t-shirts Roger seems to have. I gotta get me one of those! Now there's an idea Ron, print up some Harvested shirts for the Echoes folks. I'd be first in line to buy one! ;) For those not familiar with the Colmar CD, it's a single disc set featuring only three songs form the show: Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Raving and Drooling and Echoes. A copy of the complete show has been circulating on tape (recently CDR) for years. The reason I assume Harvested didn't release it is due all of the speed problems that plague the tape. The tape speeds up and slows down through all of the Dark Side of the Moon set, which is a shame as the set isn't bad. Anyway, back to the CD..... The highlight of the disc. This is the earliest recording of the track available (the song debuted on June 18 in Tolouse. No tapes of the show exist). The song is in it's early stages and the lyrics have yet to be finalized: "But if it's too much to bear, I'll be joining you there..." "Come on you boy child, taker of chances, come on you <..>, you user of trances and shine!" Unfortunately, the sound is distant and the lyrics are hard to decipher. There are a few other alternate lyrics, but I can make them out. One thing I can make out is Dave's guitar playing, especially right before the final verse. In a word....WOW! This track is proof of why Dave is one of the best guitar players around and is definately one of the highlights of the disc. The song doesn't end with the coda of Syd Barrett music. They must of added that during the British Winter Tour. An average performance of an average song. I'm not a big fan of Raving and Drooling anyways.... A solid performance here. Nothing spectacular, but good nonetheless. This is from the 11/14/74 show at Empire Pool, released as "Black Holes in the Sky" about five or six years back by Great Dane. I think the sound quality is better than the Great Dane CD, it sound a little cleaner, and I would have liked to see Harvested release this show instead of Colmar, but that's just my opinion. Again, not a favorite track, but much better than Raving and Drooling. This song is more interesting than Raving and Drooling as it underwent the most revisions over the course of the 1974-74 tours, one of the best versions possibly being the Ivor Wynn show (6/28/75 - Holes in the Sky RoIO). Not to slight the work of Rontoon and his Harveted team, they have done a TREMEDOUS job, but to me, this is the least impressive disc that they have released so far. On the plus side, it does get some relatively uncirculated music out there. On the minus side, it's just not a very interesting listen. I certainly would like to hear what others out there think as this is all just my opinion. Now Eclipse.....there's a great show. Review to come..... ________________________________________________________________________________ Greetings all, In regard to Colmar, which was reviewed for us, I'd like to add just a couple of things: > No offense to RonToon or the fine folks at Harvested, but I gotta > admit...."Colmar" isn't one of my favorite discs. It happens to be one of my favorites. I really like the performance, and that of the filler..... > > A solid performance here. Nothing spectacular, but good nonetheless. Oh but the middle section IS spectacular! Of all the roios I have of Echoes, this is one of my all-time favorites (it ranks right up there with the Hollywood Bowl '72 version). Mostly because of this middle section. Gilmour makes sounds with the guitar that I have never heard on any other version of Echoes. It's spine-tingling. Normally the middle section of Echoes is a bit boring for me and really borders on "music." Not here. > Here's another first for me. Of all the versions of YGBC that I have heard, none of them has the middle synth section that later appeared on Dogs. No show before this one, no show after this one, has any kind of middle section whatsoever. The first half of the song usually just ends and goes straight into the second half. But what a surprise on this one! There is indeed a middle section! I'd be curious to know if there are any other roios of this song with featuring the middle section. > On the minus side, it's just not a very interesting listen. I certainly disagree....IMO, a most interesting listen indeed! Thank you Harvested! _____________________________________________________________________________ Review : COLMAR Ð FRENCH TOUR 1974 (Harvested 002) - 1 CD Colmar, France, the 22nd of June, 1974 * Empire Pool, Wembley, the 14th of November 1974 Shine On You Crazy Diamond Ð Raving & Drooling (early version of "Sheep") Ð Echoes Ð Gotta Be Crazy * (early version of "Dogs") (About 73 mn) THE PERFORMANCE : This was one of the very first time* that Shine On You Crazy Diamond (and Raving & Drooling, which was the prototype version of "Sheep") were performed. The Floyd premiered this new material, in my country, the France ! ;-) *the fourth time to be precise. SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND : the song debuted on June 18 in Toulouse. No tapes of the show seem to exist. The song is in its early stages (the 2 parts of the song are stuck together) and the lyrics have yet to be finalized. There are some alternate lyrics, but I can make them out. Unfortunately, since the sound is distant and my English is not very good, the lyrics are hard to decipher (but they are different to the "final" version). There is no saxophone on "Shine On", therefore Nick is doing a synth solo instead of the sax part. There is no "Shine On... number 9 part" (the funeral march), they re-played the hypnotic "sax riff" of the sixth part and then the "jazz/funky" jam of the eighth part which closed the song. RAVING & DROOLING is good. No particular comment to add. ECHOES : sorry it won't help you to make your opinion about that one, but I don't like their post '72 versions of Echoes. Although there is not a lack of energy for this performance of "Echoes" I don't know why "Echoes" is not as good as in 71 or 72 and _where_ is exactly the problem but they had lost _something_. Although Dick Parry was here, there is NO saxophone during "Echoes", such as the '75 performances. Some nice weird effects during the "seagulls-like" section. GOTTA BE CRAZY : starts with the usual guitar intro (but the guitar sounds as an acoustic guitar) and with a synth intro. The tempo of the song is slower and the song sounds more "acoustic" than the '75 performance of this song (and IMO this version is better than the '75 versions). The melody is sung differently. The lyrics are different (even different to the 1975 versions) but I was unable to decipher them (because of my English ;) and the sound is too distant :( There is a good instrumental part with Dave singing "ouuuuuuh ouhhh" like the vocal section of Atom Heart Mother (when he did the choir himself with Rick) before his nice guitar solo and the "And when you loose control..." vocal section. Contrary to the '75 versions of this song, they do the long synth part of the song with some great works by Dave and Rick (= the slow long part where we can hear the dogs, from the "Animals" LP). In an nutshell, an excellent "prototype" version. THE SOUND QUALITY : VG+ The crow is rather quiet during the songs, well-disciplined should I say (applause when Roger start to sing the second vocal section of "Shine On", hands clapping during the beginning of Raving & Drooling). Unfortunately the sound is distant. This is not too annoying for the instruments but the voices are too distant. Therefore the alternate lyrics are too hard to decipher. This is not an essential RoIO, but beyond the historic interest of this material it was a pleasure to discover one of the very first performance of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", my favorite Floyd's song, just after "Echoes" ! :-) and a very good version of Gotta Be Crazy. I would rate the sound quality : VG+ for the "Colmar material" and "Gotta Be Crazy" (although the sound quality is _slightly_ better than the "Colmar material").