SPACE RITUAL

This was my first experience with Hawkwind. I like 2 or 3 of their studio albums but think they never did better than Space Ritual. My first reaction to the music herein was that it was just punk rock with spacey sound effects. I was expecting more. But after listening to it for a year or two, I had more respect for the music and heard things that I ignored the first time. I haven't heard any of the other live albums from Hawkwind, but I can't imagine they could be better than this. It wasn't much of a shock to discover that the songs here are superior to the studio versions. "Born To Go", "Upside Down" and "Orgone Accumulator" were new songs apparently. I have to give a shout out to their tall dancer Stacia; she had some of the nicest pair of boobies on Earth. She probably had a nice personality too.

The first thing that really blew me away here was the bass playing. If you only knew Lemmy from his Motorhead stuff, you would have no idea how good of a bass player he was. Just listen to "Lord Of Light" where he almost sounds like he's soloing half the time. I don't think Hawkwind ever recovered from his loss. Nik Turner, on the other hand, here sounds so low in the mix you barely notice him. The drums, guitars and vocals seem to drown out his sax and flute playing. The synthesizers and electronics of Dik Mik and Dell Dettmar aren't overdone and compliment the music nicely. Robert Calvert here reads the poetry of Michael Moorcock and it's usually well done, especially on the apocalyptic "Sonic Attack". Oh, there is some singing, drumming and guitar playing too.

Other highlights include "7 By 7" and "Space Is Deep", where I just love the combination of guitar, bass and vocals at the end. Spacey goodness. The songs "Brainstorm", "Time We Left This World Today" and "Orgone" were supposeedly edited from longer versions. It's odd that the band's only hit song "Silver Machine" wasn't included. As far as the sound quality goes for this live album...I've heard better and I've heard worse. I have the older CD release which doesn't have any of the bonus songs on later versions. A very good live set from this band. 3.5 but I'll round it off to 4 stars.