The Rolling Stones - Knebworth Fair '76

For a long time I tried to avoid listening to mid-seventies live recordings of my favorite band, the Rolling Stones. I considered 1975, 1976 and 1977 the low points of their live career. The lack of good organization, too much heroin and cocaine and basically bad sound and/or bad performances kept me away from those shows. I still think those tours were not as good as the ones before (1972, 1973) and after (amazing 1978), nevertheless I started appreciating them. And great playing by new Stones guitar player, Ronnie Wood, straight from the Faces.

While browsing through my bootleg collection, I found an old DVD release of the Knebworth Fair show from 1976. It's incomplete, but the sound is okay and, in overall, video is highly enjoyable. I can recommend this release :-) On the other hand, it's quite short, clocking at 56 minutes only. And it contains a lot of snippets of other songs that are not shown here which can be a little bit irritating.


Among Stones' standards (like "Tumbling Dice", "Street Fighting Man" or "Honky Tonk Women") we get two rock and roll tunes ("Star Star", also known as "Starfucker", which could be easily a Chuck Berry track, it certainly sounds so, and good old "Route 66") and two great blues songs (Wolf's "Little Red Rooster" and lenghty "Midnight Rambler").

Guitars by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are high in the mix and really deserve to be so. Especially Ronnie's fills and solos are tasty: I love his slide guitar work on "Midnight Rambler" and solos on "Wild Horses" and "Tumbling Dice". Sometimes straight and to-the-point, more often lazy, laid-out and relaxed: he sounds there as good as in the old Faces days, just plays less and feels comfortable with that.


The only Stone that let me down was Mick Jagger. He failed at everything really (though the crowd seemed to enjoy his stage presence): hair, clothes (oh damn!), dancing and singing. Well, no, not singing really: he was howling and growling all the time, but it just wasn't fun.

If you don't know the Stones material too well, avoid this at all prices. One of the worst possible introductions to the band ;) If you like them, though, and have enough of earlier days work, get this. Not as good as you might think but still watching it is a very nice way of spending your next evening. "Little Red Rooster" is sexy and worth the price of the whole set. :)