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ODIN Live at the Maxim
This live concert is an impressive documentation of Odin, captured at the birth of the band’s search for its individual identity. The four musicians had agreed to cast in their lots and devote themselves to playing progressive rock professionally. This was the plan. Rob Terstall, Ray Brown and Stuart Fordham had played together in the band Honest Truth and got along well personally and musically. The recent addition of organist Jeff Beer opened up new possibilities and changed the band chemistry. Their plan to create something unique and original presented quite a challenge and exciting as it was, the outcome was uncertain. Would it be possible to make their plan a reality? Their selection of repertoire quickly showed that Odin was not geared towards the mainstream sounds of the day, but was drawn to the progressive mainstays of the time; Frank Zappa and The Mothers, Robert Fripp’s King Crimson, Yes, Soft Machine, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant, John McLaughlin and Quatermass.
“Odin was a group of top flight soloists, each with an insatiable musical appetite, each looking for a challenge. We wanted to get onstage as quickly as possible to sound out the band’s potential and to grow together musically. A band can only find itself playing live. It is the eternal initiation. For this reason we selected the best material possible that fit our instrumentation and we made this our starting point, our runway. Later on we gradually introduced our own compositions. Eventually, in autumn 1971 Odin appeared in front of an audience and our first concerts were staged at the Maxim, in Schweinfurt. The Maxim was a relatively large club with a high ceiling, a spacious wood paneled auditorium that was in those days used exclusively for live concerts, mostly touring bands from England and very rarely, a German act. A high block placed at the front wall served as the stage. There was no back stage and the musicians had to enter through the audience and climb a few stairs to the stage, to the boards that mean the world. The recordings were made using a large reel-to-reel Philips stereo tape recorder including the appurtenant microphones, probably built in 1968. I don’t recall the product specifications. A speed control allowed recording to be done in three basic speeds (19, 9.5 and 4.75 ips) which was very useful for the detailed study of complicated rhythms and solos.
The Odin tapes were holy to me and I never gave them to anybody, since they represent the nucleus of the so called “Odin archives”. Unfortunately, the recording quality of these tapes, though they are all musically exciting, is very diverse. These tapes are like a physically manifest corpus, comprising an extensive amount of material that tells the story of Odin and its development from the very beginning. The contents range from spontaneous recordings done by individual band members, to complex and elaborate polyphonic structures with overdubbing. There are detailed passages, simple vocal and instrumental outlines, various rehearsal recordings (including the preparation phase for the debut album) and numerous live concert recordings. Since moving to my present farmhouse turned studio in the north-east of the Upper Palatinate (Bavaria, South-East Germany) the ferrite tapes, already some 20 years old when I moved, have been stored for another 20 years in the dry atmosphere of the former grain storehouse, undisturbed by external factors and without any kind of damaging power source, hidden in a forgotten and still unpacked case, surrounded by antique books. All this must have produced a rather stable condition. Owing to this fortunate happenstance, it was still technically possible to publish the recordings after all these years.
Manfred Steinheuer of Longhairmusic, who kept phoning me, entreating me over and over to go looking for the Odin tapes until I eventually discovered them, he deserves the credit, and so does the brilliant sound engineer Jörg Scheuermann who restored the old tapes with the help of the most modern studio techniques, allowing us to hear the birth of the ancient Odin in the form of one of our very first public concerts.”
Jeff Beer, January 2007
Translation: Dr. Martina Häusler
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