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Title: Not A Great Performance
Review: As a long-time fan of Mountain, I found this set to be far less than satisfactory. Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi are here, but Corky Laing and Steve Knight are absent, replaced by Bob Mann and Alan Schwartzberg, neither of whom plays well. Mann's guitar/keyboard work is surpassed in its awfulness only by Schwartzberg's drumming, which is simply dreadful. However, no one in this lineup appears to have any real enthusiasm, slogging through one ragged number after another. The version of "Nantucket Sleighride" is so long that it soon becomes an exercise in pure tedium; it's a wonder that anyone in the audience was able to stay awake all the way through. None of the other cuts on this album is much better; in fact, the highlight is the moment during Leslie's "Guitar Solo" when a speaker blows; the rest of the album merely blows. This entire set sounds like a contractual obligation, and nothing more.
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