Guru Guru

The 1971 Bremen Concert documents Guru Guru on 21 September 1971, when the trio played the auditorium of the Gymnasium at Leibnizplatz in Bremen and the engineers of Radio Bremen taped the evening. The set consists of three long pieces, almost an hour of music, caught a few weeks after the release of their second album. It is the first time the whole concert has been issued, and it gives a clear picture of how the band stretched its studio material on stage.

The line-up was the classic early one: Mani Neumeier on drums and vocals, Uli Trepte on bass and Ax Genrich on guitar. Genrich had come in from a short spell with Agitation Free before Neumeier recruited him. By the autumn of 1971 the group had two LPs out on Ohr, the label run by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser: UFO in 1970 and Hinten in 1971. Parts of this tape circulated before, about a third on a United Dairies LP credited to Uli Trepte and Guru Guru, about two thirds on a Spalax CD. This edition presents the full show, taken from a noticeably better copy of the tapes and revised for release.

The concert opens with LSD Marsch, here running 23 minutes and taken from the debut album. It is followed by Bo Diddley (18 minutes) and Space Ship (16 minutes), both from Hinten, which was then brand new. All three are built around long stretches of open improvisation. The label describes the result as an idiosyncratic mix of rock, jazz and funk, with African polyrhythms and cascades of psychedelic sound, and the three long tracks leave plenty of room for all of it.

Hinten had already made noise in the German music press when the band reached Bremen. The magazine Sounds credited its engineer, writing that "with this recording, sound engineer Conny Plank has created a masterpiece". The same review found the group less nervous and scattered than before, with the free excursions of the three players now resting on calm, drawn-out bass lines and a marching drum beat. When the concert came out in 2025, Aquarium Drunkard wrote about it at length, presenting Guru Guru as a band that does not fit the usual krautrock clichés.

CD in a digisleeve, released on Made in Germany (catalogue MIG 03382) in February 2025, total running time 57:40.