California Jam (also known as Cal Jam) was a rock music festival co-headlined by Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, held at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California, on April 6, 1974. It was produced by ABC Entertainment, Sandy Feldman and Leonard Stogel. Pacific Presentations, a Los Angeles-based concert company headed by Sepp Donahower and Gary Perkins, coordinated the event, booked all the musical talent and ran the advertising campaign. Don Branker worked for Leonard Stogel and was responsible for concert site facilitation, toilets, fencing and medical. The California Jam attracted 300,000–400,000 paying music fans. The festival set what were then records for the loudest amplification system ever installed, the highest paid attendance, and highest gross in history. It was the last of the original wave of rock festivals, as well as one of the most well-executed and financially successful, and presaged the era of media consolidation and the corporatization of the rock music industry.
Since 1991, a complete edition of all recordings in which Karlheinz Stockhausen has personally participated is being released on compact discs. Each CD in this series is identified by Stockhausen's signature followed by an encircled number. The numbers indicate the general historical order of the works. Stockhausen realised the electronic music and participated in these recordings as conductor, performer, sound projectionist, and musical director. He personally mixed down the recordings, mastered them for CDs, wrote the texts and drew the covers.
In a conscious shift of aesthetics, the very European Gods turned their eyes on America with the band's fourth album, producing its most 'rock' record to date, a consistently strong smash. Opening with "Our House," it all seems (powerful) business as usual - odd sonic loops, rhythm patterns suddenly exploding into mass drum/riff combinations. But the difference here lies with the lyrics - discounting earlier covers, Treichler for the first time sings in English here and throughout, a conscious audience targeting which he addressed in contemporaneous interviews. "Gasoline Man" turns out to be the big shift, revamping what sounds like an old ZZ Top riff into as classic an American rock song as any - blues lyrical structure, loving the road and the motor - yet with the Gods' unique sonic signature present, revamping and restitching the past into a cleaner, newer form that avoids sounding just like another bar band.