live albums

[blissblogger]

Anyone got any time for these?

I can barely think of any that I rate or would ever want to play.

It seems a bizarre idea, wanting to bring the concert vibe into your living room.

Like, isn't the point of a recording to be studio-sculpted and glisteningly perfect and make pictures in your head? Why would you want the mind-pictures to be Dingwalls?

At one point, the Live Album was a seemingly unavoidable fixture of a band's career. Roundabout just after the third, or after the fourth album, when the group's shagged out and drained of songwriting inspiration, the record company would pop out a live album as a stopgap. Even now, all kinds of groups who aren't particularly special in the live context - who more or less duplicate the recordings onstage - have live albums. Groups that endure often end up putting three or four live albums across their career - a whole discography within the discography.

Thread prompted by news that an 8 CD box set of Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous is due to come out. I like Thin Lizzy quite a bit but somehow never got around to listening to Live and Dangerous - reputedly one of the best live rock albums of all time. Now there's this eight-fold inflation of it - the entire concerts out of which the performances were disparately selected. Who on earth would want that? But then they surely know that demand is there.

 

[blissblogger]

Totale's Turns is a pretty good one, but really it doesn't sound that different from the records The Fall were making in the studio at that time, so rough 'n' ready live-sounding they were.

 

[shakahislop]

nirvana unplugged

 

[blissblogger]

Ah, thought of another 'pretty good 'un' - Absolutely Live by the Doors. But that is mainly because it contains a performance of the epic song-cycle "Celebration of the Lizard", which was never released as a studio version (at least at the time - some form of it came out on a later Super Deluxe Edition).

 

[blissblogger]

nirvana unplugged

That is kind of in a special category of its own, isn't it? It's live, but it was done for MTV, without the usual amplification and distortion etc. I can't remember listening to it as an album but I feel like it watched at the time, or have seen bits of.

Another similiar one - done in the TV studio if I recall right - is Fleetwood Mac's The Dance. That is electric - because of the sparks between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, and the way that the saga of the band's amorous internicine wars had built up around the group.

 

[blissblogger]

Actually I did hear one recently that I preferred to any of the studio records by the group - Santana's Lotus from 1974. It's actually pretty close to the Miles Davis albums of that era.

 

[blissblogger]

Hip hop and dance music surely abolish the concept of the live album. Render it inapplicable.

I mean, I'm sure there must be a Cypress Hill live album in existence, but... no one sensible wants a document of a live rap performance.

 

[william_kent]

ahem...

Hawkwind - Space Ritual Alive

their finest moment

maybe only equalled by Hawkwind - Live At The BBC ( for the version of Born To Go , with the extremely awkward spoken intro by Stacia )

or perhaps their side on Greasy Truckers Party

( again, for the original version of Born To Go, which was never on any studio album )



Hawkwind - Born To Go

one of the three tunes that will be played at my funeral ( this one just as the coffin descends into the flames )

edit: Nik Turner died last week, aged 82...

 

[william_kent]

and Miles Davis in the 70s...

Live Evil

Miles Davis at Filmore

In Concert

Black Beauty

Dark Magus

Panegea

Agharta

all pinnacles of sound

I'd even include "We Want Miles" from the 80s

and I should mention the "Plugged Nickel" box set from the 60s, as well as the unofficial bootlegs like "Vienna 1973", etc.,

 

[luka]

jazz doesnt count

 

[william_kent]

jazz doesnt count

Miles is beyond jazz!

 

[blissblogger]

ahem...

Hawkwind - Space Ritual Alive

their finest moment

maybe only equalled by Hawkwind - Live At The BBC ( for the version of Born To Go , with the extremely awkward spoken intro by Stacia )

or perhaps their side on Greasy Truckers Party

( again, for the original version of Born To Go, which was never on any studio album )



Hawkwind - Born To Go

one of the three tunes that will be played at my funeral ( this one just as the coffin descends into the flames )

edit: Nik Turner died last week, aged 82...

I confess that I have never managed to make it all the way through Space Ritual .... in theory it's everything I want from music and "approve" of, but...

I even have the gatefold vinyl version (a reissue of it, not an original).

 

[blissblogger]

and Miles Davis in the 70s...

Live Evil

Miles Davis at Filmore

In Concert

Black Beauty

Dark Magus

Panegea

Agharta

all pinnacles of sound

I'd even include "We Want Miles" from the 80s

and I should mention the "Plugged Nickel" box set from the 60s, as well as the unofficial bootlegs like "Vienna 1973", etc.,

I have extravagantly reviewed almost all of those albums - some of them individually, back when you could only get things like Pangaea as Japanese imports, and later on for The Wire I did a whole bunch of them when Sony reissued them as deluxe CDs in the 2000s.... Praised them to the heavens, I did. But in truth, since the deep immersion for the review, I don't think I've ever listened to them again! If I want Miles, I go straight to In A Silent Way, On the Corner, Get Up With It, Bitches Brew.

They are great, objectively, those live dubbles. But still I prefer the studio albums - the Teo Macero-d spatializing.

Beautiful physical objects of course (as with Space Ritual)

 

[william_kent]

I confess that I have never managed to make it all the way through Space Ritual .... in theory it's everything I want from music and "approve" of, but...

I even have the gatefold vinyl version (a reissue of it, not an original).

I can understand...

but, as the drummer of New Order said:

“Punk rock started because in every small town there was somebody who liked Hawkwind.”

 

[versh]

Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club, Hamburg is scorching.




Cale's Sabotage/Live is great too. One of my favourite things of his.

 

[william_kent]

if there's any geriatric soul boys on this forum they might make a case for:



James Brown - Live at The Apollo




ALL CAPS speaks volumes...

 

[william_kent]

there's certain bands that I only listen to the live albums of, when I'm extremely intoxicated

Spacemen 3 for example...



Spacemen 3 - Suicide ( Live At The New Morning, Geneva, Switzerland, 18.05.1989 )

on their live recordings the spacemen opted for volume, feedback, and riffs, reaching a level of psychotic psychedelia they never managed on their studio albums...

 

[blissblogger]

if there's any geriatric soul boys on this forum they might make a case for:



James Brown - Live at The Apollo


View attachment 13522

ALL CAPS speaks volumes...

Shamefully I've never listened to this, canonically central though it is. JB is a small doses thing for me at the best of times (I did once make it through a box set, but then I was reviewing), the idea of a whole concert of whoops and shattering soul-cries always seems exhausting before you've even started.

 

[versh]

Hip hop and dance music surely abolish the concept of the live album. Render it inapplicable.

I mean, I'm sure there must be a Cypress Hill live album in existence, but... no one sensible wants a document of a live rap performance.

What about tape packs?

 

[versh]

jazz doesnt count

That Pharoah Sanders thing Barty was always posting was a live one.