“Alive ... and kicking”
Lively up yourself with some human Live album recommendations
This BBC story about a music fan selling off his vinyl collection before his 50th birthday, which included 120 Neil Young studio and live records, got me thinking briefly about the merits of my own record collecting and the Neil Young song from his ‘Toast’ album called “Quit” which contains the line ..“Now is not the time to cash it in”
After recently completing the collection of Bruce Springsteen’s studio albums, I’ve been wondering about embarking on another adventure and starting anew, to endeavor to track down his Live recordings next. When I visit the physical record store these days I still find myself automatically navigating to the “S” section to see what Springsteen titles are in there.
I’ve been listening to his most recent live release on Spotify from the ’99 Reunion tour, featuring many of his best songs. The Boss has 23 live albums, but where to begin with his and what about other live albums?
Live albums
While I definitely need an injection of live music into my veins as often as I can manage it, I feel slightly ambivalent about live albums in general because they can be a bit hit and miss with the different sound standards from different artists and just so many variables, the venue, the vocals, the audience, producers, sound engineering factors, over dubbing etc that can influence and impact the recording output of a concert. An example of a miss that comes to mind is ‘Live at the Hollywood Bowl’ from The Doors, whose studio discography is exemplary and actually also the muffled sounding ‘Live at Last’ from Black Sabbath.
Looking through my current growing collection, it includes only a handful of live recordings which I didn’t really think about until recently. In his “Retromania” book, music journalist Simon Reynolds mentioned:
“American rock culture has always placed more emphasis on live performance than records, in Britain, its the opposite”
I wonder if that same sentiment extends to the rest of music lovers in Europe?
When Albums Ruled The World
The ‘BBC Four documentary ‘When Albums Ruled The World’ covered the heyday of the album when LP records were at their greatest heights in popularity, in that golden period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. After the the financial success and minimal cost for record executives for greatest hits compilation albums which were ideal for the casual fan to dip in and out of a bands discography, record companies had found another way to package collections of hits cheaply with the introduction of the live album and the targeted consumer being the loyal fan.
“It was easy as pie to make a live album, you would just show up with a truck that had a 16 track recorder in it, set up the mics you know or take a feed off the stage mics” — Tony Visconti, BBC Four documentary
Back then, bands were under different recording contracts with a forced periodical release cycle to publish studio albums sometimes as frequently as every 9 to 12 months and usually after three or four albums, the record companies would push for a release a live record which some acts were obligated to deliver. The Grateful Dead with their Warner Bros contract was a one such example of this and their first live album called ‘Live/Dead’. That album was released a few years before the Dead and their audio engineer “Bear”(Stanley Owsley) came up with The Wall of Sound which consisted of 604 speakers with a combined 26,400 watts of power providing high-quality audio for a range of 200 meters. The Internet Archive has a vast collection of live Grateful Dead concert recordings and the band have their own concert taping culture which is chronicled in the 1994 Clinton Heylin book, “Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry”, and explored in Mark A. Rodriguez’s 2022 book “After All is Said and Done”.
American Pickers and some ’70s live recording history
I don’t normally enjoy reality TV shows but I have been drawn into the American Pickers show on several occasions because of the wide range of popular cultural artifacts that the guys can can uncover and unearth from the most unlikeliest of places, including old pinball machines, design signage from a bygone era, classic cars like the 1954 Nash-Healey or the 1967 Ford Mustang/Shelby GT500 which are so aesthetically pleasing to look at.
Other notable items of musical interest were the tiny 1964 International Harvester Metro van that Aerosmith once started out in and traveled to their gigs in which was found on a rural property in Massachusetts after 40 years and a Chet Atkins model Gretsch guitar that the Black Keys singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach was freaking out over. It was fun watching a guitar player/collector struggle to contain his excitement over such a find.
There was another episode where co-presenter and music fan Frank Fritz visited Cheap Trick’s guitarist Rick Nielsen’s museum in Rockford, Illinois which is jam packed with music memorabilia and he became starstruck on meeting his hero. Nielsen is also an avid collector himself and has amassed so much paraphernalia from all the Cheap Trick tours. (At one point, they were playing more than 250 shows a year.)
But it was the episode where the guys got to visit Third Man Records in Detroit and they received a tour of their record pressing plant with Jack White that totally intrigued me, especially when White displayed his own discovery in a vintage box 1969 Chevrolet P30 van that he was in the process of restoring. His engineer went on to explain:
“This is a mobile recording truck. You can actually take this truck to a live show, the truck pulls up, we wire everything up, you record straight to the truck. You don’t have set up anything inside the venue. The mobile studio was built in 1971 by an 18-year-old engineer working for a Detroit company called Metro Audio. Among the ’70s albums it recorded live were Bob Seger’s Live Bullet, KISS’s Alive!, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s One More From the Road”
One of those recorded live albums mentioned was Bob Seger’s ‘Live Bullet’ recorded in 1975 in Detroit’s Cobo Hall in front of 24,000 fans which is one of the live albums in my collection having picked it up from a second hand store. It still sounds so good, you can hear the announcer holler before the opening track “You are here because you want the real thing!” which Seger definitely delivers!
Live Sound Pioneer
Earlier this year, the legendary sound engineer Bob Heil sadly passed away. Heil was a true pioneer, designing speakers, mixing boards, microphones and recording equipment, and is best known for creating the template for modern rock sound systems while working with the Grateful Dead, The Who, Joe Walsh, Jeff Beck, Lynrd Skynrd, Stevie Wonder, Richie Sambora and Guns N’ Roses Slash. He was responsible for the first modular mixing console (the Mavis), his custom quadraphonic mixer (originally used on the Who Quadrophenia tour). In this Heil podcast Bob talked about the challenges of doing The Who’s ‘Quadrophenia’.
One of the most famous live albums and best sellers from the 70’s era, was ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ released in 1976 by A&M Records where Peter Frampton plays a voice box that was created by Heil. (Joe Walsh used the device on the track Rocky Mountain Way in 1973, Heil gifted one of the devices to Frampton’s partner as a Christmas present idea). I don’t particularly like this record but in a post about live albums it does warrant a mention for the quality of the recording.
Fillmore East
I much prefer Frampton as part of the band Humble Pie and their landmark live album ‘Rockin’ the Fillmore’. In one of his podcast episodes Bob Heil gave his top five loudest bands ranked by stage volume, which included Humble Pie, The Who, Mountain and also ZZ Top. I since fell down the Filmore rabbit-hole and started reading more about it in this great post on the historic venue by Mind Smoke Music, an NY independent record label. Bill Graham, the American impresario had decided to take his Filmore West venue idea from San Francisco and setup an East Coast version in New York which had no curfews, using an old movie theatre as his location. I didn’t realise that Miles Davis opened for Neil Young and Crazy Horse back then, another little nugget of popular music history
I find it incredible that roughly fifty live albums were recorded at this historic New York venue especially when you consider that it was only open from March 8, 1968 to June 27, 1971. (Not all of those recordings have been subsequently released and after much searching I found this list of the released ones.) Graham just couldn’t make the small venue financially viable when Rock bands were entering the Stadium Arena era.
Notable performances that were captured were Hendrix’s 1969 appearance with the Band of Gypsys, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Joe Cocker’s ‘Mad Dogs And Englishman’ in 1970 along with the Allman Brothers with one of the momentous live rock albums ever in their simply titled ‘Live at the Fillmore East’, which is a favourite of AC/DC guitarist Angus Young.
The Apollo, Glasgow
In the AC /DC book Maximum Rock n Roll, by Murray Engleheart there is an account of the live album ‘If you want blood’ which was recorded at the Apollo Theatre in Glasgow in 1978 at the desire of Angus Young as the preferred venue. Scotland had qualified for the World Cup and the band emerged back on stage for the encore in the Scottish football strip, to an audience that were already going berserk.
“Audiences only thought AC/DC had been loud on previous tours. This time they presented another dimension of volume again, one that made just the ears ache but the face ache as well” — Murray Engleheart
The Apollo is another historic venue that is no longer around, it was Frank Lynch the manager of a young Billy Connolly at the time that took it over in 1973 and everyone from ABBA to Lynyrd Skynyrd played there. King Crimson recorded material which appeared in part of their ‘The Great Deceiver’ live album, but later their full show was released as ‘1973 — Apollo, Glasgow, Scotland’. Roxy Music recorded ‘The High Road’ and even though The Ramones ‘Its Alive’ record is credited as being recorded live in The Rainbow Theatre, London apparently the crowd noise was taken from their Apollo date of their tour. The venue was in serious decline for a number of years before the curtain finally came down with the Style Council playing the final gig in June 1985.
At the Budokan
One other venue synonymous with live album recordings is The Nippon Budokan in Tokyo which translates to “Japan Martial Arts Hall”. It opened ahead of the 1964 Summer Olympics and thankfully this theatre is still around. The Beatles were the first rock band to perform here and multiple live albums have been recorded because of the combination of the favorable acoustics and the Japanese music audiences. At some stage I had Deep Purple’s ‘Made in Japan’, one of the most famous albums from here but I think I sold it in a collection pruning exercise at one point and I don’t seem to have missed it.
Acts like Bob Dylan, Blur, Chic, Ozzy Osborne have all recorded albums there but I always associated the venue with Cheap Trick’s ‘At the Budokan’. The Japanese fans went wild for their particular schtick, the Japanese music press had fallen for the band when they played support to Queen on tour and been promoted their work beforehand to the public. But I read a quote from their record producer Jack Douglas who said the record wasn’t actually even recorded there, the audio was actually from a gig in Osaka…Go figure!
MTV Unplugged
The MTV Unplugged series was one of the best things that MTV initiated, launching the show in 1989. Depending on which version of the show history you read, it was a Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora’s acoustic rendition at the MTV awards that same year that was apparently one of the inspirations for the project. It was co-created by Robert Small and Jim Burns, with Alex Colleti as producer but singer/songwriter Jules Shear was also referred to as an originator of the show’s concept when trying to promote his own acoustic record at that time. He presented and appeared on the first season playing a cover of Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl with Joe Walsh and Dr John. It was their intention for bands to unplug from their amps, effects and simply go acoustic reworking their repertoire.
The fact that Squeeze were the first act to appear still seems a strange selection years later but it wasn’t until Paul McCartney performed that the idea of packaging the show as an album was first thought of, his thinking was to fend off any potential bootleg records that could be made from TV recordings. McCartney’s ‘Unplugged’ (The Official Bootleg) was released in May in 1991, with stripped back versions of his songs along with some covers.
MTV Unplugged had so many outstanding performances but I am trying not to be pedantic about classifying these recordings, yet I find it difficult to categorise these as live albums as they were a very different type of live show especially compared to the albums already mentioned here. However the record industry lists Eric Clapton’s ‘Unplugged’ 1992 album as the best selling live record of all time and it is estimated to have shifted 26 million copies worldwide.
Sifting back through my musical memory of the series, that Clapton performance wouldn’t have been in my top five and I prefer his version of the Muddy Waters “Rollin and Tumblin” track from the ‘Live Cream’ 1970 record. The stand out acts for me were Nirvana’s appearance in 1993 displaying a more vulnerable side showcasing their acoustic craft and musical versatility, in a funeral themed set. Pearl Jam were just so raw and sensational, REM and particularly Michael Stipe’s vocals were very much at home in this format. Alice In Chains were a revelation in this setting and the 10,000 Maniacs cover of “Because the Night” was simply amazing, but I can’t recall any other of their songs from that show!
Concert film/documentary soundtrack
The concert/documentary film soundtrack albums are another slightly different entity with stellar releases such as ‘The Last Waltz’, ‘Stop Making Sense’, ‘The Song Remains The Same’ and The White Stripes ‘Great White Northern Lights’ but I think my favourite remains to be the 3 x LP recording of the ‘Woodstock Music from the Original Soundtrack’ with memorable performances by Country Joe and the Fish, Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix and The Who and Joni Mitchell.
One surprise recommendation I received was an album that came from musicians who worked on the soundtrack of the Inside Llewyn Davis movie directed by the Coen brothers, which is one of their movies I have still to watch. It features many artists including the glorious Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch collaboration, who happen also to have a new album ‘Woodland’ out this month, “Empty Trainload Of Sky” is the first released track from it.
Suggested live albums
This isn’t meant to be a best of live albums post by any means, but more that these are personal recommendations from fellow music enthusiast friends and an older rocker sibling. Two live recommendations I would suggest are Wilco’s ‘Kicking Television: Live in Chicago’ and The Antlers album ‘The Antlers In London’, especially for Darby Cicci’s playing on there, he’s a remarkable multi-instrumentalist. Both of these bands I have seen live and each of these albums capture the quality of their musicianship and live energy.
Also, while never perceived as a ‘cool’ band, Travis released an 20th anniversary live album of ‘The Invisible Band’ performance in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall a couple of years back that is very much under rated. They supported The Killers on a recent tour this year and that night they won over a new generation of fans.
The general consensus amongst those I asked for their personal live album favourites some of whom are also Springsteen fans, was that they considered that his ‘Live 1975–85' recording simply can’t be beat. But there was a special mention for a preference for this live version of Rosalita from the ‘Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75' album, while one also absolutely loves his ‘Live at my Father’s place in Roslyn’ from 1973. Funnily enough, two of them separately also recommended live albums from Springsteen E Street band member Nils Lofgren, ‘Accoustic Live’ and ‘Night After Night’.
There was agreement that ‘Live in Europe’ was Rory Gallagher’s best offering, the other Irish live album contender being Thin Lizzy’s ‘Live & Dangerous’. Plenty of shout outs for ‘Live!’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded live in concert 1975 at the Lyceum Theatre, London and MC5’s ‘Kick out the Jams’, as well as ‘The Who live at Leeds’, which is another of Angus Young’s favourites.
But what was great about these conversations is that they threw up some other suggestions that were completely new to me, including Warren Zevon’s ‘Stand in the Fire’, Keith Jarrett’s ‘Live in Koln’ and one friend from Toronto suggested the 801 ‘801 Live’ record, all of which I have to dig into.
A live album that I borrowed from one mate that I had listened to a few times on Spotify, was Sam Cooke’s ‘Live at the Harlem Square Club’. It’s a staggering recording of the soul/gospel great, bursting with energy. I’m not an audiophile but I can’t get over the difference on vinyl compared to when streaming this album, there is simply no comparison.
“It stands as one of the few recorded monuments to an era in which the good feeling of the audience was as important as the showmanship of the performer” — Peter Guralnick -Author Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke
That Cooke record is often touted to be up there with ‘Live at the Apollo’, the first live album by James Brown which is regarded by critics as one of the greatest live records ever and the original breakthrough rock and soul album. I have only streamed this album and I really need to get my hands on a vinyl copy. What I found amazing though to read, is that Brown spent his own money to make it, from the Don Rhodes book Say It Loud! on “the hardest-working man in show business”, describes that when Brown wanted to try a live album, Syd Nathan of King Records had no vision for what Soul fans wanted:
“They [ King Records] didn’t think I could do it [record a live album]. They thought I was crazy. I spent my own money. It cost, $5,700. Today, it would cost $400,000. It probably has sold 25 million copies, I guess. I’ve never been paid yet, but I guess of these days I’ll get paid” — James Brown, Dec 1984, Augusta Chronicle
I had heard some individual tracks over the years from the Johnny Cash ‘Live at San Quinten’ and ‘Folsom Prison’ live albums both on the Columbia record label. (He would record a staggering 59 full-length albums for Columbia)
I was more aware of their cultural and political impact but I have never properly listened to them in their entirety. I just cant imagine this happening today in a maximum security prison or even contemplate an artist pitching the idea to a record company!
Cash was a firm advocate for prison reform, he met with the then President, Richard Nixon and testified before a Senate subcommittee on national penitentiaries back in 1972. In the ‘I am Johnny Cash’ documentary singer Merle Haggard tells the viewer, “In a room full of presidents, Johnny would stand out”.
Today, there is far too much competition for our time and attention with messaging apps, social media, the Internet, streaming movie services, on demand TV and everything else, but collecting records can be a fun activity that provides a delayed gratification and delivers a little bit of joy with the unexpected albums that we find and uncover.
I know what albums I will be hunting for next and listening to, what about you?
