I’m a huge fan of live albums – when they are actually good that is. A few of my favorites:
Barenaked Ladies - Rock Spectacle: Great concert band, and this album really captures the experience. Plus the recording quality on some of the songs is most excellent.
Underworld - Everything Everything: Aren’t electronica bands supposed to suck live? Some of the songs on this are SO much better than the album versions. Maybe the fact that it’s live is incidental (just some cheering at various points), but it’s still a great album.
Billy Idol - VH1 Storytellers: The “new” Billy Idol. Mostly acoustic, excellent quality. I didn’t even like him the first time around, and this album made me a fan.
So what are your favorites? And on the flipside, how about ones that really suck?
Billy Joel’s live album is terrible because it’s not really live. They cut out a LOT of the New Year’s Eve concert (the bootleg is 3 CDs, the release is 2) and because the album was quite obviously engineered in the studio after the actual recording was done.
Live/Dead (Grateful Dead). The first 16 track live recording. Clear as a bell and a high energy set.
Fillmore Concerts (Allman Bros.) The Tom Dowd commentary on the liner notes is a bit self-congratulatory, but this re-working of the material on Live at the Fillmore East is still stunning. “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is actually from two different performances but the production and engineering make it flawless.
Live at the Apollo (James Brown) Soul Brother Number 1. The Godfather of Soul. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Guaranteed to make you break out in a cold sweat.
Travels (Pat Metheny) “Are You Going With Me?” to open the disc is perfect. Sort of a samba beat to lead things off, then swirling up and up and up.
Worst
Steal Your Money (er…Face) (Grateful Dead) Hands down the worst.
The absolute number one in my book is Rush’s Different Stages. Double live album with an excellent production, a great mix of old and new material, and an extra CD with a 1978 concert at London’s Hammersmith that completely knocks you off your feet.
Very few live albums by my favorite bands are terrible- but most of them are unnecessary. Too often, a live album is little more than a Greatest Hits album with clapping between the songs. But hey, if the band is good enough and has enough good songs, that can be enjoyable, too.
The only really LOUSY live album I’ve ever owned was Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same.” Robert Plant’s voice was in very bad form that night, and while John Bonham was a greta drummer in many respects, he was a godawful soloist (which made “Moby Dick” a crashing bore).
As for GREAT live albums? Well, my favorites are
The Clancy Brothers Live at Carnegie Hall
Renaissance Live at Carnegie Hall
The Who Live at Leeds (the Who completely reinterpreted their songs for this one; most bands’ live albums feature note for note recreations of the studio versions of their songs… which means there’s no real reason to buy the live albums!)
Deep Purple’s “Made in Japan” (yeah, I know I’m a 70s classic rock dinosaur- wanna make something of it?).
Some of my other favorites are Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet, and Joe Satriani’s Dreaming #11. Though the latter only has about 25-30 minutes of live concert stuff (along with one studio track), it captures the experience of a Satriani concert perfectly.
Probably the most disappointing live albums I know of are Alanis Morrisette’s Unplugged album (yuck), and the surprisingly-bad Police Live! double-CD released in 1995. I’ve never heard the Police sound worse, honestly.
I still like Warren Zevon’s “Stand in the Fire.” Has some of his hits (“Excitable Boy” “Werewolves of London”) and some other good tracks, like the Bo Diddly song.
Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads, especially the new longer version, is the best I’ve heard (and yes, I do mean it’s better than The Name Of This Band is The Talking Heads). Second would probably be Curiosity Anomalies by the Cure. Also, the live tracks on the three Satan Live singles by Orbital are quite good. Oh, and Jane’s Addiction’s self-titled first album also bears mention.
The worst? Um… The Orb’s Live '93 disc doesn’t do much to improve the album tracks.
Stop Making Sense is essentially a studio album, what with all of the post-“live” production and overdubbing that went on.
Fibonacci,
One of the funniest record reviews I ever read was for Get Your Ya-Yas Out: "Very muddy tapes of teenagers screaming.
The Best: Bruce Springsteen & The E. Street Band: Live 1975-1985 85-75<-----This was a 2cd bootleg set.
A number of the Pearl Jam “official bootlegs” are excellent.