While common now this is by no means Universally true.
IMO a good live band should make a live album but I am mostly a live sound engineer so I have my biases. There are some really bad live albums as well.
Technology today makes live recording easy. There are digital consoles that integrate with a multi track Pro-Tools recording rig, I see them often. Expect more live records from more bands.
Capt
Capt are they using autotune now in live concerts? Or is that just in the studio recordings?
A bad live album is pretty much just like the studio version except the singer is off-key and the crowd sings along with the big hit. There’s not much defending those. A really good live album like many of the examples lifted here can be exceptional and can show you a great band creating music in the moment in a way that a studio album generally doesn’t.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they record everything separately. And sometimes they group together instruments (like drums + bass and maybe rhythm guitar) before piling on the rest (this was the approach I was most used to). Saying that they “never play together in a studio recording” is not quite right.
Rush YYZ live in Rio with the audience chanting to an instrumental song.
Sometimes
::sigh::
I will occasionally use a pitch shifter live, to make a singers voice “bigger”. 12 cents up and 12 cents down and dumped into the reverb. The idea is for nobody to notice it though.
It seems to me that Autotune is being used more as an effect than pitch correct and hopefully will go the way of the L.A. Plate verb from the eighties, one can dream anyway.
Capt
Little Feat, Waiting For Columbus. Billy Payne’s work alone is worth studying.
Deep Purple, Made In Japan.
I assume we’re excluding live jam/funk/fusion/prog bands from consideration.
I don’t have a lot of live albums but one interesting example is the debut from Jane’s Addiction. Their first album Jane’s Addiction aka XXX was a live recording which featured some of the songs that appeared on their first studio album, Nothing’s Shocking, which was released almost a year later. Since I heard the live versions of songs like “Jane Says” and “Pigs in Zen” before the studio versions I’ve always liked them better.
I’ve always wanted to hear a live recording that did not have the audience in it. Based on my experience in recording church stuff, it’s all on a separate track, so it should be possible to do. That way we can tell in edge cases whether the band is really better or we just are picking up the momentum of the crowd.
BTW, I like live versions that have the songs flowing into each other. This is pretty rare on studio versions, it seems. Or, at least, it was. I haven’t really bough an album in a long time.
If you like songs that flow into other songs, find a few Phish concert recordings; I am not a jam band guy and I wish they had a real vocalist, but their musicianship is superb and their transitions can be truly masterful. A friend made me a copy of what is considered a great concert from…the Nutter center in some east coast city?? - it is really, really great.
As for not having the audience in a concert recording - ???
When it comes to older, “classic” bands, I really enjoy finding recent live performances on YouTube. Particularly when the lead singer (who may be age 60+) still has his/her voice. The simple fact that on-stage equipment (amps, PA, etc) as well as live recording technology are so much better now than they were when these bands were in their heyday means that we can really hear how good some of these bands are live.
Cheap Trick, 2010, Austin City Limits
Well that’s what you get with a band comprised entirely of professional studio musicians 
The only Bob Seger album I ever owned was the live Nine Tonight. My god, the tracks on that are so much better than the studio versions. And the studio versions are awesome.
Oh yeah, and the DVD - seeing 100,000 South Americans bowing down to Peart during his drum solo. The band itself was completely blown away by their audience, and it really fed their performance.
That’s one of the reasons I have so many Springsteen concerts. He’s as good as he ever was, and despite him and the band mostly being in their sixties, they still play high energy 3 hour plus concerts. They include songs played by sign request every gig, sometimes common songs but occasionally rarely played songs the band doesn’t really know, which is always fun to hear (and they always manage it), sometimes covers - the last two shows had Drift Away and Boom Boom, for example. Hearing how the songs change, and for that matter how they stay the same, over decades of performance is fascinating.
The fairly recent London Calling - Live In Hyde Park DVD shows just how powerful the band is, and also has the sign-collecting shown.
Speaking of people still performing in their old age, I heard a couple of Leonard Cohen bootlegs last year, and he’s still performing three hour shows in his late seventies, and still fantastic.
Some live albums are good, some aren’t. The sound reinforcement technology available now is much better than it was when the Beatles were touring.
Live albums I really like that haven’t been mentioned so far are:
24 Nights - Eric Clapton
How Late’ll Ya Play 'Til (the live album/CD) - The David Bromberg Band
Stars And Stripes Forever - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Live At Kansas State - The Earl Scruggs Revue
Both “The Cowboy Way” and “Live” by Riders In The Sky
Alabama Ass Whuppin’ by Drive-By-Truckers is a good live album. The live versions of “18 Wheels of Love” and “Steve McQueen” are better than the studio versions.
For me, live albums have two purposes: heavily reworked or different versions of their hits, and cover songs. For instance, Clapton’s version of “Layla” on his “Unplugged” album is much, much better to my ears than his original. On the other end of the spectrum, I love cover songs that are radically different than the original, and I love Dylan covers and Beatles covers, and there’s hardly a band out there that can’t whip out one or the other.
A couple years ago, my husband and I went to Vegas to see Rush. It was my first time, but something I’ve been wanting to do for 20 years, they just never come to the BFE places I tend to live.
MrTao had just had foot surgery, and could not stand for any length of time. We had mezzanine seats, and the folks in the two rows ahead of us stood/danced the whole time, so we couldn’t see ANYthing. We tried asking politely to switch seats with any of them so they could dance behind us and we could see, but no dice. (Go home, old farts! This from kids who probably were there ironically, little jerks 
)
So…we left after about an hour, went into the halls, and bought their live perforance on DVD.
And it was amazing, and I loved it, and can’t wait to actually see them live sometime, lol.
Well, since bootlegs are free on the internet these days, you should track down Rockford IL 1977 and Royal Oak MI 1978. I’ll bet people’s ears are still ringing from that Rockford gig.
Four that are in my line of sight, Babylon by Bus, Living in Clip, 34th & 8th, and even Captured all contain much better versions of songs than the studio versions.
Anyone who is a fan of Fleetwood Mac in its original Peter Green/Jeremy Spencer/Danny Kirwan incarnation should listen to the 3-disc “Live at the Boston Tea Party” box set. These guys absolutely COOKED in concert. I was fortunate enough to see this line up in the Fall of '68, and this box set captures it perfectly. It was recorded over the span of several shows, with the idea of releasing a live album, so the sound quality is excellent.
VERY highly recommended!
This is the one I came to mention. Adds horns and backup singers to some old songs, plays some songs that are not recorded anywhere else and he even plays a couple songs sans Double Trouble. Not a single song sounds anything like his studio work (which I also adore).
SRV has some other live recordings of his usual songs that are just off the hook. Like Texas Flood from his “Live at the El Macombo” recording. Jaw droppingly good.
[QUOTE=3trew]
I’ve heard New Order doing a version of Blue Monday that I would describe as them rocking the fuck out.
New Order didn’t rock out.
Blue Monday is not rocked out to.
[/QUOTE]
Are you sure it was New Order? The band Orgy did a loud rock out version of Blue Monday. I can’t do youtube from work, but I’m a rock out kind of guy and I prefer Orgy’s take to New Orders. But that’s just me…