I don’t have much to add apart from agreeing that certain live albums transcend the studio recordings. Live music has a vitality, an energy drawn from the audience to which the musicians respond, taking the oeuvre to a new place. Transcendental.
For me, The Who Live At Leeds stands at the peak of live albums. I’ve never been to a Who concert but listening to that record is like being there - I can’t express the visceral feeling the music evinces in this sorry hippy soul.
Deep Purple Live In Japan is very very good.
I have a deep affection for The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” of which only one side is live but the whole album works.
Woodstock is surreal albeit a curates egg. Some of the recording is dull but then suddenly there is The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills etc. Heck its a feast of live music.
Actually Uriah Heep Live is one of my favourites too.
Frampton Comes Alive…well I dunno, always thought this was overrated. Peter should have stuck with Humble Pie.
Cheap Trick Live at Budokan an absolute winner.
Neil Young - Live Rust. Excellent, just excellent.
Rory Gallagher - Irish Tour
And of course, Lou Reed - Rock’n’Roll Animal - an essential album of which I wore out the grooves.
Todd Rundgren’s album Second Wind was recorded on a stage in front of a live audience in a series of single takes. The audience was instructed to not make any noise until he gave them a signal after the song. They had gobos between the instruments, isolated amps, etc. The idea was to get the excitement of playing with a full band and the energy of an audience, but without the trade-offs of a concert recording.
Pink Floyd’s “Live In Pompeii” film had no audience whatsoever, not that Floyd exactly seemed to feed off the audience generally. Yes’s “Live Acoustic” film had a small audience, but you can’t hear them at all.
I used to love the song Heroin, having only heard the studio version. Loved this song, and still love it, but then I heard the live version from Rock n Roll Animal and holy hell, it blows the doors off the studio version.
Another recommendation for the OP to maybe revaluate his stance: my favourite, “It’s too late to stop now” by Van Morrison. Highly intense and emotionally challenging, absolutely no overdubs (Van rejected to include “Moondance” because of one flubbed guitar note (Yeah, John Platania, that old hack ;))), fantastic band including horns and strings sections, beautiful arrangements different from the studio versions, and vocal gymnastics you have to hear to believe. The experience I get from this album could never be reached by a studio recording (although I love those studio versions as well, they’re just different).
And I like the audience reactions too, listen to the woman exclaiming “all right” at the end of this astounding version of Listen to the Lion (sorry, rather crappy sound quality).
Bolding mine. This is the main reason I love Paul Simon’s Concert in the Park live album. I was there and it was a fantastic event in Central Park. Just an amazing crowd and a great show. I even convinced myself that I found us among the crowd on the album cover. It’s nice to play it and remember the day.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a Japanese singer I like named “aiko”. She’s a great singer/songwriter, has a top-notch band, and puts on one hell of a show. I was watching clips from one of her live DVDs on YouTube (before her record company made her completely vanish from there), and at one point in this particular show, in the middle of a song, she forgot the words to the whole second half of the verse. It was one of her biggest hits, and one of her older songs that she’d been singing for years. You could tell that she was utterly mortified and embarrassed.
And she left it on the DVD. I thought that was especially interesting because the video of the show was obviously stitched together from two different performances at the same venue on consecutive nights. She could have easily used the version from the other show where she probably didn’t forget the words, or left it out entirely (though that would have been awkward - she was singing the song as part of a medley of several hits, so leaving it out would have required leaving out the entire medley).
I just thought it was cool. It made the whole performance seem more “real”, and showed that a superstar singer is still human.
That just sucks. Many years ago, several friends and I sprung for good seats, second-row near-center, for Steve Miller. Even so, we stood the entire time, as the people in front of us stood. In the front row. Because there was so much in their way, they had to stand
Meh. We put up with it. It’s what happens at concerts. The one fellow in front of my friend’s wife chose poorly, however, and decided he was going to stand on his seat, in the front row, hoot, yell, scream and wave his arms. Friend’s wife doesn’t suffer fools, so she shoved him off the seat with great gusto. DAMN. That was a little dangerously cold-blooded for my taste. Could’ve done real damage shoving a guy off a seat from behind unexpectedly like that, but then my friend’s wife was a nurse, so at least he’d have had on-the-spot medical treatment.
Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Chair-Standing Guy turned around in surprise and anger, but sometimes it’s nice that every guy in your social circle is on the large side. I was the short guy at 6’3". He calmed down fast, which is good. My buddy’s wife was the really dangerous one anyway. Concert continues, fun ensues, blood stays where it belongs. A successful evening out.
This is another reason I like collecting bootlegs, trying to find recordings of shows I was actually at. I’ve found quite a few, with varying quality, including a Motörhead show where I can hear my drunken caterwauling on the recording. It’s a lot easier to find them nowadays, with just about every concert everywhere turning up on the internet, sometimes in as little as one day.
Some bands even sell soundboards of every show on a tour. I saw KISS in 2009, and they had booths set up in the concourse where you pay for the CD’s, give your address, and a week later a perfect soundboard of the show arrives in your mailbox.
I have almost every Phish show ever played, seen almost 100 of their shows, and listen to the studio albums once the day they come out and that’s it. The studio stuff is like a basic sketch, the live versions are full on murals. I didn’t even realize live albums needed defending!
The same almost applies for the Dead, but I LOVE the production on Aoxomoxoa.
Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall 1972 is the album I’m listening to on repeat ATM. Amazing band, great versions and it sounds as though they are playing at about half the volume that my covers band do!
I’ve just been watching the new Judas Priest live DVD, from their “farewell” tour, and it’s reminded me of a couple of other reasons why I like live recordings. One is that musicians and singers change and, very often, improve over a 40 year career, and hearing a band playing their current version of an old song can change it entirely. Secondly, I enjoy hearing the interaction with the crowd. Music is a form of communication, and some concerts - and pretty much all heavy metal concerts - are two-way communication. It’s pretty cool to hear, and see, the band letting the crowd sing the whole of “Breaking The Law” (which is not something I recall seeing any band do before). I may not want that every time I listen to the song, but that’s what the studio album is for.
We had floor seats about half way back. Once the show started everyone in front of us decided to stand on their folding chairs. I spent the entire concert perched upon a rickety metal folding chair in order to see anything.
Fucking assholes. If everyone sat down we’d have had the same vantage point.
Live albums, especially in the 1970’s and 1980’s, allowed a fan to hear the live band when they could not get tickets or travel to a show. One album that comes to mind is “Second’s Out” by Genesis…
More recently, even in the digital age of YouTube, bands like Pearl Jam and Phish record and release (nearly) every live show…
