I’ve also only experienced live Zeppelin via recordings. If you listen to a lot of live recordings you’ll notice there was a giant difference in the band from '68-'72 compared to '73-end. From '73 on, Robert Plants voice was horrible and Page was inconsistent at best. Pre '73, they sound fantastic IMO.
Check out the youtube vids of Royal Albert Hall 1970.
Toad the Wet Sprocket. The make some catchy pop songs (though not at the absolute top of the heap). But they’re very workmanlike in their live shows. The all stand in place and play, there’s some audience interaction but not very much, and it’s just dull. Saddened me. But I saw them three times at different events one summer and it was the same each time.
My one experience with the Moody Blues left me entirely underwhelmed. For a band that has done some awesome studio work, they just didn’t seem to have it together in a live performance. May not have been entirely their fault…it was the opening event of a brand new venue, largest in the state, and so a pretty big deal. Unfortunately the venue wasn’t up to it. Unfinished construction, uncomfortable seating, disorganized production and horrible acoustics. Nevertheless, a really good performance could have made the affair much more palatable.
SS
I was going to start a thread like this. No idea why I never did.
Something I’ve been curious about for a while now is that I’ve heard that 80’s pop band Thompson Twins sucked live. Does anybody know if that’s true?
So to you a band is not live unless they are filling a stadium?
I am not talking about the Syd Barrett days when they were playing small clubs in London. (I wish!) This was a sizable hall, played later the same year, by Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and other major acts of the time. The ticket price for the Floyd was actually higher than that for the Stones, Zeppelin, or anyone else, and they filled the place. They were a fairly major band by then. It was just that it was before the era of overblown stage shows.
I got free tickets to see them live a few years ago. We got box seats with free booze and food. They were so bad I still feel ripped off. They are the worst band I have ever seen live.
No, thats not what I meant. Its that 1971 was 41 years ago and they were a smaller band, so if someone mentions they saw Pink Floyd once, it’s much more likely it was after they were big. Same as if someone saw Zeppelin, odds are it was in '75 or '77 when they were playing arenas and stadiums, not 1969 in a club.
I think it’s extremely cool you got to see them in '71.
Me too.
The Replacements were always one of my favorite bands. I saw them twice during '87-'89, after Bob Stinson had been replaced. Both shows were very good with little of the drunken behavior they were known for. Westerberg screwed up the beginning of “Skyway” a couple of times and just decided to play something else, though. I’m sure alcohol could have been involved. 
I’ve seen Styx twice. The first time, I was a teenager, the second time I was 52. Make of that what you will.
Nonetheless, even as a teenager, the first show was simply awful. The sound was terrible, nothing but extremely loud noise.
The second show was actually quite good, although it was really the Tommy Shaw show. The current keyboard player and singer is not bad. Shaw brought out the first bass player for a song, but I don’t think any of the current band was in the first band I saw back in the '70s.
Whoa
IIRC, with Steely Dan the issue was not that they sucked live, but that they didn’t tour at all after the first album or so.
The Cars, I saw in a club in Boston before they broke out, this would have been circa 1978, and the crowd didn’t really know what to make of them. They did a concert video in the early 80’s that was boring as hell.
There’s bands like Aerosmith where you never know what you’re going to get. I’ve seen them 4 times, 1976, 1984, 1989, and 2009. The first show was horrendous, but this was probably near the peak of their drug problems. The rest were good, although the 2009 tour seemed cursed, there were all kinds of weird injuries happening.
For the 2009 show, which I saw in Vegas, they had a riser platform set up behind the drummer; Tyler was obviously supposed to gallop across it, but instead, he walked up the ramp and then half-walked, half-limped across. I actually LOL’d. It was smart of him to get a day job.
When I got tickets to see OMD, I was worried that they might not be able to recreate the same echoey sound they used in the studio.
Well, I needn’t have been worried. They perfectly recreated it – to the point that there was barely a difference between their recordings and the stage. The only way I could tell that it wasn’t a lip-synch is that they messed up a couple times.
Although I do have to hand it to them for not losing their voice in the past 30 years and for still putting on a stage show with some energy.
If she’s the one who sang with Eminem at some awards show last year, she knocked it out of the park.
About 1987 or so I saw Chuck Berry. I figured I wanted to see him once before he died. Still not dead. He did the typical Chuck Berry show. Unrehearsed, a back up band he never laid eyes on before getting on stage, hour late getting in from the airport and a total of about 45 minutes of on stage time. No set list, just took requests from the audience and the band had to keep up. I do have to say that for those 45 minutes he was Chuck Berry and he played all the hits. So I wasn’t really disappointed just kind of amused by the whole thing.
I’ve told this story on here before, but Dio (R.I.P.) was impressively bad live.
I saw him in 1996 in NYC. Motorhead opened, and they were great… then Dio came on and things went downhill. Ronnie’s singing was OK, but he chose to wear a brown tunic. It’s hard to be am impressive metal singer when you look exactly like Gargamel.
Then the lead guitarist did a solo that seemed to go on forever. I am sure I could have played a better solo, and I don’t play guitar. It sounded like a 20 minute catfight.
Then for the encore, Ronnie introduced “Rainbow In The Dark” by describing the song as “a chain around my fucking neck”. Thanks!
Similarly, I’ve heard Modern English introduce I Melt With You with “okay, now we’re gonna play that song.” And it was the last song before the encore. And almost no one left after it, despite the fact it was a free concert and it was right before they left the stage.
I saw them in 1984, at the Illinois State Fair; my little brother was into them at the time and wanted to see them, and I went along. I don’t remember much about the concert, but I don’t remember them sucking or me regretting I’d gone, FWIW.
Thanks.
I saw The Ramones at Hammerjacks in Baltimore in the late 1980s. Joey looked comatose; he didn’t move at all. Stood like a statue and quickly blurted out the words to the songs. Sounded horrible.
I noticed Dee Dee kept looking over at Johnny’s left hand. I finally figured out why: so he could follow along! When Dee Dee saw Johnny moving to a different chord, he would move his left hand to play the corresponding note.
Was painful to watch.