live albums

[blissblogger]

What about tape packs?

Interesting question. Deejaying is recorded music being "performed" by people who didn't make it - reinjecting a kind of liveness into it.

In that sense, all my cherished, endlessly-replayed pirate tapes are sort of live albums - or live bootlegs. The MC element adds another layer of liveness.

Having said that about 'no live dance music albums', i expect there are - didn't Daft Punk do one? Kraftwerk also (not quite dance music i suppose).

 

[blissblogger]

Live bootlegs show that fans - or some fans - really enjoy live albums. Ultra-fans will want bootlegs of every concert on a tour, even though the setlist is usually the same each time - and often the between-song banter is the same.

There's that whole argument that the studio versions of the songs aren't as good as the live version. Dead-aired, studio-bound. Joy Division believed that about Unknown Pleasures - it didn't capture the ferocity of their live assault.

 

[versh]

Interesting question. Deejaying is recorded music being "performed" by people who didn't make it - reinjecting a kind of liveness into it.

In that sense, all my cherished, endlessly-replayed pirate tapes are sort of live albums - or live bootlegs. The MC element adds another layer of liveness.

Having said that about 'no live dance music albums', i expect there are - didn't Daft Punk do one? Kraftwerk also (not quite dance music i suppose).

There's the stuff like the Fantazia tape packs too, sets recorded at raves rather than off the radio. Another layer of liveness.

 

[william_kent]

Thread prompted by news that an 8 CD box set of Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous is due to come out.

wasn't there a big debate at the time about how it wasn't really a "live" album ( studio overdubs, etc., )

much like a lot of the "live" 70s rock albums, really studio creations with audience noise dubbed on...

( edit: and 60s, the Seeds live album was just a studio creation I seem to recall? )

 

[versh]

There's that Birthday Party compilation that's made up of bits of various gigs they played, has that ferocious cover of 'Funhouse' on it.

 

[subvert47]

Anyone got any time for these?

I can barely think of any that I rate or would ever want to play.

It seems a bizarre idea, wanting to bring the concert vibe into your living room.

Like, isn't the point of a recording to be studio-sculpted and glisteningly perfect and make pictures in your head? Why would you want the mind-pictures to be Dingwalls?

Depends what they're for really. For a good live album it's not so much for the vibe, I think, as its effect on the musicians. They can be less restrained in a live situation, which makes the resulting music worth listening to, even if the recording quality is inferior.

Here's some of the stuff I have...

The Allman Brothers Band - At Fillmore East — a great blues band, much better on this than on their studio recordings
Art Ensemble of Chicago - Urban Bushmen — live recordings at ECM quality, simply superb
Borbetomagus - Live in Allentown — an onslaught it would be difficult to capture in a studio
Johnny Cash - At San Quentin — JC wasn't enhanced by studio recording anyway
John Cooper Clarke - Walking Back to Happiness — for the authentic poetry performance
Henry Cow - Concerts — dunno why I have this; they were terrible improvisers
Miles Davis - Live-Evil + Dark Magus — already mentioned
Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys — worth it for Machine Gun alone
King Crimson – Live at the Zoom Club, October 13, 1972 + The Great Deceiver Vols. 1&2 — all have the band pushing it way beyond the studio
Pink Floyd - Ummagumma — sides A&B are far more successful than their long-form studio recordings of the time
Robert Rental & The Normal - Live at West Runton Pavilion, 6-3-79 — yes, I'd prefer studio recordings if they'd done any
Section 25 - Hymns from the Bardo — just got this; it's more how I remember them than their actual records
Susana Santos Silva - All the Rivers: Live at the Panteão Nacional — all about the amazing venue acoustic
Masayuki Takayanagi - New Direction for the Art: Complete "La Grima" — same as with Borbetomagus
Throbbing Gristle - Second Annual Report — first side live recordings are the quality stuff
Wire - Document and Eyewitness — the end of their greatest era; again, I'd prefer studio recordings
v/a - The Roxy, London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77) + Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus — sheer nostalgia
v/a - Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack — just for Hendrix' Star-Spangled Banner

I have quite a few more live jazz albums as well, plus a load of free improv which is very often recorded live anyway.

One cut from all those...

 

[subvert47]

There's that whole argument that the studio versions of the songs aren't as good as the live version. Dead-aired, studio-bound. Joy Division believed that about Unknown Pleasures - it didn't capture the ferocity of their live assault.

It certainly didn't. But Martin Hannett was right anyway 😉

 

[Murphy]

Live bootlegs show that fans - or some fans - really enjoy live albums. Ultra-fans will want bootlegs of every concert on a tour

There's that whole argument that the studio versions of the songs aren't as good as the live version

must....not....post.....Grateful Dead.....unironically ..... yet

Grateful Dead - Sunshine Daydream (Veneta, Oregon, August 27, 1972)

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2013 CD release of "Sunshine Daydream (Veneta, Oregon, August 27, 1972)" on Discogs.

www.discogs.com

 

[DannyL]

Someone is going through all the extant Miles live tapes and posting them on a blog. i like Miles a lot but that's a level of dedication that's a bit too much for me. He's doing it chronologically as well: https://theheatwarps.com/

 

[blissblogger]

Depends what they're for really. For a good live album it's not so much for the vibe, I think, as its effect on the musicians. They can be less restrained in a live situation, which makes the resulting music worth listening to, even if the recording quality is inferior.

Good point, they are unleashed, certain kinds of bands....

I had no idea Urban Bushmen was live - guess I didn't look at the small print! It is very well recorded.

Exceptions aside, like Allman Bros, I tend to think that it goes a bit like this:

Jazz (at least until the Miles-Macero era, jazz-rock, fusion) - the live experience is the Platonic ideal and a studio recording, no matter how well recorded and detailed and atmospheric, is a pale flickering cave wall shadow of the real-time flow and right-in-front-of-you magic.

Rock - the recorded version is the Platonic ideal and live is the shadow-version.

This actually brings something up which I had meant to make a thread, which is that the idea of the jazz recording seems inherently at odds with the spirit of the music - to be proper jazz, surely, any instantiation of the piece should be different from all others, because of the players improvising - each time you heard it, it ought to be not-the-same. But with a jazz studio recording that particular improvisation is fixed as the definitive take - there is "flow" within the playing, in the genesis and shaping of that take, but as heard by the listener, it is a paradoxically frozen flow.

As a rock-reared listener listening to jazz records, I tend to automatically hear whichever performance is captured in the studio recording as the definitive version, how it could only ever have been. I enjoy the repeatability, the exact-same-each-and-every-time-I-play it of e.g. Thad Jones's version of "April In Paris".

if I was to somehow hear that tune done live, by a resurrected Thad and band, and in proper jazz fashion they'd inflect it differently... I'd be measuring it in my head against the Blue Note recording and be minutely dissatisfied... the presence of the musicians would compensate and add a lot, their interaction and physicality - but still, at heart, I'd want the solo to go note for note how I've heard it the scores of times I've played the recorded tune.

 

[blissblogger]

wasn't there a big debate at the time about how it wasn't really a "live" album ( studio overdubs, etc., )

much like a lot of the "live" 70s rock albums, really studio creations with audience noise dubbed on...

( edit: and 60s, the Seeds live album was just a studio creation I seem to recall? )

That's true - there's a lot of doctoring.

One of the simple reasons there are a lot of live albums in the world is that they are much cheaper to make than studio albums. You take it off the board or you send round a mobile unit. Then there's some mixing and maybe some postproduction additions and subtractions (sometimes they get rid of the audience noise). But there's not weeks and weeks in the studio and the band possibly having to be put up in hotels and the costs of session musicians and ancillary employees and go-fers. The sales are generally never going to be that big (well there's the occasional thing like Pete Frampton Comes Alive which sold vastly more than his studio records) but it's easy money if there's a captive cult following.

 

[blissblogger]

must....not....post.....Grateful Dead.....unironically ..... yet

Grateful Dead - Sunshine Daydream (Veneta, Oregon, August 27, 1972)

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2013 CD release of "Sunshine Daydream (Veneta, Oregon, August 27, 1972)" on Discogs.

www.discogs.com

yeah the Dead are one of those rare examples where the studio albums are way way less important and valued than the live official releases - and then there's the massive fan economy of tapes

the Dead compensate for lack of record sales by selling every kind Dead-insignia-ed merch imaginable - skateboards, surfboards, you name it.

 

[blissblogger]

Someone is going through all the extant Miles live tapes and posting them on a blog. i like Miles a lot but that's a level of dedication that's a bit too much for me. He's doing it chronologically as well: https://theheatwarps.com/

Enough is as good as a feast, as me old mum says.

 

[blissblogger]

I was thinking about whether there was a mini-tradition of the Live Single.

This is the one that sticks out as being a/ actually good b/ capturing the spirit of the genre, 2Tone being about dance music played by live bands c/ a huge triumph, one of their two number 1 singles - the other being "Ghost Town"

 

[sufi]

Jazz (at least until the Miles-Macero era, jazz-rock, fusion) - the live experience is the Platonic ideal and a studio recording, no matter how well recorded and detailed and atmospheric, is a pale flickering cave wall shadow of the real-time flow and right-in-front-of-you magic.

Rock - the recorded version is the Platonic ideal and live is the shadow-version.

This actually brings something up which I had meant to make a thread, which is that the idea of the jazz recording seems inherently at odds with the spirit of the music - to be proper jazz, surely, any instantiation of the piece should be different from all others, the players is improvising - each time you heard it, it'd be different. But with a jazz studio recording that particular improvisation is fixed as the definitive take - there is "flow" but it is a paradoxically frozen flow.

As a rock-reared listener listening to jazz records, I tend to automatically hear whichever performance is captured in the studio recording as the definitive version, how it could only ever have been. I enjoy the repeatability, the exact-same-each-and-every-time-I-play it of e.g. Thad Jones's version of "April In Paris".

if I was to somehow hear that tune done live, by a resurrected Thad and band, and in proper jazz fashion they'd inflect it differently... I'd be measuring it in my head against the Blue Note recording and be minutely dissatisfied... the presence of the musicians would compensate and add a lot, their interaction and physicality - but still, at heart, I'd want the solo to go note for note how I've heard it the scores of times I've played the recorded tune.

sound systems, dj sets, radio sets also all have an odd relationship to the "live album" concept - the performance coming out of recordings but still more than the sum of them, and the recording of the session not always capable of capturing the moment

 

[droid]

Thread prompted by news that an 8 CD box set of Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous is due to come out. I like Thin Lizzy quite a bit but somehow never got around to listening to Live and Dangerous - reputedly one of the best live rock albums of all time. Now there's this eight-fold inflation of it - the entire concerts out of which the performances were disparately selected. Who on earth would want that? But then they surely know that demand is there.

Thin Lizzy are famous for this because of Visconti and the over dubs. IIRC Lizzy had some kind of mobile recording van for their gigs, so there was a ton of tapes, but when they were editing pretty much everything bar the drums got replaced - which is why it sounds so good for a live LP.

 

[droid]

A few great live LPs:

 

[sufi]

the likes of hawkwind, the floyd, the dead all spring readily to mind,
but there must be others whose live performances is a distinctive part of their act and enough different from recordings that the live album is a worthwhile thing but i cant really think of any tbh

 

[sufi]

& I was thinking John Martyn,
turns out that he did a lot of live albums but the one with the wildfowl is pretty special

 

[Murphy]

The Chieftains in San Francisco - Owsley Stanley Foundation

owsleystanleyfoundation.org