It’s impossible to capture the frenzy of a live show on record, but it’s not for lack of trying. Here are 50 of the best attempts from Jimi’s historic Monterey Pop guitar incineration to less than 200 people crammed into Abbey Road for Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker; from Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison to Cheap Trick at Budokan. We tried to avoid albums that are mostly overdubs (see Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps) or completely fake (the nonetheless essential Cheap Thrills from Big Brother and the Holding Company) and focused on groundbreaking moments, career-making albums and epic jams.
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A pre-sobriety Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars and Bob and Tommy Stinson alternate between the best and worst bar band of all time on Twin/Tone's cassette-only The Shit Hits the Fans. Recorded with two hanging mics at Oklahoma City's converted church venue the Bowery in 1984, these 24 songs (19 of which are covers) are a lubricated mix of blues, metal, soul and spilled-beer wankery. 'I asked Paul or somebody if he minded that I record the show,' Bowery manager and DJ Roscoe Shoemaker recalled in the Replacements oral history All Over But the Shouting. Typical Westy response.'
Recordholic 3rd Nov 2017: Although written by Sherley while an inmate in Folsom Prison, the A-side first saw release as the closing song on Johnny Cash's live Folsom Prison LP in 1968. Shop Tarkett vinyl flooring in the flooring section of Lowes.com. Find quality vinyl flooring online or in store.
Between the comical breakdowns, the 'Mats show off the bruised slack-rock template of the Let It Be era that eventually inspired Nirvana, Wilco and thousands of other pop-loving punks. Faithful and furious takes on 'Sixteen Blue' and 'Can't Hardly Wait' are balanced out by decidedly insincere covers of the Jackson 5's 'I'll Be There' and Led Zeppelin's 'Misty Mountain Hop.' By the time it's done, they've artfully mangled R.E.M., U2, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. Reed Fischer. The album that brought Little Feat back to their, well, you know, Waiting for Columbus was recorded in London and Washington D.C. In August 1977. It was released six months later to become the band's best selling record, renewing the Feats' credibility in the process.
The notion to record a live album was pushed by their producer, Lowell George, whose flagging writing chops had alienated his bandmates. Columbus, however, demonstrated that the band was still a New Orleans-funk powerhouse, with energy and improv skills to spare, as demonstrated by 'Dixie Chicken' and 'Tripe Faced Boogie.' Lowell later overdubbed most of his lead vocals and many guitar solos to great effect, giving the album an engagingly punchy sense of detail. Indeed, Columbus's reputation has grown steadily over time, with Phish complimenting it with a live cover version on Halloween 2010. Richard Gehr.
Backed by a combo that included Chicago session vets such as guitarist Philip Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and drummer Fred White (who later joined Earth, Wind & Fire), Donny Hathaway swings with vividness on this brilliant live set and the audience responds ecstatically. When he runs through a 12-minute version of 'The Ghetto,' playing the Rhodes electric piano with intensity, his fans soul-clap in time; a woman screams delightedly when he gives a gospel lilt to Carole King's 'You've Got a Friend.'
Meanwhile, 'Little Ghetto Boy,' which was released the following year as a classic single from the Quincy Jones soundtrack collaboration Come Back, Charleston Blue, earns a life-affirming preview. Live cracked the Top 20 and became Hathaway's first gold album, but the noted perfectionist was typically self-critical. 'I'm naturally happy with the sales but the album itself isn't as good as I would have liked it,' he told Blues & Soul magazine. 'I've got to polish myself up for the next one.' Sadly, he never got that chance: The album closes with a 13-minute rendition of 'Voices Inside (Everything is Everything),' a song that inadvertently predicted his struggles with schizophrenia, and his eventual suicide in 1979 at the age of 33. Between its birth in 1973 and the release of 'Rapper's Delight' in 1979, hip-hop was exclusively a live concern. However, until the internet age, this period was mostly archived via tape-trading and bootlegs — so leave it to hip-hop historian KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions to not only provide the live era's most vivid retelling (the 1986 single 'South Bronx'), but also its most bombastic revamp with this groundbreaking 1991 album.
Recorded in New York, Paris and London, KRS connects the dots between the spoken-word poetry of forebears like the Last Poets, the interjections of reggae toasters and, when 'I'm Still #1' falls apart, the crowd-pleasing freestyles of rap's earliest days. Christopher R. In 1978, the then-red-hot Thin Lizzy decided that they wanted to work with producer Tony Visconti, who had made his name working with fellow glam travelers David Bowie and T. Time was tight, so a live album was in order: Live And Dangerous was the snarling result, a document of a band that took no prisoners even on mellower tracks like 'Dancing In The Moonlight.' How exactly the Irish outfit came to be captured so effectively is still in dispute; Visconti has asserted that 75 percent of Dangerous was recorded in the studio in order to smooth out the rough spots, but the band vehemently disagrees.
'We are a very loud band,' guitarist Brian Robertson told Guitar Player in 2012, 'me being the loudest of all of us. So how are you going to replace my guitar when it's so loud that it's going to bleed all over the bloody drum kit?' Maura Johnston. A live recording that features real danger.
When U2 played Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver on June 5, 1983, the weather was so terrible that less than half the sold out crowd showed up, and both opening acts (the Alarm and Divinyls) canceled over safety concerns. That did nothing to deter U2 and especially Bono. In 2004, guitarist The Edge told Rolling Stone that Bono 'scared the shit out of me' by climbing a lighting rig to wave a white flag during 'The Electric Co.,' coming close to live wires. But the real lightning came from this live album, concert film and the fog-shrouded 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' music video.
Even though most of Under a Blood Red Sky's album tracks came from shows in Boston and Germany, the Red Rocks visuals stand as U2's last moment of young, ragged glory before mega-stardom set in. 'It was a benchmark,' said Adam Clayton. 'We could say now: 'Right, we've got to a point where we're contenders. We're at the starting gate.' David Menconi. Neil Young was in the middle of a career renaissance when he hit the road with Crazy Horse in early 1991.
Their new album Ragged Glory was hailed as their finest in a decade and the group was playing songs old and new with a stunning level of energy and passion. The live album Weld captured the best moments on a two-CD set.
The 14-minute rendition of 'Like A Hurricane' remains one of the best version of the tune, while concert staples 'Cortez The Killer,' 'Powderfinger' and 'Hey Hey, My My (In The Black)' have never sounded so vital. It's hard to pinpoint a live peak for Crazy Horse, but this very well might be it. The album originally came packed with Arc, which was a single 35-minute track of various feedback-soaked beginnings and endings of songs. 'Now here I am, 45 years old, and this is the essence of what's happening to my mind,' said Young of the extended noise suite. 'I really made Arc for people who ride around in the Jeeps with the big speakers.
If you pull up beside somebody on the street and you're playing that, that makes a fucking statement.' Perhaps more than any other show, Phish's New Year's Eve 1995 (to 1996) extravaganza at Madison Square Garden set the commercial and artistic bar for the jam legions that followed. Bordering on musical theater starring four longhaired nerds, their three sets packed in one stunt after another.
But as always, the band's most impressive tricks were in their improvisation, including a delicate second set-ending delay loop motif that later turned up on Trey Anastasio's homemade side project One Man's Trash as 'That Dream Machine.' 'It felt like an era was coming to an end,' Anastasio told Parke Puterbaugh of the band's massive extended fall 1995 trek, featuring some of the Vermont quartet's all-time noisiest excursions. New Year's '95 would prove to be a renewable resource, yielding an instant classic tape, months of fan debate ('Did Trey tease 'Fire on the Mountain' in 'Drowned'?' ), a three-CD set and, most recently, a six-LP Record Store Day edition. Jesse Jarnow. In the summer of '76, nothing was in the air like Frampton Comes Alive!, the ultimate example of the double-live album with gatefold cover — it was supposed to be just a single album until A&M Records took the unusual step of insisting on a second disc.
Frampton, a journeyman Humble Pie guitarist gone solo, happily obliged. 'Baby, I Love Your Way,' 'Show Me the Way' and most of all 'Do You Feel Like We Do' came to life in the live setting (all 14 minutes of it). Even the crowd noise sounds sensational. Frampton Comes Alive! Quickly became the biggest-selling album of all time until the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack topped it. 'A year before Frampton Comes Alive!
We had released the studio version of 'Show Me The Way' as a singleand it totally tanked,' Frampton. 'It was pretty strange to put out the live version and watch it go through the roof. It was still the same song. What had changed? AOR was the big radio format at the time. And they were playing Frampton Comes Alive!
If you put on an AOR station — any station — you’d hear pretty much all the songs from that record.' David Menconi. King's openers had a rough time. As an announcer welcomes the likes of Sheriff Joseph Woods to the stage before the blues legend takes the stage for a 1970 show at Chicago's Cook County Jail, the prisoners greet the officer with aggressive boos and jeers. It was a tough crowd, but King entranced them with ease and humility. He was gracious, flirtatious and even self-deprecating as he effortless ripped through songs like 'Worry, Worry' and 'Sweet Sixteen.' 'It was the best show we ever had,' said the Department of Corrections Superintendent Winston Moore who had invited King to perform for the prisoners.
By the time he finished on a sweet note with the ballad 'Please Accept My Love,' King had the crowd on their feet, hollering ecstatically. Brittany Spanos. Joni Mitchell's first live album arrived at the peak of her fame.
Recorded a couple months after her breakthrough Court and Spark debuted, the Canadian singer-songwriter documented the California stops on the tour supporting the new LP. Performing an expansive collection of tracks from her 1968 debut Song to a Seagull onward, Miles of Aisles carefully avoided the hits. 'No one ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a 'Starry Night' again, man,' said Mitchell before playing 'Circle Game.'
In 1991, she why she made the comparison: 'I never wanted to turn into a human jukebox. I haven't used up all my ideas yet. But I'm working in a pop field, and whether they're going to allow an older woman to do that is an open question. It requires a loyal, interested audience who believes in my talent.'
Brittany Spanos.
Of the fifteen tracks on Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison album, one was written by an inmate of the prison, Glen Sherley. Read the story of the real armed robber who wrote Greystone Chapel. January 13 th 1968: Johnny Cash walked through the gates of one of the most notorious prisons in the United States. Cash was not there as a prisoner. He was there to record an album that would become one of his most famous pieces of work. Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison was his 27 th album and became a landmark in his career which was until that day gradually sliding down the rock ‘n roll route of drink and drugs obscurity.
Cash had his addiction under control by the time he went to Folsom New Mexico in 1968 and was determined to put his career back on track. The singer performed two shows in the prison that day and fifteen tracks from those two shows made it to the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album which went on to become a commercial success for Cash, and something which pulled his career up from a downward spiral.Of the fifteen tracks on the album, one was written by an inmate of the prison. Greystone Chapel was the work of Glen Sherley who was serving time in Folsom for the armed robbery of a bank.Sherley’s song was about how the chapel at Folsom provided inmates with an escape from the harsh realties of life behind bars, calling it ‘a house of worship in a den of sin.’Sherley recorded his song in that chapel with the help of the chapel minister, Reverend Floyd Gressett who coincidently was a friend of Johnny Cash and the night before the concert at Folsom prison, the reverend gave Cash a copy of Sherley’s recording.Glen Milborn Sherley was born on an Oklahoma farm in 1936. While still a young boy, his family relocated to California where his life of crime took root. Sherley carried out a series of bank and liquor store robberies while the number of prisons he frequented varied. He served time in San Quentin, Chino, Soledad, and was serving three years at Folsom by the time Cash arrived there for his legendary performance in 1968.Cash had stayed up all night learning Sherley’s song and the next day used it as his last song to sign off his successful concert with. Sherley, who was sitting in the front row, was unaware that Cash was going to sing his song and when he did the place almost erupted in exhilaration when Cash pointed out the inmate who wrote the song.A year later Sherley was transferred to Vacaville prison in California and by 1971 he got another musical boost when Eddy Arnold recorded another one of his songs Portrait Of My Woman.
Success was to come to Sherley again when he was offered the chance to record his own album in prison.Sherley reordered Live at Vacaville with the aid of session musicians from Nashville that Cash had organised. It was the first time an album was recorded in a prison by a prisoner.During this time Cash was able to convince the Governor of California Ronald Reagan to permit an early release date for Sherley.
Later that year Glen Sherley was granted his freedom and there to meet him at the prison gate was the man in black.Six days later Sherley accompanied Cash to a senate hearing on prison reform. Under the guidance of Cash, Sherley started carving out a career for himself in the country music scene.
He came under Cash’s publishing house The House Of Cash, and even met and married Nikki Robbins who was working there. The ceremony was held in Cash’s house in Tennessee with Cash as Sherley’s best man.
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