Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks – Where’s The Money?
Live Albums You Wish You Were Present At The Recording Of
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks – Where’s The Money?
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Talking Heads / Stop Making Sense
Similar but for me it would be Disc 2 of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads. IMHO this is so much better musically than Stop Making Sense thanks to the contributions of Busta Jones and Adrian Belew. Almost without exception, these are as good as any of these songs ever got. Visually I’d imagine Stop Making Sense was probably more of a spectacle.
Other than that I’d imagine Live at the Apollo with James Brown in his pomp would have been spectacular.
@Chrisf saw that tour in San Francisco. Stunning then a month later they were in Melbourne. Had far less staging though.
Genesis – Genesis Live. Oh I was there.
Stackridge – Pick Of The Crop. Ditto.
The Who – Live At Leeds. An obvious choice so I could meet the student promoters I got to know later in life and who invited me to the surprise show the band played in 2006.
My top five:
Pink Floyd – Is There Anybody Out There? (i.e. The Wall live)
Depeche Mode – 101
Diary of Dreams – Alive
The Birthday Massacre – Show and Tell
Kate Bush – Before the Dawn
Plus too many others to mention. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been to a single gig that was later turned into a live album, other than some Marillion ones that were released as “official bootlegs”, where every gig on a tour was recorded on the sound desk and then made available from their website.
I find myself just thinking of my favourite live albums and wonder if that is exactly the same thing as the question poses. Anyway …
Two from my youth –
AC/DC – If You Want Blood …
MSG – One Night at Budokan
Two more recent(ish) –
Semi-Detached Mock Tudor – Richard Thompson
Live at Barrowlands – Peat & Diesel
You are a man of distinction and taste with the first two suggestions.
Saved me a list.
I would add Cheap Trick at the Budokan.
And UFO’s Strangers in the Night too.
Obvs. But the track list on the original album doesn’t reflect the setlist.
Still I would have loved to have been there.
Rainbow Live On Stage and Fleetwood Mac Live. Neither seem to get mentioned much, but the former contains the best recorded version of Catch The Rainbow while the latter has the best versions of Never Going Back Again, Not That Funny, Landslide and Rhiannon.
I went to Fleetwood Mac at Wembley Arena the night some of that LP was recorded. Was the night before one of my A Levels and I was in the third row. The ticket was £3.50 if I remember rightly.
My surprise was that they rocked out a lot more than I realised they did, Buckingham was fantastic.
You are on the wrong thread!
Joni – Shadows and Light
Yessongs
Deep Purple – Made in Japan (or Europe) as my 12 yr old self
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Live At The Filmore. Those nights sound like they were a lot of fun…
Two that immediately come to mine;
Jackie Wilson At The Copa.
Can you imagine being in the same room for the performance of To Be Loved from this?! Magical
Sam Cooke At The Harlem Square Club.
If I had one wish/a time machine etc.
I flipping hate concerts, but do like Live CDs and I like, for instance, The Stones’ Get yer Yaya’s.. featuring tunes inverted from the original studio cuts, Sympathy for the Devil has same chord prgressions yet with Mick Taylor they completely re-invent its arrangment for live performance.
As far as the question: it’s just the one: The ‘Oo Leeds University Refectory feb 14th 1970. I’ve listened to this record hundreds of times – maybe one thousand – some of it was tarted up in the studio, but it still thrills me every time. Photo taken of the empty space just before the madness/ rock n roll nirvana starts:
Ya-Ya’s would probably be up there as one of my all time favourite live albums, but like you, I just don’t really love being at gigs. So while Ya-Ya’s is amazing, I think I’d find it annoying being in that crowd, especially with people yelling “Paint it black! Paint it black you devils”
Had a few lunches in there in my time.
Jean-Michel Jarre- Concerts in China
Depeche Mode – 101
U2 – Under a Blood Red Sky
A Carly Simon live performance I saw on TV once. Summer evening, somewhere in the US. Completely great.
Nils Lofgren – Acoustic live
Neil Young – live Rust
Dexys – One day I am going to soar ( not sure if that was the title but it was the tour which was brilliant).
That Carly Simon gig was repeated a year or two ago. I think I get_iPlayer-ed it. I’ll check later.
Was that the one from Martha’s Vineyard? I’ve got a dim memory of her doing Coming Around Again.
Yes – just looked it up and it must be the one I remember.
get_iPlayer where we download stuff and then don’t get around to re-watching it before it’s next shown on BBC 4.
Yep, it’s the unlabelled VHS tape for the internet generation.
Good pick with J-MJ in China, although I think I would prefer to be at his Rendez-Vous Houston show. I recall seeing it on a small TV (although I suppose all TVs were small back then) and being blown away by the images of astronauts floating across skyscrapers, the laser harp, the choir giving it both barrels, etc. I expect being there in person might mean seeing fewer details, but I bet the overall effect must have been really something.
I saw the lightshow when he played Docklands – you could see it from as far away as our house in Hainault. People drove up the hill and parked up to watch!
The U2 gig would have been a treat.
I played that album to death back in the 1980s.
Off to find it…
Yes, me too. It was shown as a Tube special I think and then released as a low-price album. Great record.
The Dream Syndicate — Live At Raji’s
The Move — Something Else By The Move
Warren Zevon — Stand In The Fire
Duke Ellington – Newport Jazz Festival 1956
The gigs that (mostly) ex-members of Traffic performed that became Welcome To The Canteen
Bob Marley & The Wailers – the Lyceum gig, not Babylon By Bus tour
The Croydon and Sunderland gigs that were recorded for Free Live.
I’m greedy so I’m nominating the Last Waltz but if its one artist I will join the other Afterworders in Leeds waiting for The Who.or maybe Van’s Too Late To Stop Now show
Rather than just list favourite live albums once again, acts I would have liked to have seen live and possibly could have, but didn’t
Wings 79 tour
Joy Division 79/80
Taking Heads 81 (Wembley Arena)
The Clash (they played Liverpool Royal Court Theatre when I lived there, but I didn’t go)
The Jam (final tour)
Frank Sinatra (Albert Hall ca. 83)
Lucky enough to have seen most other acts live that I am interested in.
The Talking Heads gigs at Wembley Arena were 12-13 July 1982. Yeah, I wish I’d seen that tour, too.
The band only played six gigs in the whole of 1981, and they were all in Japan!
Ah, yes 1982 of course. I didn’t even try to get tickets. Think I had finished my studies for the summer by then, so not sure why
I knew of Talking Heads because my cousin Simon (who was a couple of years older than me) had Fear of Music, and we knew they’d stopped after Remain In Light. We didn’t know they’d started up again until Speaking In Tongues came out in 1983, by which time we’d missed them.
I’d only just turned 10 when Joy Division ended, so they’ve always been an historical act for me.
I’d like to have seen the Stone Roses at the Majestic club in Reading, just before they went overground, but it was during August and I had a summer job in Cambridge.
I saw The Stone Roses on the Second Coming tour, they were shite, except John Squire played some great guitar.
I saw them for about 10 minutes at the Reading Festival, after John Squire had left, and they were even shiter.
I also didn’t see them at Glasto after JS fell off his bike, and Pulp replaced them, and were one of the best things I ever saw there.
I worked with someone once who had seen them at that Reading Festival, he was a casual fan and knew someone had left the group but he got it wrong, he said “the new singer is terrible”
Only ever saw Talking Heads once – earlier on in their career – double header with Jonathan Richman at the Birmingham Odeon. Would love to have seen the Remain in light toyr but was lucky enough to see David Byrne twice. The Utopia your and the one that preceded it – amongst the greatest gigs I ever saw.
Oh and I forgot – would love to have been at the Elvis Costello and the Attractions live at the El Mocambo.
Had the consolation of seeing David Byrne quite a few times. Always a great show.
I was at that Odeon gig, too!
Bill Withers – Live at Carnegie Hall (1973)
Charles Lloyd – Forest Flower (Live at Monterey 1966, with Keith Jarrett, Jack de Johnette and Cecil McBee)
Don Ellis – Live at Monterey, also 1966
Duke Ellington – Live at Newport, 1966
The two most famous Duke Ellington live recordings at Newport are the classic 1956 one with the mighty Paul Gonsalves soloing in “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”, and the less celebrated 1958 one. According to discogs, there’s also a “Duke Ellington Live! At The Newport Jazz Festival ’59” set, which I’m not familiar with.
But I’ve never heard of Live at Newport, 1966…
That’s simple. My fat fingers. Should have been 1956.
The Tubes – What Do You Want From Live
Floyd – Pompeii.
Thin White Rope – The One That Got Away.
Now that would have been a storming gig to have attended…
Also, John Martyn’s gig at Henry Afrika’s in Glasgow, 1983. Only available as a bootleg, sadly – but hopefully it’ll be allowed as a live album.
Oh – and Vital, obviously.
And Yessongs, obviously.
And the gigs in Yesshows where Moraz was playing, obviously.
Coltrane at Newport. Yes, both years.
Not released on a single album but tracks were scattered over a few different ones:
Frank Zappa live at Hammersmith Odeon February 18th 1979.
Includes the notorious “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” performance with the two poetry interludes from a narcoticised audience member.
One of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder gigs.
At different ends of the spectrum (but all part of one continuum):
Ramones – It’s Alive
Neil Young – Rust Never Sleeps / Live Rust
John Coltrane at The Village Vanguard
Slade Alive!
Bueno Vista Social Club At Carnegie Hall
Pete Ubu By Order of Mayor Pawlicki
Rolling Stones El Mocambo
I’m going for Hildegard Von Bingen Live at St. Rupertsberg monastery July 1150
The Elvis comeback show in 1968
Dylan at the Albert 1966. All those years I thought I was there for that recording, then it turned out I wasn’t.
So you mean Manchester?
Yes.
That sounds like the ideal topic for one of those wonderfully quirky HM Bateman “The man who…” cartoons
Schroedingers Bob
The thing is most live albums aren’t one concert but a compilation. Putting that aside…
Edgar Winter’s White Trash – Roadwork (actually is one concert)
John Coltrane – Live at the Village Vanguard
Johnny Winter And Live
Little Feat – Waiting for Columbus
Deep Purple – Made in Japan
Donald Fagen – The Nightfly
I’m sure there are others.
I recently picked up a Bowie live in Berlin album, a Record Store Day release. From the Stage tour. Now thats one I would have loved to have attended.
Not the greatest live album of all time, but I would have liked to have been at The Concert for George. One of a very few number of concerts that I couldn’t get tickets for. As it turned out I was in the Far East on a business trip when it happened, so I couldn’t have gone anyway!
Oh yes. I’ve got that on Blu-ray. I think I prefer George’s songs when sung by other people. See also: Dylan, B. and (sometimes) Young, N.
But, Ray Cooper.
Most talented one of the lot! 😉
I really like Jeff Lynne’s version of “The Inner Light” at the Concert for George. It’s wasn’t an obvious Harrison song for him to cover, but he did a nice job.