Been Awhile
For new subscribers, I want to welcome you to my Friday column and I hope you enjoy. If you dissagree with anything, please feel free to call me out on it. Unlike, most progressives and Democrats, I enjoy and will listen to dissenting opinions.
Your opinion is as valuable as mine and I hope to always keep it that way.
The Friday column will generally be about music but it may stray from time to time into other forms of entertainment. There are a couple of things that I probably will never change my opinion of. 1. Music from lets say 1995 to now generally sucks. 2. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a sham.
This being the unofficial start of Summer I think it’s time we take another look at live music over the decades. This Summer has a plethora of groups touring and festivals galore and I can pretty much disagree I won’t be a single one of them. Not because of Covid, but because the great live bands of the past, while they may be touring, they aren’t great live anymore. Bandmates, leave, die. Singers voices are not what they were and I am sorry but I would just rather remember them the way they were and not the shell of their former selves. I know I am wrong about this but I saw the Who when disagree voice could shatter bulletproof glass. Not now. I heard the shows where great but I just can’t bring myself to watch The Who at 60%.
So, I fall back on the records of live shows past. To give you a better example: I finally saw the Rolling Stones a few years ago at The Prudential Center in Newark. Good show, not great but it was The Stones so it had a level of cool that other concerts could not approach. Like I said, the show was good but the reality is, listening to Get Yer Ya Yas Out to me, better exemplifies The Stones in concert.
With that background in mind, I am going to give you some Live albums that you may have forgotten about and a live song that transcends the original recording as well.
My first song is one that I just heard two days ago and I loved it. Never a big fan of disagree, I happened to hear a live version of “Crystal River” from the Extended Play Mudcrunch Live album. This is a Tom Petty song that he wrote for the first Mudcrunch album and it is excellent. Lyrically and musically it sores and if you are like me, you will listen to it over and over again.
Keeping with the Tom Petty theme, I will include the five CD Live Anthology album because this album just shows a complete picture of how great Tom Petty was. Let me preface the next comment with that I like Tom Petty but was never a huge fan until he passed away in October of 2017. It was then that I realized how important he was to music and I think every time I hear one of his songs that he left us too soon. When I started listening to this collection, it was then that I realized what an amazing talent he was. Hard to pick one song but if you were to hold my feet to the fire I would say “Mystic Eyes” would be the one song I would play over and over. This old Van Morrison song never sounded so good as it does on this record.
The last time I wrote this type of column, the one album that was mentioned more by readers than any other was The Allman Brothers Band, Live At The Fillmore. I have no excuse for forgetting about this album. I am not a huge fan of the Brothers and I am not sure how many times I can listen to “Melissa” or “Statesboro Blues” but this album transcends the repetition of a lot of their records. It is arguably one of the greatest live albums of all time and who am I to argue. While not considered their greatest concert performance, what the double record set did was introduce the band to a wider audience and it helped push the Allman Brothers to another level. You could not turn on any progressive FM radio station in the early 70’s and not hear “Whipping Post” in it’s 22 minutes of glory..at 2:30 in the morning.
Why I didn’t bring this record up the first time is beyond me but The Who, Live At Leeds is still one of my favorite live albums ever. Being a burgeoning Who fan at 13, my brother bought me this record and from the minute I opened the plastic wrapper, I knew I had something special. The October that was included was fascinating and I didn’t even play the album for an hour as I went through the liner notes, the receipts from Woodstock and everything else they stuffed in there. Once I played this album on my Panasonic stereo, I didn’t come out of my room for 5 days. I had never heard such energy, such power in any album and here it was, with my new favorite group. Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys Blah! This was a band that could rock! The later versions of this album/CD have songs that for whatever reason were left off of the original and that’s fine by me. I prefer the original and have over the years deleted the added songs as bad filler.
Somewhere, I know I have recommended this album and I apologize but it is an album that pretty much covers my college years and I still love it today. Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus was different from most live albums at the time. It was more of a fun boogie compilation with less emphasis on straight rock and roll. The live version of “Dixie Chicken” is better than the studio version by a long shot and “Fat Man in The Bathtub” is still one great song.
The aforementioned Get Yer Ya ya’s Out is the best Rolling Stones Live record ever. Trust me, there are like 804 Stones live albums and none come close to this one. The vinyl is better than the CD simply because you can clearly hear that girl in the first row yelling “Paint it Black, You Devils!" as the Stones go into “Sympathy For The Devil”. On the CD, if you have shuffle on, you don’t get the same connection. This may be overstating it but this is the greatest live album from the greatest rock and roll band.
My last album for this article is one that I am sure I will get plenty of pushback from. 11/17/70 by Elton John was a different type of live album. Smallish audience recorded for a radio station in New York at the beginning of Elton John’s career. What it did show was how talented Elton John is. The potential was what was on display here and he knocked everyone for a loop. The songwriting, the talent as a singer/songwriter and his skill on the piano. You can say whatever you want about Elton John, you cannot say he is not talented. Obviously, his career exploded after this record and the rest is history. This album is a time capsule with excellent song after excellent song. This record opened up a door that changed music forever, unleashing Elton John.