Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays: Cockles & Mussels…

…Alive, Alive O!

Welcome back my friends, to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday sashays up to the crease to deliver yet another light-loafered, lubed-up googly from the gasworks-end of musical magnificence. Tonight’s missive will consider an oft-overlooked entry within the discography of many a fine and noble musical artiste. It’s what separates the musical muscle Marys from the limp-wristed soy boys – the live album.

It’s generally accepted that the first live albums were recorded around about the mid-1930s, but this really is just semantics. Pretty much any recording from around that time – and indeed earlier – would necessarily have been a live recording. This is simply because of the limitations imposed by the recording technology of the time: if you wanted to record a group of musicians, they played it live and you recorded it live.

This all changed in the mid-1950s, when multi-track tape recorders became available and performances no longer needed to be captured in their entirety. The arrival of multi-track machines allowed recording engineers, for the first time, to assemble recordings. They could now, for example, record a piano performance on one track, send the tape to another studio in another part of the world and subsequently record a vocal performance onto a second track on the same tape. Mix the two together and you’ve created a musical performance that never actually existed in reality.

This was revolutionary stuff. Multi-track tape machines meant that performance recordings no longer needed to be live events. The multiple individual instrumental and vocal contributions could be separated by both time and distance and yet still be easily stacked and conveniently assembled by a competent studio engineer. And better still, if you didn’t like the finished product, you could remix it. Don’t like the sax solo? fade it out. Lousy timing by the drummer? Get a battle-hardened studio professional in to provide a new drum track. And by these wonderfully newfangled technological standards, pretty much any recording from before this period should probably be considered a live recording.

Anyway, once multi-track recording, mixing, editing and all the other studio tools had settled into the recording process, the humble live recording began to be overshadowed and became a somewhat neglected art. Both artists and record labels often thought of live albums as second-rate product when compared to the highly polished studio creations they could now produce – and this was particularly true for artists who treated the studio as an instrument in its own right, producing compositions that (given the technology of the time) were often unreproducible (or at least very difficult and very expensive to reproduce) on stage.

I’ve never subscribed to the view that live albums (perhaps, for our purposes, more accurately described as in-concert albums) were an inferior product. In fact, quite the contrary. In my opinion a good live album can blow a studio album out of the water and can significantly boost the professional standing of an artist. “Good in the studio, even better live” was, for many performers, a badge of honour to be worn with great pride.

A good live album can generate an intimacy between artist and listener that is often absent on a beautifully produced but perhaps somewhat sterile studio recording. In a live setting the audience responds to the performance, the artists in turn respond to the audience and this feedback loop, when the stars align, can sometimes produce moments of pure magic and – if the musical gods are smiling – even entire performances of musical magic. And when these moments are captured, they can create a truly great live album.

But before I get carried away with all this overblown hyperbole, I should point out that live albums can be just as manufactured as their studio cousins – often assembled using music from multiple performances, sometimes separated by many years. Nevertheless, over the last seventy years or so, some truly magnificent live albums have been released, and tonight we’ll take a gander at just a few of my favourites. We might also consider a few albums for which I have to admit a grudging admiration, even though I have no love for either artist or album. And we should perhaps start with an example of the latter. A legendarily accomplished live performer – The Boss: Bruce Springsteen.

I’m really not a fan. I think my problem with Bruce lies in the overblown histrionics and his hideously annoying and deeply irritating overuse of the glockenspiel on many of his studio recordings. The tedious tinkle of this childish percussion instrument (not as bad as the triangle, obviously) renders much of his studio output entirely unlistenable for me, but his live shows are a completely different matter. Case in point – Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Live 1975-85.

Released in 1986, this was Springsteen’s first live release – and it really did have a lot to prove. Bruce had built a fearsome reputation around his near-legendary live shows, so for his debut live release he decided to go big. There was gonna be no messing around with a limp-wristed double live album for Bruce, no siree; a paltry triple live album weren’t gonna butter no muffins neither. When da Boss go big, da Boss go big: a pentuple live album, no less: forty songs, five LPs and a decade’s worth of stage sweat.

Backed by the ridiculously talented E Street Band, this whopper of a live album contains some seriously good live performances. I am not and probably never will be a Springsteen fan, but I have seen a fair few Springsteen performances and I can assure you there are very few musicians who can captivate a stadium full of punters like this geezer.

Next up, a firm favourite of mine: Bob Marley and the Wailers, Live! Recorded in London on the Wailer’s 1975 Natty Dread tour, this was the album that propelled Marley from reggae stardom into international superstardom and prompted Melody Maker to acclaim Bob as “possibly the greatest superstar to visit these shores since the days when Dylan conquered the concert halls of Britain.”

The album very nearly didn’t happen. The band were booked to play two shows at the London Lyceum, but there were absolutely no plans to record either of these gigs. Industry legend has it that when Island Records’ founder Chris Blackwell witnessed the jaw-dropping performance on the first night, he very quickly made sure the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio was parked outside the Lyceum to capture the second. The result was a legendary live album that drips with raw emotion. It transformed the market for reggae – particularly in the U.S. and in my humble opinion remains one of the best live albums of the ’70s.

The Mark II version of Deep Purple was famous for delivering some sensational live performances and, happily for the purposes of posterity, the band were captured at the absolute peak of their powers in August 1972 on their live album, Made In Japan.

Deep Purple were on a high, having just released their career-defining studio album Machine Head. The album had been greeted with huge public and critical acclaim, and they had also managed to achieve considerable commercial success in Japan. As a result, they were booked to play in Osaka and Tokyo in August 1972.

The dates sold out almost immediately and fans were left clamouring, so their record label decided to record the shows for a live album to be released only in Japan. The band were not convinced the recording would be any good, as the recording equipment supplied was deemed to be seriously sub-standard. As a result, they dismissed the recording from their thoughts and focused their efforts on delivering a series of good shows – which is exactly what they delivered. But, to the surprise and delight of all concerned, the subsequent recordings turned out to be of absolutely phenomenal quality and the decision to make the album a Japan-only release was soon abandoned. The album was issued worldwide, sold very well and has consistently been praised as one of the finest live albums of all time.

Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover would later call Made in Japan “the most honest record in rock history”, with no overdubs or studio tampering. Drummer Ian Paice said, “it’s still probably the best live rock’n’roll album ever made… a tour de force of innovation and living on the edge… great playing… fantastic sound. Nothing comes close”.

I agree. It’s raw, brutal, full of on-stage errors, but is utterly authentic and captures Deep Purple in full flight and on blistering form. I saw Deep Purple live a great many times, but I never saw them when they were this good. Many acclaim this as the best live rock album of all time and there is an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer states: “everyone knows that rock music reached perfection in August 1972” – and who am I to argue with Homer Simpson?

Time for a change of pace and a very firm personal favourite of mine: Joni Mitchell and her 1974 live album, Miles Of Aisles.

It’s an absolute corker – a superb album and, for me, one of the best live albums of the mid-70s. Up until its release, I’d considered her to be very good, a harmless hippy drippy type, entertaining, certainly talented, but nothing really special. This album genuinely shocked me with its quality and turned me into a hopeless devotee. The recording quality is good, but not perfect (there is audible tape wow and flutter) but all 18 songs on the album are wonderful – tightly arranged and beautifully performed by Joni’s magnificent backing band, L.A. Express. It’s one of those albums that, once I start listening, I just want to listen straight through.

I didn’t get to see Joni live until the late ’70s / early ’80s, when she had an even better backing band that included Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Michael Brecker and Lyle Mays. Now that’s a show I truly wish was available as a live album. That show was also my introduction to the wonderful guitar skills of the American jazz musician, Pat Metheny. I was left open-mouthed in admiration by his performance and he remains, to this day, one of my favourite musicians. Happily, he too has produced some tremendous live albums. My personal favourite is his 1983 tour de force, Travels. It’s a wonderful live album and the perfect entry point for anyone interested in exploring this magnificent musician’s body of work.

And talking of magnificent musicians, we can’t discuss sensational live performances without mentioning the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughan. There are shed loads of SRV live albums out there and it really, really doesn’t matter which one you pick – they are all magnificent, except for all the ones that are even better than that.

I think we’ll take a short proggy detour here and give a quick mention to the delights of Italian prog. Italy has produced some tremendous prog rock bands over the years and one of my favourites are Premiata Forneria Marconi, better known as PFM. Their name apparently translates as Award-Winning Marconi Bakery. Perhaps not the most rock ‘n’ roll name in the business, but they are a sensational live act and have produced several splendid live albums over the past few decades. The cream of the crop is, without question, their 1974 live album, Cook (also known as Live in the USA). It’s a rip-snorter of an album and, along with Yessongs (by Yes) and USA (by King Crimson) is easily one of the best live albums of prog rock’s golden era.

Speaking of Yessongs, Yes have produced some pretty shoddy live albums over the years and I should probably include Yessongs in that hall of shame. It was recorded when the band were at the peak of their powers and the performances captured on the album are blisteringly good. Sadly, however, the recording quality is abysmal. I’ve heard bootleg recordings made by punters sitting with a portable tape recorder on their lap that were almost as good as this supposedly professional recording. Nevertheless, despite the shoddy sound quality, Yessongs remains a firm favourite of mine, simply because of the tremendous live material it captured.

And I suppose we have to talk about Peter Frampton and his 1976 planet-rogering monster of a live album, Frampton Comes Alive – one of the most successful live albums of all time.

It was the best-selling album of 1976, the best-selling live album of all time (for a while, at least), it collected worldwide gold and platinum awards by the truckload, was voted Album of the Year in numerous polls, stayed on the charts for 97 weeks, produced a stack of hit singles, still consistently polls as one of the best live albums of all time and I really can’t stand it.

The album drips with that smug, easy going, west coast, laid back, permanently sunny disposition that permeated a great deal of mid-70’s U.S. rock music (yes, I know Frampton is a Beckenham boy). The U.S. radio stations named the genre “soft rock” and Frampton hit the motherload with this album.

However, although hugely successful, Frampton Comes Alive is also one of those live albums whose authenticity has been questioned – something Frampton flatly denies. But in truth, there are a great many supposedly live albums that are perhaps not quite what they seem.

Eddie Kramer (the truly gifted producer and studio engineer who mixed Humble Pie’s utterly magnificent double live album, Performance Rockin’ the Fillmore) has suggested that a fair proportion of the live material released by the American band Kiss was actually a studio concoction.

Queen’s Live Killers has been much-maligned for its “cut and paste” approach to assembling live tracks – particularly as live bootlegs from the period reveal the band were on top form and needed no such studio nonsense. Fairport Convention’s In Reel Time is a studio recording that uses crowd noise from a John Martyn concert to make it sound like a live performance, and the Carlos Santana / Buddy Miles “live” album irritates me deeply (mainly because it’s a damn fine album that needs no trickery) by using the same loop of crowd yells and whistles over and over again. I am still not sure if this was ever an actual live recording or not.

One of the worst offenders is Marc Bolan’s Acoustic Warrior. This was released in the ’90s, presumably to cash-in on the then very popular MTV Unplugged series. It presents itself as a collection of live acoustic performances by Marc Bolan and T. Rex, but seems to be a bizarre hodgepodge of Frankenstein tracks with some pretty awful canned applause dubbed over the top. Most of the tracks seem to be cobbled together from studio performances, radio sessions, and home demos, tastelessly adorned with added 90’s instrumentation and fake audience noises.

However, the one that saddens me most is Thin Lizzy’s Live & Dangerous – a firm favourite of mine. Performances were recorded in London and north America during the band’s 1976 and ’77 tours, and the recordings were mixed and overdubbed in Paris in 1978. Nobody denies that overdubbing took place, but there is considerable disagreement as to the extent. Producer Tony Visconti has claimed the album was 75% recorded in the studio, with only the drums and audience noise remaining from the original live recordings, whereas various members of the band have firmly denied this accusation and maintain their claim of in-concert authenticity, with minimal overdubs and studio shenanigans taking place. Whatever the truth, it’s still a great album.

And we can’t finish without a mentioning the MTV series Unplugged, which has given us some tremendous live performances. Unplugged, for the uninitiated, showcases performers playing acoustic or “unplugged” versions of their songs. The show started in 1989 and is still (occasionally) on the air. Many of the artists who appeared on the show have subsequently released their Unplugged session as a live album, and some of these have been absolute belters.

Eric Clapton’s Unplugged sold over 26 million copies worldwide and became, for a while, the best-selling live album of all time. Other notable Unplugged albums have been released by numerous artists including Mariah Carey, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Rod Stewart, 10,000 Maniacs, Tony Bennett and – my absolute favourite of the Unplugged series – Page and Plant’s 1994 stormer, No Quarter. It’s a very good job my copy of that album is not on vinyl, because it would be completely worn out by now.

Anyway, I see the pineapple quiche has been gobbled and there’s no more Bud Lite in the fridge, so I think that’s probably quite enough of my ramblings for tonight. So that’s yer lot for this week’s P.A. powered edition of Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays. I think we’ll wrap things up for this evening with a live performance oft’ voted the most iconic live music broadcast of the last century: The Fabulous Sun City Boys, a.k.a. Freddie and Queen, completely revitalising their flagging career by performing the definitive set-of-the-day on the tedious Bob Geldof’s poptastically monstrous 1985 transatlantic telly extravaganza – Live Aid.