http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VbOo6bmuso
This video is awesome! It tells me exactly what I need to know!
Tuesday 11 December 2012
Sinatra- Live album 1950's
http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-in-australia-1959-mw0000615722
So when Sinatra was in Australia in '59, they recorded some tracks on 2 stops on the tour. It wasnt officially released until 1997 but it was recorded then.
Also there are some recordings of Billie Holiday from 1934 to the 50's which also werent released as an album until later.
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Recordings-1934-1959-Lester-Young/dp/B000WCN8VY
So when Sinatra was in Australia in '59, they recorded some tracks on 2 stops on the tour. It wasnt officially released until 1997 but it was recorded then.
Also there are some recordings of Billie Holiday from 1934 to the 50's which also werent released as an album until later.
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Recordings-1934-1959-Lester-Young/dp/B000WCN8VY
Trying to find the first ever live album
This is proving more difficult than first anticipated! I thought looking for the date of the first live album released would be simple... It isnt.
http://www.rollingstones.com/release/got-live-if-you-want-it/
So the Stones seem to be the first ones to release an album (based on the fact I cant find anything earlier than 66) but they kinda disowned it coz they didnt like it... this is a great start isnt it?
Anyhow, the link is there =)
http://www.rollingstones.com/release/got-live-if-you-want-it/
So the Stones seem to be the first ones to release an album (based on the fact I cant find anything earlier than 66) but they kinda disowned it coz they didnt like it... this is a great start isnt it?
Anyhow, the link is there =)
Saturday 8 December 2012
Alan Lomax Field Recordings
http://www.last.fm/music/Alan+Lomax+Field+Recordings
Alan Lomax is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He began making field recordings with his father, a fellow folklorist, John Lomax, of American folk music for the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. Throughout his six decades of pivotal work, Lomax travelled all over the United States, as well as to the Carribean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain (where he was hounded by Franco’s fascist police), and Italy. Aside from turning the Archive of American Folk Song into one of the most important music resources in the world, Lomax wrote numerous books on music, hosted radio shows in the United States (CBS) and Britain (BBC), and even brought a concert series to New York called The Midnight Special.
Alan Lomax has played an incredibly important role in the preservation of classic folk music, and helped introduce such artists as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Jelly Roll Morton to the world.
http://www.radioopensource.org/lomax/
We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”
Alan Lomax with unidentified man. [Library of Congress photo]
Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?
John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]
Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n'roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.
Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/arts/alan-lomax-who-raised-voice-of-folk-music-in-us-dies-at-87.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20lomax%20obit&st=cse
Alan Lomax is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He began making field recordings with his father, a fellow folklorist, John Lomax, of American folk music for the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. Throughout his six decades of pivotal work, Lomax travelled all over the United States, as well as to the Carribean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain (where he was hounded by Franco’s fascist police), and Italy. Aside from turning the Archive of American Folk Song into one of the most important music resources in the world, Lomax wrote numerous books on music, hosted radio shows in the United States (CBS) and Britain (BBC), and even brought a concert series to New York called The Midnight Special.
Alan Lomax has played an incredibly important role in the preservation of classic folk music, and helped introduce such artists as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Jelly Roll Morton to the world.
http://www.radioopensource.org/lomax/
We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”
Alan Lomax with unidentified man. [Library of Congress photo]Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?
John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n'roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.
Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/20/arts/alan-lomax-who-raised-voice-of-folk-music-in-us-dies-at-87.html?scp=1&sq=alan%20lomax%20obit&st=cse
Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice Of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
Correction Appended
Alan
Lomax, the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to
record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie,
died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience.
Although some of those he recorded would later become internationally famous, Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in simply discovering stars. In a career that carried him from fishermen's shacks and prison work farms to television studios and computer consoles, he strove to protect folk traditions from the homogenizing effects of modern media. He advocated what he called ''cultural equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and equal time in the classroom.''
Mr. Lomax's programs spurred folk revivals in the United States and across Europe. Without his efforts, the world's popular music would be very different today.
''What
Caruso was to singing, Alan Lomax is to musicology,'' the oral
historian Studs Terkel said in 1997. ''He is a key figure in
20th-century culture.''
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
In an interview, Bob Dylan once described him as ''a missionary.''
Mr. Lomax saw folk music and dance as human survival strategies that had evolved through centuries of experimentation and adaptation; each, he argued, was as irreplaceable as a biological species. ''It is the voiceless people of the planet who really have in their memories the 90,000 years of human life and wisdom,'' he once said. ''I've devoted my entire life to an obsessive collecting together of the evidence.''
To persuade performers and listeners to value what was local and distinctive, Mr. Lomax used the very media that threatened those traditions. By collecting and presenting folk music and dance in concerts, films and television programs, he brought new attention and renewed interest to traditional styles.
''The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them,'' Mr. Lomax once said. Listeners then realized that the performers, as he put it, ''were just as good as anybody else.''
Mr. Lomax started his work as a teenager, lugging a 500-pound recording machine through the South and West with his father, the pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax. They collected songs of cowboys, plantation workers, prisoners and others who were rarely heard.
''The prisoners in those penitentiaries simply had dynamite in their performances,'' Mr. Lomax recalled. ''There was more emotional heat, more power, more nobility in what they did than all the Beethovens and Bachs could produce.''
Discovering the Greats
One prisoner recorded by the Lomaxes in Angola, La., was Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who began his singing career after John Lomax helped secure his release in 1934. Alan Lomax produced Leadbelly's albums ''Negro Sinful Songs'' in 1939 and ''The Midnight Special,'' prison songs performed with the Golden Gate Quartet, in 1940. The Lomaxes held part of the copyright to his song ''Goodnight Irene,'' and the royalties they received when the Weavers' recording of it became a huge pop hit in 1950 helped finance their research trips.
Alan Lomax recorded hours of interviews with the New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton in the 1930's, an early oral-history project that resulted in both a classic 12-volume set of recordings and a 1950 book, ''Mister Jelly Roll,'' which remains one of the most influential works on early jazz.
More History
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/
The Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004) contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures. The collection includes field recordings and photographs Lomax made in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales, 1930s-2004.
All of the material in the collection has been indexed and is available for research at the American Folklife Center. For more information contact the Folklife Reading Room. Many of the sound recordings, photographs, and videos may be accessed online through the Association for Cultural Equity,
founded by Alan Lomax in 1983.
In March 2004, the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress acquired the Alan Lomax Collection, which comprises the unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of sixty years. The acquisition was made possible through a cooperative agreement between the American Folklife Center (AFC) and the Association for Cultural Equity, and the generosity of an anonymous
donor. The Alan Lomax Collection joins the material Alan
Lomax collected during the 1930s and early 1940s for the
Library's Archive of American Folk Song, and its acquisition brings
the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof
at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.
"The Alan Lomax Collection contains pioneering documentation of traditional music, dance, tales, and other forms of grassroots creativity in the United States and abroad," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "We are extremely pleased that this collection has come to our American national library, where its creator did such important work in the 1930s."
From the time he left his position as head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1942 through the end of his long and productive career as an internationally known folklorist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host, Alan Lomax amassed one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world.
The collection has been housed in several large rooms at Hunter College in New York City. It includes more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, several databases concerning portions of the archive, and over 120 linear feet of manuscript such as correspondence, fieldnotes, research files, program scripts, indexes, and book and article manuscripts.
Sonny Terry (obscured), Woody Guthrie, Lilly
Mae Ledford, Alan Lomax, New York, 1944. Photographer unknown.
Included in the collection are sound recordings of traditional singers, instrumentalists, and storytellers made by Lomax during numerous field trips to the American South, the Caribbean, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; original video footage, shot in the South and Southwest, Washington, D.C., and New York City, that was used as the basis of Lomax's American Patchwork television series, as well as videotapes of all the programs in the series; 16mm footage of performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, and others during the Newport Folk Festival in 1966; videotape of folk dance performances; and work elements and originals of numerous films made by Lomax.
Alan Lomax believed that folklore and expressive culture are essential to human continuity and adaptation, and his lifelong goal was to create a public platform for their continued use and enjoyment as well as a scientific framework for their further understanding. His desire to document, preserve, recognize, and foster the distinctive voices of oral tradition led him to establish the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), based in New York City and now directed by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood.
ACE will continue to produce the Alan Lomax Collection compact-disc series on Rounder Records and to administer rights to repertoire contained in the collection, working from digital copies of original materials that the Library of Congress will be housing. ACE plans to donate CD and DVD copies of hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings to regional libraries in the United States and abroad. Over the next few years, ACE will work closely with the American Folklife Center to create databases for the audio, video, and film collections, to raise funds for preservation and for fellowships, and to make Lomax's ethnology of performance style available to researchers.
The Lomax family has a long history of collaboration with the Library of Congress. Alan's father, John Avery Lomax, began a ten-year relationship with the Library in June 1933, when he set out with Alan, then eighteen, on their first folksong gathering expedition under the Library's auspices. Together they visited Texas farms, prisons, and rural communities, recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues. John Lomax was named "Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song," which had been created in the Library's Music Division in 1928. Alan became the Archive's "Assistant in Charge" in 1937, and he continued to make field trips and supply recordings to the Archive of American Folk Song until 1942. He was the first to record such legendary musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, as well as an enormous number of other significant traditional musicians. He also recorded eight hours of music and spoken recollection with Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton in 1938, and four hours of the same format with Woody Guthrie in 1940.
After he left the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax continued his work to document, analyze, and present traditional music, dance, and narrative through projects of various kinds throughout the world. With his father and on his own he published many books, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941). He received many honors and awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle award for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and a "Living Legend" award from the Library of Congress. According to folklorist Roger Abrahams, he is "the person most responsible for the great explosion of interest in American folksong throughout the mid-twentieth century."
The Association for Cultural Equity administers the rights to the use of materials in the Alan Lomax Collection, and carries on Lomax's mission through the cataloging and dissemination of materials. In partnership with the American Folklife Center, ACE seeks to ensure that Alan Lomax's legendary collection remains accessible to general and specialized audiences.
"We are delighted that our agreement with ACE makes it possible to combine Alan Lomax's earliest documentary material, which he collected during his time at the Library of Congress, with the material he collected during the rest of his life, " said American Folklife Center director Peggy Bulger. "His entire collection will now be in available in one place. The collection is simultaneously a monument to one of the greatest cultural documenters of the twentieth century and a priceless storehouse of traditional artistry." The collection has served as the basis for many publications, films and videos, commercial recordings, broadcasts, multi-media products (notably Lomax's "Global Jukebox"), and major research endeavors (such as his Choreometrics, Cantometrics, and Parlametrics projects).
According to Michael Taft, head of the Center's Archive of Folk Culture, "the Alan Lomax collection may be the largest single collection we have ever received, and we are committed to fulfilling Alan Lomax's dream of making his unparalleled collection widely available to the world."
Alan Lomax Collection
The Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004) contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures. The collection includes field recordings and photographs Lomax made in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales, 1930s-2004.
All of the material in the collection has been indexed and is available for research at the American Folklife Center. For more information contact the Folklife Reading Room. Many of the sound recordings, photographs, and videos may be accessed online through the Association for Cultural Equity,
founded by Alan Lomax in 1983. In March 2004, the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress acquired the Alan Lomax Collection, which comprises the unparalleled ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of sixty years. The acquisition was made possible through a cooperative agreement between the American Folklife Center (AFC) and the Association for Cultural Equity
, and the generosity of an anonymous
donor. The Alan Lomax Collection joins the material Alan
Lomax collected during the 1930s and early 1940s for the
Library's Archive of American Folk Song, and its acquisition brings
the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof
at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home. "The Alan Lomax Collection contains pioneering documentation of traditional music, dance, tales, and other forms of grassroots creativity in the United States and abroad," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "We are extremely pleased that this collection has come to our American national library, where its creator did such important work in the 1930s."
From the time he left his position as head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1942 through the end of his long and productive career as an internationally known folklorist, author, radio broadcaster, filmmaker, concert and record producer, and television host, Alan Lomax amassed one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world.
The collection has been housed in several large rooms at Hunter College in New York City. It includes more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, several databases concerning portions of the archive, and over 120 linear feet of manuscript such as correspondence, fieldnotes, research files, program scripts, indexes, and book and article manuscripts.
Sonny Terry (obscured), Woody Guthrie, Lilly
Mae Ledford, Alan Lomax, New York, 1944. Photographer unknown.Included in the collection are sound recordings of traditional singers, instrumentalists, and storytellers made by Lomax during numerous field trips to the American South, the Caribbean, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Italy; original video footage, shot in the South and Southwest, Washington, D.C., and New York City, that was used as the basis of Lomax's American Patchwork television series, as well as videotapes of all the programs in the series; 16mm footage of performances by Howling Wolf, Son House, and others during the Newport Folk Festival in 1966; videotape of folk dance performances; and work elements and originals of numerous films made by Lomax.
Alan Lomax believed that folklore and expressive culture are essential to human continuity and adaptation, and his lifelong goal was to create a public platform for their continued use and enjoyment as well as a scientific framework for their further understanding. His desire to document, preserve, recognize, and foster the distinctive voices of oral tradition led him to establish the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), based in New York City and now directed by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood.
ACE will continue to produce the Alan Lomax Collection compact-disc series on Rounder Records and to administer rights to repertoire contained in the collection, working from digital copies of original materials that the Library of Congress will be housing. ACE plans to donate CD and DVD copies of hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings to regional libraries in the United States and abroad. Over the next few years, ACE will work closely with the American Folklife Center to create databases for the audio, video, and film collections, to raise funds for preservation and for fellowships, and to make Lomax's ethnology of performance style available to researchers.
The Lomax family has a long history of collaboration with the Library of Congress. Alan's father, John Avery Lomax, began a ten-year relationship with the Library in June 1933, when he set out with Alan, then eighteen, on their first folksong gathering expedition under the Library's auspices. Together they visited Texas farms, prisons, and rural communities, recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues. John Lomax was named "Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song," which had been created in the Library's Music Division in 1928. Alan became the Archive's "Assistant in Charge" in 1937, and he continued to make field trips and supply recordings to the Archive of American Folk Song until 1942. He was the first to record such legendary musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards, as well as an enormous number of other significant traditional musicians. He also recorded eight hours of music and spoken recollection with Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton in 1938, and four hours of the same format with Woody Guthrie in 1940.
After he left the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax continued his work to document, analyze, and present traditional music, dance, and narrative through projects of various kinds throughout the world. With his father and on his own he published many books, including American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Our Singing Country (1941). He received many honors and awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle award for his book The Land Where the Blues Began, and a "Living Legend" award from the Library of Congress. According to folklorist Roger Abrahams, he is "the person most responsible for the great explosion of interest in American folksong throughout the mid-twentieth century."
The Association for Cultural Equity administers the rights to the use of materials in the Alan Lomax Collection, and carries on Lomax's mission through the cataloging and dissemination of materials. In partnership with the American Folklife Center, ACE seeks to ensure that Alan Lomax's legendary collection remains accessible to general and specialized audiences.
"We are delighted that our agreement with ACE makes it possible to combine Alan Lomax's earliest documentary material, which he collected during his time at the Library of Congress, with the material he collected during the rest of his life, " said American Folklife Center director Peggy Bulger. "His entire collection will now be in available in one place. The collection is simultaneously a monument to one of the greatest cultural documenters of the twentieth century and a priceless storehouse of traditional artistry." The collection has served as the basis for many publications, films and videos, commercial recordings, broadcasts, multi-media products (notably Lomax's "Global Jukebox"), and major research endeavors (such as his Choreometrics, Cantometrics, and Parlametrics projects).
According to Michael Taft, head of the Center's Archive of Folk Culture, "the Alan Lomax collection may be the largest single collection we have ever received, and we are committed to fulfilling Alan Lomax's dream of making his unparalleled collection widely available to the world."
History of Live Recording
http://www.peermusic.com/peermusic/index.cfm/about-us/ralph-s-peer/
Consider the evidence: histories of popular and country music, jazz and the blues, as well as the recording and music publishing industries, abound with his innovations and discoveries. Peer figures centrally in the lives of performers as disparate as the Carter Family and "singing brakeman" Jimmie Rodgers, of Thomas "Fats" Waller and Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten, of Latin American legends Alberto Dominguez and Agustin Lara, and of blues icons Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White. Success might have been longer coming to "Star Dust" composer Hoagy Carmichael but for Peer's foresight in publishing and promoting his work; song standards from France, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries might have been far slower reaching the international audiences they now command.
In short, historical research finds Ralph Peer everywhere, driving the main action from a position usually just offstage, slightly out of camera range. And ironically enough, that may be the way he preferred it. From all indications, Peer considered himself a businessman, working behind the scenes in living embodiment of Calvin Coolidge's 1925 declaration that, "The chief business of the American people is business."
He was born May 22, 1892, in Independence, Missouri, the suburb of Kansas City best known as the birthplace of President Harry S. Truman. His father, Abram Peer, was a storekeeper, dealing in furniture, sewing machines and - significantly for the boy - Columbia Graphophones and records. A vaguely Horatio Alger flavor hangs over accounts of young Ralph, age ten, working weekends in Abram's stock room and learning the operation quickly enough to handle re-orders of machines, parts, and records. "Naturally I went in and out of Kansas City," he told interviewer Lillian Borgeson in 1959, a year before his death. "There was an interurban electrical line running back and forth, a 45-minute trip. I would go in to pick up a package of records, for example, or some repair parts."
Self-possessed and personable, the lad was soon a frequent and welcome visitor at Columbia's Kansas City offices and warehouse, and before long began filling in during summer months for vacationing stock and shipping clerks. Married directly out of high school and in need of a steady job, he knocked on the door he knew best, easily landing a full-time position with Columbia. "I worked very hard for them for a number of years," he recalled, and his enthusiasm and industry won rapid promotions to credit manager, retail manager, and finally a transfer to Chicago, Columbia's largest regional office.
Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I, young Peer went to sea in the Merchant Marine, catching his first taste of Britain and France and establishing an international outlook which would serve him well in coming years. By 1920 he was back in the United States, again with Columbia. When his old Chicago boss, W. S. Fuhri, moved to the smaller but livelier General Phonograph Corporation, young Peer followed him.
General had launched its OKeh label in 1918 with a selection of standard ballads, sacred music, marching bands, and light classical pieces. It also showed marked interest in the music of black Americans, particularly the blues and the emergent novelty called jazz. On the advice of house pianist-songwriter Perry Bradford, OKeh in early 1920 recorded black vaudeville singer Mamie Smith performing two numbers, one of them composed by Bradford himself. The record was an almost immediate success, prompting OKeh to schedule another Mamie Smith date. On August 10th, when the singer and a small backup band assembled in front of OKeh's acoustical recording horns, young Ralph Peer was there as assistant to musical supervisor Fred Hager.
"Crazy Blues," made that day, was a breakthrough, a runaway million-seller that revealed a fresh market for what Peer soon began calling "race" records, performances by black artists specifically targeted at black buyers. By the following summer he was running OKeh's new 8000 "race" series, and General Phonograph had captured a market that enabled it to compete significantly with industry leaders Columbia and Victor. By 1923, Peer and Hager had recorded such nascent artists as singer Sara Martin and young Harlem pianist Fats Waller, pupil and protège of the respected James P. Johnson.
Then, one morning that March, destiny strolled into Peer's West 45th Street Manhattan office in the person of a Virginia mill hand who introduced himself as William Henry Whittier and touted himself as "the world's greatest harmonica player." Peer, intrigued by such bravado, recorded a few test selections at Okeh's Union Square studio. "He was a great harmonica player," he recalled later. "No doubt about that."
By year's end OKeh had released performances by Whittier and by Atlanta-based "Fiddlin' John" Carson, among others, and launched yet another specialty record series, designated "hillbilly" by Peer and bearing its own catalogue numbers. Together with the company's already thriving business in ethnic and nationality-oriented records, the new lines propelled Okeh - and Ralph Peer - into the most important phase of his early career. Country music had arrived.
Most available evidence indicates that the practice of "field" or location recording - travelling to sometimes remote locales to capture the work of regional artists on portable equipment - had gone on since the industry's first days. But there is no doubting that it began in earnest in the early 1920s, and that its most vigorous practitioner was Ralph S. Peer. By the end of 1923, he had taken equipment designed by OKeh technical director Charles Hibbard to Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, recording artists for the label's "race," "hillbilly," and mainstream catalogues.
Among attractions recorded this way, often under Peer's close supervision, were King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra of Chicago, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the Jenkins Family, Kelly Harrell, blues singer "Sippie" Wallace, and the family of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, whose 1925 hit, The Titanic, numbers among the earliest "event songs" - those celebrating and romanticizing actual occurrences - recorded in the country field.
In 1924 and '25 Peer expanded his reach to Cincinnati, Dallas, Cleveland, Detroit, Asheville, North Carolina, and, significantly, New Orleans, where he recorded some of the Crescent City's leading jazz bands in situ, doing much to justify folklore historian Archie Green's praise of him as "a cultural documentarian of the first rank." As he did, attracting scores of performers from sometimes far-flung and rural retreats, a business idea took root in his mind.
By securing copyright protection for original material recorded under his supervision, Peer became de facto publisher and recipient of royalties earned by those compositions under the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act. In a general sense, that had been common record industry practice all along; but the idea of actively encouraging early country and black artists to generate original material to record, avoiding already copyrighted selections, was his innovation. That way, Peer paid each artist a $25 talent fee per selection, and a percentage of royalties earned.
By late 1925, when he left OKeh, Ralph S. Peer was certain of his own value as a recording man, but unsure what to do with it. A preliminary approach to the Victor Talking Machine Company foundered on his salary demands. Brief ventures in promoting experimental automobiles and apple pies, though prescient in their grasp of marketing principles, came to nothing. He returned to Victor, this time proposing a novel arrangement: he would draw no salary at all, as long as he could control copyrights on all original material recorded under his aegis. He could furthermore promise that several key attractions who had recorded for him at OKeh - bandleader Moten, blues singer Wallace and "hillbilly" standout Harrell among them - would come over to Victor with him. The company accepted, and Peer hit the road in early 1927 to put the new association into action. Between January and March he set up Victor's brand-new "Orthophonic" electrical recording equipment in Atlanta, Memphis, and again in New Orleans. By summer he was off again to points south, his first stop Bristol, Tennessee.
A small city (population 25,000 in 1927) straddling the Virginia-Tennessee border, Bristol is now celebrated by historians as the scene of modern country music's "big bang," its origin on record. While hardly the first location recording of such material, Peer's two weeks in Bristol did assemble a virtual Who's Who of early "hillbilly" and gospel performers, who committed 69 examples of their singing and playing to posterity: they included Whittier, the Stonemans (with fiddler "Uncle Eck" Dunford), gospel singers Alfred G. Karnes and Blind Alfred Reed, and many others - but above all two particular acts: Alvin Pleasance Carter of nearby Maces Springs, recording with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle as the Carter Family - and, no less significantly, the personable Mississippi-born singer and guitarist Jimmie Rodgers.
Recognizing great potential in both, Peer soon began managing and steering their careers, carefully selecting the material they recorded. As scholar Charles Wolfe has remarked, "Peer sensed he was developing a new commercial art form...and that this art form was to be derived from, though not fully reflective of, traditional mountain music."
The same field trip that took Peer to Bristol found him, some weeks later, in Savannah, Georgia, where he recorded Blue Steele's "territory" band playing Girl of My Dreams, a new waltz by trombonist Charles "Sunny" Clapp. By year's end the song was a national hit, and remains a beloved standard. Further trips the following year yielded such seminal bluesmen as Furry Lewis, Ishmon Bracey, Will Shade, Jim Jackson, and Blind Willie McTell. A series of New York dates, meanwhile, featured music by Trinidad-born songwriter Donald Heywood, targeted at new arrivals from the Caribbean and West Indies.
Again and again, while steadfastly denying any motive other than effective business, Peer displayed a knack for making making music history by doing the right thing at the most appropriate time. In 1929, on his watch at Victor, jazz bands of black and white musicians began recording together regularly for the hitherto socially conservative industry leader. A mid-November field trip to New Orleans yielded four titles by the "Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight," including (reportedly at Peer's specific behest) white clarinetist Sidney Arodin. New York sessions organized around comb-playing "blue-blower" Red McKenzie also included such Harlem stars as Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and bassist George "Pops" Foster.
Peer's publishing operation, now officially known as Southern Music, by 1928 controlled more than one-third of all non-classical music recorded by Victor. In 1928 it split into four distinct companies, to accommodate ever greater and more diversified revenue. Southern Music, now the group's flagship firm, extended its reach well into the mainstream pop market with such standards-in-the-making as Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," "Rockin' Chair" and, somewhat later, "Lazybones," his first collaboration with Georgia-born Johnny Mercer. When Hollywood's Hal Roach studios followed Warner Brothers into sound movies it signed Leroy Shield at Victor to write soundtrack music, with Peer handling copyright business. Income from the Roach films eventually helped Peer underwrite expansion of Southern's operations in Europe and South America.
Jimmie Rodgers, by now gravely ill with the tuberculosis that would shortly claim his life, continued to tour and record as the '30s got under way, with Peer guiding him steadily toward a wider popular market. Nolan Porterfield, biographer of "the singing brakeman," contends that Peer saw a natural fan base for Rodgers in the audience attracted to crooners Gene Austin and Johnny Marvin.
Even with the Depression at its pre-New Deal worst and such record industry leaders as Columbia in bankruptcy, the Carter Family's Victor records kept selling. But all was far from well: the marriage of A.P. and Sara Carter, foundation of the trio's successs, had unraveled. Jimmie Rodgers' death of tuberculosis on May 26, 1933, put an abrupt end to the singer's career. Ralph Peer, having recovered sole ownership of his publishing concerns from RCA Victor, seemed poised to move on.
A 1928 visit to Mexico City, the first of three, had resulted in Peer's discovery of the composer Agustin Lara (1901-1970), and an immediate realization of Latin America's importance as a popular music resource for U.S. listeners. Overnighting at a San Antonio hotel en route home, he heard a local band playing The Peanut Vendor, by Cuban composer Moises Simons. Within weeks the firm had opened offices in Mexico City and Havana, beginning the long process of carrying Latin American melodies and rhythms to a grateful international market.
The next decade saw an infusion of Peer-controlled Latin American songs into the American popular music bloodstream: Granada (1932), Baia (1938), Brazil and Perfidia (1939), Frenesi (1940), Green Eyes and Maria Elena (1941), Besame Mucho (1943), Amor (1944), and other classic standards, all fitted with English-language lyrics.
The 1930s also found Peer establishing offices in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, and even exploring the German market. But the Nazi takeover with its increasingly repressive laws concerning Jews, then Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland, created all but insuperable obstacles to free interchange of music between the United States and the Third Reich. Letters from German firms, still in the company's files, can chill with their casual references to "aryan" and "non-aryan" composers.
A 1940 Paris visit by Tom Ward, Peer's London executive, had convinced him that France, with its rich musical life, could be fertile territory for Peer Southern songs. But Gen. Georg von Kuechler's 18th German Army, swooping on the French capital one bright Friday morning that June and hoisting a giant Nazi swastika flag on the Eiffel Tower, put such plans on hold. Business might continue, at least officially, but on a greatly reduced scale and subject to the constant scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and the even more sinister gaze of the Gestapo.
By early 1945, with the Nazis fighting on two fronts against Allied forces in the west and the Red Army advancing from the east, several formerly occupied cities were becoming more accessible. Using available channels, Ward gained entry to Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome and Milan and ultimately Vienna, discovering a market hungry for new songs from abroad - despite even a paper shortage that seemed universal through Europe. His personal journal of those months, prepared later at Peer's request, reads like a spy thriller, full of vividly sobering details of the dedication and resourcefulness required even to subsist in such chaotic times.
Peer had dealt with a crisis of a far different sort at home: at the start of 1941, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) pulled all music it controlled off the radio in a dispute over broadcast royalties. Southern was already negotiating with ASCAP's upstart rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which had entered the field concentrating on public domain material, songs from abroad, and specialty items by niche market performers - particularly jazz, blues and hillbilly artists. As a result, such bandleaders as Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat rode a wave of renewed popularity with south-of-the-border songs, many imported by Peer's new BMI firm Peer International Corporation. Artie Shaw's 1940 RCA coupling of two Peer items, the Alberto Dominguez favorite Frenesi and another Mexican import, Adios, Mariquita Linda, kept on selling. The ASCAP walkout lasted only a matter of weeks, but long enough to establish BMI as a viable alternative, especially for songwriters hitherto outside the mainstream.
Through a Peer Southern department manager, the company became active after World War II in "serious" music publishing and promoting Charles Ives and other contemporary composers, including the American David Diamond. Ultimately the company's Classical Division published such major names as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Jan Sibelius, Wallingford Riegger, Virgil Thomson, and William Grant Still, among many others.
By the 1950s the Peer organization was operating smoothly on a vast international scale, coping easily with the nascent phenomenon of rock-and-roll. Such seminal artists as Buddy Holly, The Platters, the Penguins, Roy Orbison, Bobby Rydell, and even Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, topped the charts with Peer songs. When Hollywood's Love in the Afternoon teamed Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn onscreen, the soundtrack featured an old waltz, Fascination, a longtime Peer catalogue staple. Other Peer hits of those years included Mockin' Bird Hill, a major record for Les Paul and Mary Ford, and a French import, The Three Bells, known familiarly as "The Jimmy Brown Song."
The 1950s also found Ralph Peer devoting time to avocational horticulture, particularly the cultivation of camellias. He brought characteristic energy and intelligence to his collecting, exchange, and correspondence with a worldwide network of camellia growers. International camellia organizations and individual growers came to know him as an unfailingly loyal colleague and tireless advocate, rewarding him with numerous honors and decorations, including, in 1955, the prestigious Veitch Gold Medal of Britain's Royal Horticultural Society. Founder and first President of the Los Angeles Camellia Society, he became President of the American Camellia Society in 1957, and was made a society Fellow. In 1958, Peer was appointed a director of the American Horticultural Society.
Ralph Sylvester Peer died in Los Angeles on January 19, 1960, leaving the firm under the leadership of his British born wife, Monique Iversen Peer. Their son, Ralph II, guides today's peermusic operation with his father's sure vision and steady hand.
Journalist and music historian Barry Mazor is currently at work on a full-length biography of Ralph S. Peer. His most recent book is Meeting Jimmie Rodgers – How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Ralph S. Peer
A Life of Infinite Variety and Many Achievements
by Richard M. Sudhalter
If one abiding paradox surrounds the life of Ralph Sylvester Peer, it is this: that a man so indispensable to the story of 20th Century vernacular music should remain so little known to the public.
A Life of Infinite Variety and Many Achievements
by Richard M. Sudhalter
If one abiding paradox surrounds the life of Ralph Sylvester Peer, it is this: that a man so indispensable to the story of 20th Century vernacular music should remain so little known to the public.
Consider the evidence: histories of popular and country music, jazz and the blues, as well as the recording and music publishing industries, abound with his innovations and discoveries. Peer figures centrally in the lives of performers as disparate as the Carter Family and "singing brakeman" Jimmie Rodgers, of Thomas "Fats" Waller and Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten, of Latin American legends Alberto Dominguez and Agustin Lara, and of blues icons Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White. Success might have been longer coming to "Star Dust" composer Hoagy Carmichael but for Peer's foresight in publishing and promoting his work; song standards from France, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries might have been far slower reaching the international audiences they now command.
In short, historical research finds Ralph Peer everywhere, driving the main action from a position usually just offstage, slightly out of camera range. And ironically enough, that may be the way he preferred it. From all indications, Peer considered himself a businessman, working behind the scenes in living embodiment of Calvin Coolidge's 1925 declaration that, "The chief business of the American people is business."
He was born May 22, 1892, in Independence, Missouri, the suburb of Kansas City best known as the birthplace of President Harry S. Truman. His father, Abram Peer, was a storekeeper, dealing in furniture, sewing machines and - significantly for the boy - Columbia Graphophones and records. A vaguely Horatio Alger flavor hangs over accounts of young Ralph, age ten, working weekends in Abram's stock room and learning the operation quickly enough to handle re-orders of machines, parts, and records. "Naturally I went in and out of Kansas City," he told interviewer Lillian Borgeson in 1959, a year before his death. "There was an interurban electrical line running back and forth, a 45-minute trip. I would go in to pick up a package of records, for example, or some repair parts."
Self-possessed and personable, the lad was soon a frequent and welcome visitor at Columbia's Kansas City offices and warehouse, and before long began filling in during summer months for vacationing stock and shipping clerks. Married directly out of high school and in need of a steady job, he knocked on the door he knew best, easily landing a full-time position with Columbia. "I worked very hard for them for a number of years," he recalled, and his enthusiasm and industry won rapid promotions to credit manager, retail manager, and finally a transfer to Chicago, Columbia's largest regional office.
Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I, young Peer went to sea in the Merchant Marine, catching his first taste of Britain and France and establishing an international outlook which would serve him well in coming years. By 1920 he was back in the United States, again with Columbia. When his old Chicago boss, W. S. Fuhri, moved to the smaller but livelier General Phonograph Corporation, young Peer followed him.
General had launched its OKeh label in 1918 with a selection of standard ballads, sacred music, marching bands, and light classical pieces. It also showed marked interest in the music of black Americans, particularly the blues and the emergent novelty called jazz. On the advice of house pianist-songwriter Perry Bradford, OKeh in early 1920 recorded black vaudeville singer Mamie Smith performing two numbers, one of them composed by Bradford himself. The record was an almost immediate success, prompting OKeh to schedule another Mamie Smith date. On August 10th, when the singer and a small backup band assembled in front of OKeh's acoustical recording horns, young Ralph Peer was there as assistant to musical supervisor Fred Hager.
"Crazy Blues," made that day, was a breakthrough, a runaway million-seller that revealed a fresh market for what Peer soon began calling "race" records, performances by black artists specifically targeted at black buyers. By the following summer he was running OKeh's new 8000 "race" series, and General Phonograph had captured a market that enabled it to compete significantly with industry leaders Columbia and Victor. By 1923, Peer and Hager had recorded such nascent artists as singer Sara Martin and young Harlem pianist Fats Waller, pupil and protège of the respected James P. Johnson.
Then, one morning that March, destiny strolled into Peer's West 45th Street Manhattan office in the person of a Virginia mill hand who introduced himself as William Henry Whittier and touted himself as "the world's greatest harmonica player." Peer, intrigued by such bravado, recorded a few test selections at Okeh's Union Square studio. "He was a great harmonica player," he recalled later. "No doubt about that."
By year's end OKeh had released performances by Whittier and by Atlanta-based "Fiddlin' John" Carson, among others, and launched yet another specialty record series, designated "hillbilly" by Peer and bearing its own catalogue numbers. Together with the company's already thriving business in ethnic and nationality-oriented records, the new lines propelled Okeh - and Ralph Peer - into the most important phase of his early career. Country music had arrived.
Most available evidence indicates that the practice of "field" or location recording - travelling to sometimes remote locales to capture the work of regional artists on portable equipment - had gone on since the industry's first days. But there is no doubting that it began in earnest in the early 1920s, and that its most vigorous practitioner was Ralph S. Peer. By the end of 1923, he had taken equipment designed by OKeh technical director Charles Hibbard to Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis, recording artists for the label's "race," "hillbilly," and mainstream catalogues.
Among attractions recorded this way, often under Peer's close supervision, were King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra of Chicago, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the Jenkins Family, Kelly Harrell, blues singer "Sippie" Wallace, and the family of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, whose 1925 hit, The Titanic, numbers among the earliest "event songs" - those celebrating and romanticizing actual occurrences - recorded in the country field.
In 1924 and '25 Peer expanded his reach to Cincinnati, Dallas, Cleveland, Detroit, Asheville, North Carolina, and, significantly, New Orleans, where he recorded some of the Crescent City's leading jazz bands in situ, doing much to justify folklore historian Archie Green's praise of him as "a cultural documentarian of the first rank." As he did, attracting scores of performers from sometimes far-flung and rural retreats, a business idea took root in his mind.
By securing copyright protection for original material recorded under his supervision, Peer became de facto publisher and recipient of royalties earned by those compositions under the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act. In a general sense, that had been common record industry practice all along; but the idea of actively encouraging early country and black artists to generate original material to record, avoiding already copyrighted selections, was his innovation. That way, Peer paid each artist a $25 talent fee per selection, and a percentage of royalties earned.
By late 1925, when he left OKeh, Ralph S. Peer was certain of his own value as a recording man, but unsure what to do with it. A preliminary approach to the Victor Talking Machine Company foundered on his salary demands. Brief ventures in promoting experimental automobiles and apple pies, though prescient in their grasp of marketing principles, came to nothing. He returned to Victor, this time proposing a novel arrangement: he would draw no salary at all, as long as he could control copyrights on all original material recorded under his aegis. He could furthermore promise that several key attractions who had recorded for him at OKeh - bandleader Moten, blues singer Wallace and "hillbilly" standout Harrell among them - would come over to Victor with him. The company accepted, and Peer hit the road in early 1927 to put the new association into action. Between January and March he set up Victor's brand-new "Orthophonic" electrical recording equipment in Atlanta, Memphis, and again in New Orleans. By summer he was off again to points south, his first stop Bristol, Tennessee.
A small city (population 25,000 in 1927) straddling the Virginia-Tennessee border, Bristol is now celebrated by historians as the scene of modern country music's "big bang," its origin on record. While hardly the first location recording of such material, Peer's two weeks in Bristol did assemble a virtual Who's Who of early "hillbilly" and gospel performers, who committed 69 examples of their singing and playing to posterity: they included Whittier, the Stonemans (with fiddler "Uncle Eck" Dunford), gospel singers Alfred G. Karnes and Blind Alfred Reed, and many others - but above all two particular acts: Alvin Pleasance Carter of nearby Maces Springs, recording with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle as the Carter Family - and, no less significantly, the personable Mississippi-born singer and guitarist Jimmie Rodgers.
Recognizing great potential in both, Peer soon began managing and steering their careers, carefully selecting the material they recorded. As scholar Charles Wolfe has remarked, "Peer sensed he was developing a new commercial art form...and that this art form was to be derived from, though not fully reflective of, traditional mountain music."
The same field trip that took Peer to Bristol found him, some weeks later, in Savannah, Georgia, where he recorded Blue Steele's "territory" band playing Girl of My Dreams, a new waltz by trombonist Charles "Sunny" Clapp. By year's end the song was a national hit, and remains a beloved standard. Further trips the following year yielded such seminal bluesmen as Furry Lewis, Ishmon Bracey, Will Shade, Jim Jackson, and Blind Willie McTell. A series of New York dates, meanwhile, featured music by Trinidad-born songwriter Donald Heywood, targeted at new arrivals from the Caribbean and West Indies.
Again and again, while steadfastly denying any motive other than effective business, Peer displayed a knack for making making music history by doing the right thing at the most appropriate time. In 1929, on his watch at Victor, jazz bands of black and white musicians began recording together regularly for the hitherto socially conservative industry leader. A mid-November field trip to New Orleans yielded four titles by the "Jones and Collins Astoria Hot Eight," including (reportedly at Peer's specific behest) white clarinetist Sidney Arodin. New York sessions organized around comb-playing "blue-blower" Red McKenzie also included such Harlem stars as Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and bassist George "Pops" Foster.
Peer's publishing operation, now officially known as Southern Music, by 1928 controlled more than one-third of all non-classical music recorded by Victor. In 1928 it split into four distinct companies, to accommodate ever greater and more diversified revenue. Southern Music, now the group's flagship firm, extended its reach well into the mainstream pop market with such standards-in-the-making as Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," "Rockin' Chair" and, somewhat later, "Lazybones," his first collaboration with Georgia-born Johnny Mercer. When Hollywood's Hal Roach studios followed Warner Brothers into sound movies it signed Leroy Shield at Victor to write soundtrack music, with Peer handling copyright business. Income from the Roach films eventually helped Peer underwrite expansion of Southern's operations in Europe and South America.
Jimmie Rodgers, by now gravely ill with the tuberculosis that would shortly claim his life, continued to tour and record as the '30s got under way, with Peer guiding him steadily toward a wider popular market. Nolan Porterfield, biographer of "the singing brakeman," contends that Peer saw a natural fan base for Rodgers in the audience attracted to crooners Gene Austin and Johnny Marvin.
Even with the Depression at its pre-New Deal worst and such record industry leaders as Columbia in bankruptcy, the Carter Family's Victor records kept selling. But all was far from well: the marriage of A.P. and Sara Carter, foundation of the trio's successs, had unraveled. Jimmie Rodgers' death of tuberculosis on May 26, 1933, put an abrupt end to the singer's career. Ralph Peer, having recovered sole ownership of his publishing concerns from RCA Victor, seemed poised to move on.
A 1928 visit to Mexico City, the first of three, had resulted in Peer's discovery of the composer Agustin Lara (1901-1970), and an immediate realization of Latin America's importance as a popular music resource for U.S. listeners. Overnighting at a San Antonio hotel en route home, he heard a local band playing The Peanut Vendor, by Cuban composer Moises Simons. Within weeks the firm had opened offices in Mexico City and Havana, beginning the long process of carrying Latin American melodies and rhythms to a grateful international market.
The next decade saw an infusion of Peer-controlled Latin American songs into the American popular music bloodstream: Granada (1932), Baia (1938), Brazil and Perfidia (1939), Frenesi (1940), Green Eyes and Maria Elena (1941), Besame Mucho (1943), Amor (1944), and other classic standards, all fitted with English-language lyrics.
The 1930s also found Peer establishing offices in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, and even exploring the German market. But the Nazi takeover with its increasingly repressive laws concerning Jews, then Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland, created all but insuperable obstacles to free interchange of music between the United States and the Third Reich. Letters from German firms, still in the company's files, can chill with their casual references to "aryan" and "non-aryan" composers.
A 1940 Paris visit by Tom Ward, Peer's London executive, had convinced him that France, with its rich musical life, could be fertile territory for Peer Southern songs. But Gen. Georg von Kuechler's 18th German Army, swooping on the French capital one bright Friday morning that June and hoisting a giant Nazi swastika flag on the Eiffel Tower, put such plans on hold. Business might continue, at least officially, but on a greatly reduced scale and subject to the constant scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and the even more sinister gaze of the Gestapo.
By early 1945, with the Nazis fighting on two fronts against Allied forces in the west and the Red Army advancing from the east, several formerly occupied cities were becoming more accessible. Using available channels, Ward gained entry to Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome and Milan and ultimately Vienna, discovering a market hungry for new songs from abroad - despite even a paper shortage that seemed universal through Europe. His personal journal of those months, prepared later at Peer's request, reads like a spy thriller, full of vividly sobering details of the dedication and resourcefulness required even to subsist in such chaotic times.
Peer had dealt with a crisis of a far different sort at home: at the start of 1941, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) pulled all music it controlled off the radio in a dispute over broadcast royalties. Southern was already negotiating with ASCAP's upstart rival, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which had entered the field concentrating on public domain material, songs from abroad, and specialty items by niche market performers - particularly jazz, blues and hillbilly artists. As a result, such bandleaders as Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat rode a wave of renewed popularity with south-of-the-border songs, many imported by Peer's new BMI firm Peer International Corporation. Artie Shaw's 1940 RCA coupling of two Peer items, the Alberto Dominguez favorite Frenesi and another Mexican import, Adios, Mariquita Linda, kept on selling. The ASCAP walkout lasted only a matter of weeks, but long enough to establish BMI as a viable alternative, especially for songwriters hitherto outside the mainstream.
Through a Peer Southern department manager, the company became active after World War II in "serious" music publishing and promoting Charles Ives and other contemporary composers, including the American David Diamond. Ultimately the company's Classical Division published such major names as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Jan Sibelius, Wallingford Riegger, Virgil Thomson, and William Grant Still, among many others.
By the 1950s the Peer organization was operating smoothly on a vast international scale, coping easily with the nascent phenomenon of rock-and-roll. Such seminal artists as Buddy Holly, The Platters, the Penguins, Roy Orbison, Bobby Rydell, and even Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, topped the charts with Peer songs. When Hollywood's Love in the Afternoon teamed Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn onscreen, the soundtrack featured an old waltz, Fascination, a longtime Peer catalogue staple. Other Peer hits of those years included Mockin' Bird Hill, a major record for Les Paul and Mary Ford, and a French import, The Three Bells, known familiarly as "The Jimmy Brown Song."
The 1950s also found Ralph Peer devoting time to avocational horticulture, particularly the cultivation of camellias. He brought characteristic energy and intelligence to his collecting, exchange, and correspondence with a worldwide network of camellia growers. International camellia organizations and individual growers came to know him as an unfailingly loyal colleague and tireless advocate, rewarding him with numerous honors and decorations, including, in 1955, the prestigious Veitch Gold Medal of Britain's Royal Horticultural Society. Founder and first President of the Los Angeles Camellia Society, he became President of the American Camellia Society in 1957, and was made a society Fellow. In 1958, Peer was appointed a director of the American Horticultural Society.
Ralph Sylvester Peer died in Los Angeles on January 19, 1960, leaving the firm under the leadership of his British born wife, Monique Iversen Peer. Their son, Ralph II, guides today's peermusic operation with his father's sure vision and steady hand.
================
Journalist and music historian Barry Mazor is currently at work on a full-length biography of Ralph S. Peer. His most recent book is Meeting Jimmie Rodgers – How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (Oxford University Press, 2009).
NME's Top 50 Live Albums
There’s several things that constitute a great live album. In no
particular order these are: setlist, sound quality, on-stage banter,
crowd reaction, and a palpable sense of time and place.
The best live albums comprise most or all of these, and transport you directly to the front of the crowd by the opening few moments. They give you a real sense of being there, from the intros (Johnny Cash’s ‘At Folsom Prison’) to the crowd noises (the screams at James Brown’s Apollo gig) and the songs themselves. They’re moments in time, frozen for ever, enjoyed by a lucky few live but appreciated by millions ever after. When they work best, they make you desperately wish you could time travel to the front barrier and relive every moment.
Thin Lizzy’s ‘Live And Dangerous’ is just such an album. Impeccably captured and packed full of crystal clear drums, bass lines that hump your head throughout and endless jackhammer riffs, it indulges in the perfect amount of freestyle jamming and digressions from the recorded version without descending into a wankathon, while the cheesy one-liners somehow seem to only add to the charm. Witness also the crowd claps three minutes in, the ecstatic roars that don’t let up, and the slick changes between tracks.
Some people have charged Thin Lizzy with fraud, insisting they went back into the studio to add more guitar lines after the event. The band always denied this. Either way, it’s still the best live album we ever heard. The Who, Neil Young, Radiohead, Johnny Cash and Nirvana join them in the top ten.
From Gene Simmons’ “you’ve been a dynamite audience” to Lou Reed’s “good evening, we’re called The Velvet Underground. You’re allowed to dance”, these albums show the bands with their fans, at the top of their game, doing what they do best. They’ll bring back memories, even if you weren’t there.
50 - Tom Waits - 'Glitter And Doom Live'
49 - My Morning Jacket - 'Okonokos'
48 - Metallica - 'S&M'
47 - Wilco - 'Kicking Television: Live in Chicago'
46 - The White Stripes - 'Under Great White Northern Lights'
45 - The Cramps - 'Smell of Female'
44 - Talking Heads - 'Stop Making Sense'
43 - Iggy And The Stooges - 'Metallic K.O.'
42 - Future Of The Left - 'Last Night I Saved Her from Vampires'
41 - Simon And Garfunkel - 'The Concert In Central Park'
40 - Muse - 'Haarp'
39 - The Mars Volta - 'Scabdates'
38 - Cream - 'Wheels Of Fire'
37 - James Brown - 'Live At The Apollo
36 - Queen - 'Live At Wembley Stadium'
35 - AC/DC - 'If You Want Blood'
34 - Jerry Lee Lewis - 'Live at the Star Club, Hamburg'
33 - The Band - 'The Last Waltz'
32 - George Harrison - 'The Concert For Bangladesh'
31 - U2 - 'Under A Blood Red Sky'
30 - Elvis - 'Aloha From Hawaii'
29 - Bob Dylan & The Band - 'Before The Flood'
28 - Curtis Mayfield - 'Curtis/Live!'
27 - Black Lips - 'Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo'
26 - Belle & Sebastian - 'If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican'
25 - Bill Callahan - 'Rough Travel For A Rare Thing'
24 - Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More
23 - The Velvet Underground - 'Live At Max's Kansas City'
22 - Jeff Buckley- 'Mystery White Boy'
21 - Pink Floyd - 'Pulse'
20 - The Monterey International Pop Festival
19 - Lynyrd Skynyrd - 'One More From The Road'
18 - Iron Maiden - 'Live After Death'
17 - Kraftwerk - 'Minimum Maximum'
16 - Aretha Franklin - 'Live At Fillmore West'
15 - Bill Withers - 'Live At Carnegie Hall'
14 - Joni Mitchell - 'Miles Of Aisles'
13 - Deep Purple - 'Made In Japan'
12 - Led Zeppelin - 'The Song Remains The Same'
11 - The Rolling Stones - 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out'
10 - Kiss - 'Alive!'
9 - The Ramones - 'It's Alive'
8 - MC5 - 'Kick Out The Jams'
7 - Jay Z - 'Unplugged'
6 - Nirvana - 'Unplugged In New York'
5 - Johnny Cash - 'At Folsom Prison'
4 - Radiohead - 'I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings'
3 - The Who - 'Live At Leeds'
2 - Neil Young & Crazy Horse - 'Live Rust'
1 - Thin Lizzy - 'Live And Dangerous'
Photo Gallery: NME's top 50 live albums
The best live albums comprise most or all of these, and transport you directly to the front of the crowd by the opening few moments. They give you a real sense of being there, from the intros (Johnny Cash’s ‘At Folsom Prison’) to the crowd noises (the screams at James Brown’s Apollo gig) and the songs themselves. They’re moments in time, frozen for ever, enjoyed by a lucky few live but appreciated by millions ever after. When they work best, they make you desperately wish you could time travel to the front barrier and relive every moment.
Thin Lizzy’s ‘Live And Dangerous’ is just such an album. Impeccably captured and packed full of crystal clear drums, bass lines that hump your head throughout and endless jackhammer riffs, it indulges in the perfect amount of freestyle jamming and digressions from the recorded version without descending into a wankathon, while the cheesy one-liners somehow seem to only add to the charm. Witness also the crowd claps three minutes in, the ecstatic roars that don’t let up, and the slick changes between tracks.
Some people have charged Thin Lizzy with fraud, insisting they went back into the studio to add more guitar lines after the event. The band always denied this. Either way, it’s still the best live album we ever heard. The Who, Neil Young, Radiohead, Johnny Cash and Nirvana join them in the top ten.
From Gene Simmons’ “you’ve been a dynamite audience” to Lou Reed’s “good evening, we’re called The Velvet Underground. You’re allowed to dance”, these albums show the bands with their fans, at the top of their game, doing what they do best. They’ll bring back memories, even if you weren’t there.
50 - Tom Waits - 'Glitter And Doom Live'
49 - My Morning Jacket - 'Okonokos'
48 - Metallica - 'S&M'
47 - Wilco - 'Kicking Television: Live in Chicago'
46 - The White Stripes - 'Under Great White Northern Lights'
45 - The Cramps - 'Smell of Female'
44 - Talking Heads - 'Stop Making Sense'
43 - Iggy And The Stooges - 'Metallic K.O.'
42 - Future Of The Left - 'Last Night I Saved Her from Vampires'
41 - Simon And Garfunkel - 'The Concert In Central Park'
40 - Muse - 'Haarp'
39 - The Mars Volta - 'Scabdates'
38 - Cream - 'Wheels Of Fire'
37 - James Brown - 'Live At The Apollo
36 - Queen - 'Live At Wembley Stadium'
35 - AC/DC - 'If You Want Blood'
34 - Jerry Lee Lewis - 'Live at the Star Club, Hamburg'
33 - The Band - 'The Last Waltz'
32 - George Harrison - 'The Concert For Bangladesh'
31 - U2 - 'Under A Blood Red Sky'
30 - Elvis - 'Aloha From Hawaii'
29 - Bob Dylan & The Band - 'Before The Flood'
28 - Curtis Mayfield - 'Curtis/Live!'
27 - Black Lips - 'Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo'
26 - Belle & Sebastian - 'If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican'
25 - Bill Callahan - 'Rough Travel For A Rare Thing'
24 - Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack And More
23 - The Velvet Underground - 'Live At Max's Kansas City'
22 - Jeff Buckley- 'Mystery White Boy'
21 - Pink Floyd - 'Pulse'
20 - The Monterey International Pop Festival
19 - Lynyrd Skynyrd - 'One More From The Road'
18 - Iron Maiden - 'Live After Death'
17 - Kraftwerk - 'Minimum Maximum'
16 - Aretha Franklin - 'Live At Fillmore West'
15 - Bill Withers - 'Live At Carnegie Hall'
14 - Joni Mitchell - 'Miles Of Aisles'
13 - Deep Purple - 'Made In Japan'
12 - Led Zeppelin - 'The Song Remains The Same'
11 - The Rolling Stones - 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out'
10 - Kiss - 'Alive!'
9 - The Ramones - 'It's Alive'
8 - MC5 - 'Kick Out The Jams'
7 - Jay Z - 'Unplugged'
6 - Nirvana - 'Unplugged In New York'
5 - Johnny Cash - 'At Folsom Prison'
4 - Radiohead - 'I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings'
3 - The Who - 'Live At Leeds'
2 - Neil Young & Crazy Horse - 'Live Rust'
1 - Thin Lizzy - 'Live And Dangerous'
Photo Gallery: NME's top 50 live albums
Top 50 Live Albums
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/stylus-magazines-top-50-live-albums-of-all-time.htm
he
art of the live album seems antiquated these days. Back in the 70s,
artists like Kiss, Cheap Trick and Peter Frampton found their greatest
success with live albums, enjoying multi-platinum sales and even
spinning off radio hits, while other artists like The Allman Brothers
and the MC5 enjoyed their greatest artistic and critical successes with
live albums as well. However, somewhere along the line, in between
popular rock moving away from the ideals of virtuosity and pure energy
(and popular music moving farther away from rock in the first place),
live shows becoming excessively easy to bootleg, and supposedly
legendary live acts like Phish and Widespread Panic soiling many on the
form, the live album essentially lost its power, becoming increasingly
less of an artistic or commercial prospect and increasingly more like a
mere collector’s item.
Here at Stylus, we present our list of the top 50 live albums of all-time, neither to support nor question this trend, but perhaps merely to demonstrate why the live album is an art worth saving in the first place. We may never see the likes of a Frampton Comes Alive! again (and to many, that isn’t such a bad thing in the first place), but as long as great artists are still touring with passion and a desire not to merely replicate the studio experience, the live album will remain relevant. We hope so, anyway.
#50: John Cale - Sabotage
The third bullet point on John Cale’s resume (right behind member of the Velvets and crucial proto-punk producer) is perhaps his most misunderstood. Sabotage adds to the reputation: critics called it a showcase for the dangerous and confrontational edge of the Cale persona. Me? I don’t get it. Cale’s tunefulness was hardly checked at the door. "Baby You Know" could be Springsteen's pervert doppleganger, "Dr. Mudd" is cleverly almost disco, and "Only Time Will Tell" and "Chorale" are Cohen-like nymphs of fragility. While Cale never had the ego to stride cocksure above the landscape like ex-partner Reed, his ability to sacrifice persona to the song itself ensured that performances like those on Sabotage captured another, slightly more elusive piece of the rock-and-roll myth.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#49: J. Geils Band - Live: Blow Your Face Out
Before the J. Geils Band transitioned to being a pretty decent pop group, they were a dirty R&B-influenced bar band, with an intense sound that remains the epitome of its style—like a more impressive Faces. Live, the band could be stunning, and Blow Your Face Out captures not only the group's musical strength, but also its idiosyncrasies. Charismatic vocalist Peter Wolf remains entertaining even when not singing, and guitarist J. Geils and harmonica player Magic Dick both shine individually. But the group performs as a tight unit, focusing on its rock roots, but succeeding in every style it attempts, from country ("Truck Drivin' Man") to straight-forward Motown ("Where Did Our Love Go"). Even with the group locked in, the concert constantly feels as if the wheels are about to come off. It's not a house party until something gets broken, and the J. Geils Band provides plenty of encouragement.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#48: Laurie Anderson - United States Live
This was my introduction to the avant garde in American pop culture, or at least pop(ular) music. What a way to go. Anderson was a semi-known quantity by the release of this four-hour-plus set (5 records, 4 CDs), having famously hit #2 in the UK charts in 1981 with “O Superman,” which also won the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll that year. But nothing prepared anyone—except those who’d seen United States performed live—for this. It misfires almost as often as it hits its mark, but for its mix of comment, art, and music, it still holds the power to astonish. This isn’t exactly a rockin’ good time, but as a document of the American avant garde in the early 80s, it’s invaluable.
[Thomas Inskeep]
#47: Curtis Mayfield - Curtis / Live!
If Mayfield's solo debut Curtis surpassed the expectations of people who thought of him merely as the guiding light behind the Impressions, his second release, Curtis / Live! went even further. Taking the sonic blueprint of Curtis and stretching it further and longer, jamming it harder and cooler, he even refigured early Impressions cuts to fit this new context, turning in smoking versions of "People Get Ready," "Gypsy Woman," and "Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey)," among others. Releasing a live record for your sophomore effort is brave in any genre—for a soul artist gone solo from a vocal group in 1971, it was the height of audacity.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#46: David Bowie - Stage
Now this is the way to sequence a live album—exile the hits on the second disc, frontload the first with the sepulchral instrumentals whose arctic drift lent your two most recent albums their unsettling majesty. Out of print for years, Stage was rereleased and rearranged a couple of years ago to reflect the universal acceptance of Low and Heroes as David Bowie’s crowning achievements; but let us imagine how an audience in, say, Houston responded to “Sense of Doubt” and “Warsawva,” both played in the first ten minutes, as the Thin White Duke, never thinner and whiter, accompanied his expert band on woozy chamberlain keyboard. As for the Ziggy Stardust material, well, they make splendid dinner-theatre material—by speeding up the likes of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Star” he schlocks’em up, winningly. But Bowie earns his reputation for incongruent hybrids on what is very likely the best live version of “Station to Station” recorded. Speed and schlock become art and ardor.
[Alfred Soto]
#45: Grateful Dead – Europe ‘72
Not long after the collective triumph of their two greatest studio albums, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, the Dead embarked on their first extended tour of Europe, and the result, Europe ‘72, is nothing short of classic Dead. Of course, the record features such Dead set-list linchpins as “Truckin,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and “One More Saturday Night.” But it also marked the first vinyl appearance of tracks like “Tennessee Jed,” “Ramble on Rose,” and “Jack Straw,” and as with any Dead show, the songs performed live maintain a flexibility and spontaneity impossible to capture in a studio. Shortly after the release of Europe ’72 the band switched labels and suffered the loss of one of its founding members, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, making it the last great album from the group’s original incarnation.
[Jeff Weiss]
#44: Erykah Badu - Live
The queen of ‘90s neo-soul released a live recording as her sophomore effort—and made it work. She didn’t even really have to try, because if there’s one thing Badu feels like live, it’s effortless. This album captures it all, from the expansiveness of her covers of Chaka Khan (the glorious “Stay”) and Roy Ayers (“Searching,” smooth as she does) to the grit and humor of the album’s lone new song, “Tyrone” (“I’m getting’ tired of yo’ shit / You don’t never buy me nothin’” is one of the greatest opening lines ever) and the lithesome, perfect takes on Baduizm favorites such as “Next Lifetime” and “On & On.”
[Thomas Inskeep]
#43: Bruce Springsteen - Live 1975 – 1985
By 1986, Bruce Springsteen was on top of the world. He had finally struck commercial gold with 1984’s Born in the USA, and the subsequent tour was a triumph, selling out stadiums and arenas around the globe. But before he turned his back on it all, with the introspective Tunnel of Love, “Brooce” had one last love letter to his fans in the form of this career-spanning three-disc retrospective. It’s all here, from the rollicking “Rosalita” and an epic “Growin’ Up” to a chill-inducing “Badlands” and a triumphant “Born to Run,” Springsteen and his crew bang it home song after song with precision, energy, and that inimitable, inspirational X factor that makes Springsteen the people’s champion, the man every guy wanted to be, and every girl wanted to marry. It ends with a magical rendition of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl,” showing that even though Bruce knows that he can’t go home again, he’ll never forget where he came from.
[Todd Hutlock]
#42: Spacemen 3 - Performance
What Performance has over other live albums released by Spacemen 3 isn’t volume or rawness so much as structure; this is an almost ideally paced live show, from the shaggy-dog opening of Juicy Lucy‘s “Mary Anne” to the truly epic pummel through “Suicide” that ends with looped crowd noise because, honestly, we need the break. Songs get smashed to pieces on the unyielding cliffs of J Spaceman and Sonic Boom’s guitars, they cover Sun Ra and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators as if they wrote the songs themselves, and they even play the best song ever titled “Come Together.” Performance is so intense, so transformative that some of us find ourselves rhapsodizing about its heady powers; it’s the live experience as something to be equally enjoyed and endured, the latter only feeding the former.
[Ian Mathers]
#41: Velvet Underground - Live: 1969
Set a tape recorder by train tracks overnight, listen to it in the morning, and you get: a low steady chug, a roar, and wind. What you don’t get is baseball stadium organ played with violence (“What Goes On”), a car-song-turned-lullaby (“Sweet Jane”), and a lead singer who in one minute banters with his audience about the Dallas Cowboys before launching into an exhortation to put jelly on your shoulder the next (“Some Kinda Love”). Lou Reed is so friendly that you want to braid his Afro, Doug Yule convinces you that John Cale was just a nightmare Reed had, and whether holding the rhythm or plucking limpid, graceful leads, Sterling Morrison soars as the album’s real star. All this—and Moe Tucker too, proving she’s a “real” drummer, thanks.
[Alfred Soto]
#40: The Band - Rock of Ages
The would-be Crackers toured relentlessly for the first decade-or-so of their existence, backing Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and others before realizing they had no need of a frontman. Recorded on New Year’s Eve, 1971, Rock captures The Band parsing their ridiculously rich rootsy catalogue with the benefit of a horn section playing charts arranged by Allen Toussaint. High points abound on the two hour-plus set (Richard Manuel’s ragged, desperate falsetto dissolving in the three part harmonies of “I Shall Be Released, the Aerosmith strut of “Up On Cripple Creek”), but it’s hard to beat Dozier-Holland’s “Don’t Do It,” now famous as the song that ended the Last Waltz concert and opened the Scorsese film. The reissue offers the additional pleasure of hearing Dylan totally flub the words to “Like a Rolling Stone.”
[Andrew Iliff]
#39: Bill Withers - Live at Carnegie Hall
Bill Withers, one of soul's most underappreciated writers and singers, assembled a flawless setlist for his live album, and while too many live albums serve simply as sloppy greatest hits productions, this one utilizes the setting to further express Withers's strong personality. His between-song banter develops the tracks' emotional content, and the stellar renditions resonate on every listen. With a tremendous artist at his peak and the crowd constantly engaged, Live at Carnegie helps define Withers as a songwriter and a performer, and remains a unique experience in itself.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#38: The Allman Brothers - Live at Fillmore East
Definitely the finest album of Southern rock ever seriously influenced by Miles Davis, the original At Fillmore East even manages the same trick as Bitches’ Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson; producer Tom Dowd is as crucial to At Fill East’s sound as Teo Macero was to the Davis albums. Sure, the sublime “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” was one performance, but the reputation-making performances of “You Don’t Love Me” and especially “Whipping Post” are subtly woven from a couple of nights to stunning effect. To this day the Allmans remain one of the few admirable acts lumped under the “jam band” tag, and on arguably their best official live album they bring the collaborative impulse and intelligence of the best jazz to bear on blues, hard rock, country music, gospel and the then-nascent beast that is Southern rock.
[Ian Mathers]
#37: Tom Waits - Big Time
The soundtrack to this singular, too-little-seen concept concert film finds Waits at his late 80s best. As with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, these performances inevitably lose some of their impact removed from the film’s precisely calibrated visual design. Still, Big Time’s renditions of the Swordfishtrombones classics “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six” and “Underground” effectively emphasize the weird brutality that defines Waits’ career-reinventing work from this period. If only he’d waited a few years to put this together, he might’ve rounded out the set with, say, “Goin’ Out West” and “Earth Died Screaming,” both of which would feel more than welcome here.
[Josh Timmermann]
#36: Jeff Buckley - Live at Sin-E
The subsequent “Legacy Edition” demonstrated that Buckley was as digressive, cocky, long-winded, and self-regarding as his extraordinary talent suggested, but it is the original four tracks, released shortly before Grace, that are indelible. As on the album, Buckley pairs originals with covers and nearly blows his own songs away with his firecracker interpretations. Nearly. Stripped of his band, we get, in headspinning succession, Buckley the intense young songwriter (“This is a song about a dream…” he introduces the disc), Buckley the bluesman (“Eternal Life,” in a more nuanced reading than the album’s hard rock grind), Buckley the Frenchy coquette (Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas Le Fin”). Concluding and encompassing the set, Buckley plays ten minutes of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do.” The convulsive, octave-tripping scat break was the sound of Buckley flexing his wings for what should have been a long, remarkable flight.
[Andrew Iliff]
#35: Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace
While that voice (Aretha’s the finest singer of the past 50 years, hands down) can sing anything, Aretha’s rarely sung as passionately as she does when singing about Jesus. She can make any song gospel: just hear the way she brings the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” to church. With the Southern California Community Choir backing her up and the Rev. James Cleveland (the Kirk Franklin of his day) at her side, this is one of the Queen’s crowning achievements.
[Thomas Inskeep]
#34: Charles Mingus - Mingus at Antibes
Legendarily infamous as iconoclast, raconteur, firebrand, and bully, not to mention arguably the most structurally sound composer since Sir Duke, Charles Mingus consequently doesn't carry the same reputation for performative genius as Miles, Bird, or Coltrane, but that undeserved second-tier status shouldn't cause you to overlook the great man's historic 1960 set in Antibes. Most importantly, owing to Mingus' near-peerless excellence as a melodist and architect of indelibly digestible jazz sounds (though of course he was a master of the indelibly indigestible as well), Antibes isn't solely a showcase for stunning improvisation but also a storehouse of unforgettably tight signatures, patterns, and grooves, particularly the insistent "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" and the deathless "Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul."
[Josh Love]
#33: Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert
Completely improvised from the moment Jarrett sat down to the last resounding note, The Koln Concert is a totally unique document—challenging, warm, bracing, alien, humane, atonal, sweetly nostalgic. At times, melodies like shards of standards from another dimension float through, but mainly it's nothing more than the free-floating orgiastic thundercloud of one human being communing with the wildest spirits through 88 keys.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#32: Jeff Mills - Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo
Techno figurehead Jeff Mills has had a prolific recording career to be sure, but his reputation is really cemented by this release—one of the most dynamic DJ sets ever committed to disc. Recorded live on October 28, 1995, with no overdubs on three (yes, three) turntables, Live at the Liquid Room effortlessly recreates the live club experience with relentless energy, frenetic mixing (Mills juggles the three decks better than many jocks handle two), and yes, bad sound, dirty records, and screaming crowd noise. Mills’ pumping hard techno set (nearly half of which is his own work) is spectacular and the audience eats it up—you can really feel that crowd/DJ interaction here, which is much of the reason why this set is so special. Mills’ technique is stunning throughout, mixing 38 tracks with no one track staying on for much more than two minutes. Warts and all, Live at the Liquid Room is literally the next best thing to being there.
[Todd Hutlock]
#31: Spiritualized - Fucked Up Inside
Initially only available via mail order and subsequently released in very limited quantities, Fucked Up Inside chronicles Spiritualized’s first major tour across seven tracks, but it might as well be one long song. Even in the band’s early days, Jason Pierce and Co. have a dynamic onstage presence, playing off each other like wily veterans. In direct comparison to the later, more readily available live chronicle recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, Fucked Up Inside is rougher around the edges, a bit looser and relaxed with the smaller line-up and shorter running time. With a set drawing largely from the band’s debut Lazer Guided Melodies and peppered with follow-up single “Medication” and Spacemen 3 chestnut “Walking With Jesus,” Fucked Up Inside shows that sometimes less really is more.
[Todd Hutlock]
#30: The Fall - A Part of American Therein, 1981
Strangely enough, “The NWRA” and “Hip Priest” are actually the least compelling parts of this compilation that culls together bits of an American tour, as if Mark E. Smith and company thought they needed to ease the States into their monolithic, barbaric yawp. It’s the album’s second half, starting with an intense “Cash ‘n’ Carry,” that truly conveys what a fearsome group they were. (The Fall at its best isn’t just Smith ranting over any old mess, it’s the World’s Best Rockabilly Can Cover Band.) From the faintly spectral “An Older Lover” to the gleefully noisy “Deer Park,” they demonstrate why they mean more to music than a hundred more famous acts—this isn’t a sound that wants you to like it, it’s out there doing it’s own thing, drinking and falling down and getting back up again.
[Ian Mathers]
#29: Sam Cooke - Live at the Harlem Square Club
You'd think grittier, more outwardly pained voices like James Brown's or Otis Redding's would have insurmountable advantages when it came to sweaty concert work-outs, but for my dime it's Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club that stands as the most vivid snapshot in the history of performance soul. Grit didn't define Cooke's recorded career, so when his supple tenor even suggests it here the effect is revelatory. There may be hurt and confusion at times, but Cooke retains a staggeringly masterful level of control over the proceedings, elevating the show above the suffering and creating a more effectively breathtaking form of drama in its place. Contrived as it may be, I don't know if I've ever heard a more thoroughly spine-tingling moment on any live disc than the build-up to "It's All Right/For Sentimental Reasons," Cooke lulling you first with banal-seeming advice on waking up your lover if you think she's been unfaithful and waiting until she gets the sleep out of her eyes, then effortlessly, stunningly slipping into song. A single heart-stopping "baby" and he's gone.
[Josh Love]
#28: The Jam - Dig the New Breed
When Paul Weller broke up the Jam in 1982, they were at the peak of their popularity. Shortly after that final curtain came down, Dig The New Breed was issued as a thank you to the fans for their support. A compilation of live moments dating as far back as 1977, Dig still plays like a unified document—save a stray horn section the band remained a power trio from first moment to last (on stage at least). While the set list features a handful of hits (“Going Underground,” “Start”), there’s also some key album tracks (a roaring “Set the House Ablaze” and surprise album closer “Private Hell”) and a charged cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Big Bird.” Dig The New Breed has been replaced by the expanded Live Jam, but in this case, less equals more. Seek out a copy for a peerless portrait of one of the era’s best live acts.
[Todd Hutlock]
#27: Japan - Oil on Canvas
A far cry from Japan’s aptly-named Adolescent Sex days, Oil on Canvas was actually a mixed bag of instrumental studio castoffs and assorted live snippets. The setup smacks of contractual obligation—the collection came out in 1983, two years after the eloquent Tin Drum—but the majority of the album serves as a career-spanning live retrospective that actually touches quite nicely on the band’s immovable highlights. Predicting many of the stylistic hallmarks that would take clearer form during David Sylvian’s early solo career, Oil on Canvas nonetheless captures the essence of the group that had impressed upon the New Wave movement such cuts as “Quiet Life” and “Gentlemen Take Polaroids.”
[Mike Orme]
#26: Van Morrison - It’s Too Late to Stop Now
Rock’s quintessential wild-eyed Irish eccentric—sorry, Bono—is clearly in his element on this vital 1973 set. Morrison shifts seamlessly from ethereal folkie to charismatic soulman, often within the space of a single song. The covers, most notably Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” are a treat, but the selling point here is the charge of energy inserted behind catalogue staples like “Into the Mystic” (the source of the album’s title) and “Cyprus Avenue” (the lone Astral Weeks inclusion). The two are possibly the definitive versions of each.
[Josh Timmermann]
#25: Underworld - Everything, Everything
The key question behind almost every live album released by an electronic group is the same: what’s the point? Everything, Everything doesn’t necessarily answer this question—outside of vocalist Karl Hyde’s crazed, half-preacher, half-beat poet rantings, it’s basically the sound of a series of buttons getting pushed. But what Everything, Everything demonstrates is that there doesn’t need to be a point, as long as the artist knows what buttons to push. On this 2000 live release, Underworld craft a perfect musical experience for their audience, with a choice tracklist, brilliant structuring, and versions of “Pearls Girl” and “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” that somehow manage to better their classic originals. But as in any great gig, Underworld saves the high point for the encore, a rapturous 12-minute mind meld of “Rez” and “Cowgirl.” One listen, and you’ll never be satisfied with their uneven full-lengths again.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#24: James Brown - Sex Machine
Sex Machine may not have the historical significance or the zeitgeist factor of either of James Brown's Live at the Apollo albums, and its inclusion of three studio tracks may cause some purists to dismiss it as artifice, but it’s arguably the most spirited, thrilling, energetic, and concise document of James Brown ever recorded. Rarely has Soul Brother #1 ever torn through cuts the way he does here, partially, if not mostly, due to the phenomenal assemblage of musicians, among them: Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, sideman Bobby Byrd, Johnny Griggs, and a young, then-relatively-unknown bassist named Bootsy Collins. The album is pure sweat-soaked exhilaration, peaking with the frenzied rapture of "I Got the Feelin'/Give It Up or Turnit a Loose”—Brown scats, howls, aches, and, at the storm's peak, unleashes a mind-boggling scream that is equal parts carnality and catharsis. Then, without losing a beat, the band brings it back to the beginning, he does the whole thing all over again, and Mr. Dynamite has suddenly become The Godfather of Soul.
[Tal Rosenberg]
#23: John Coltrane & Thelonius Monk - Live at Carnegie Hall
This album has all the trappings of a classic: two legendary figures, great compositions from a fertile period, and a killer backstory (the recording was lost for more than 40 years). Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane shows skill and expression, but the later live recordings on this Carnegie Hall release reveal more insistent takes on the music, with both "Nutty" and "Epistrophy" allowing the artists to get carried away (the latter surpassing its studio version easily). The quartet disregarded comfort with Monk's compositions and pushed themselves—rather than discovering beauty amidst the fluctuating success of ambition, they simply found flawless peaks.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#22: Otis Redding - Live in Europe
On this 1967 set, Redding sounds like a man on a mission, hungry enough to eat Europe alive if it didn’t pay him his due. Compressing ten songs into a scant 36 minutes and backed by the never-been-hotter Stax house band Booker T and the MGs, Redding tears through Southern Soul classics with the fizzing urgency of a lit fuse, one song tripping into the next. The mix is muddy and heavy on audience noise, but it’s plenty clean enough to catch Redding’s proto-rap breaks on “Can’t Turn You Loose” (“You think I’m gonna stop, I ain’t gonna stop…”) and his affectionate introductions to songs, many of which he wrote. Don’t miss the breathless, hoarse coda to “Satisfaction,” and the moment when, after calling his audience in on “Fa-fa-fa-fa,” Redding steps back in and tells them, “Alright, let me handle it…” and does.
[Andrew Iliff]
#21: Jay-Z - Unplugged
It’s fair to assume that Jay-Z accepted this gig for no better reason than to prove that he can do anything—design a successful clothing line, run one of rap’s foremost record labels, even make Linkin Park sound good. But the real charm here is that hip-hop’s Renaissance man actually sounds like he’s having the time of his life, backed by the Roots for what he calls his “poetry readin’.” If Jay’s only half-successful at on-the-spot self-censorship (some “shits” and what have you inevitably slip in), he does a bravura job of reinventing back-catalogue staples from Reasonable Doubt to The Blueprint. “Ain’t No Nigga” is the seemingly impromptu audience sing-along, and “Song Cry” sounds genuinely soulful, with Hov himself shedding a tear or two. Jay takes a deep breath before launching into the first verse of “Big Pimpin’,” at which point there’s no question who’s running this rap, er, stuff.
[Josh Timmermann]
#20: Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys
Ditching Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and their Artie Ziff afros and aligning himself with bassist Billy Cox and the bruising drums of Buddy Miles, Band of Gypsys showcases Hendrix at his most visceral, as each vertebrae-shattering riff pays tribute to the dead bluesman that wrote the first draft of his musical blueprint. His 12 minute rendition of “Machine Gun,” is often regarded as one of the finest guitar performances of all-time, and it isn’t hard to see why. A mess of snarls, squeals and apocalypse, the song purposefully evokes visions of soldiers exploding in Vietnam. As he sings his deranged and drugged dirge, Hendrix seems to capture the spirit of the times at the precise moment when the idealism of the 60’s met the hung-over glaze of the “Me Decade.” Indeed, one doesn’t need to hear the whirling stomp of the third song “Changes,” to know that the end was near.
[Jeff Weiss]
#19: Can - Can Box Live
So much emphasis is placed on Holger Czukay's revolutionary tape-splicing and Can’s masterful use of the studio that it's easy to forget how spliff-droppingly awesome the band were live. Can Box Live prove that the two main ingredients of the band remain: the monstrousness of their groove and the wobbly strangeness of all their unsettling mutations atop it—but in an even more unstable, rocking, and loose format. Smoldering like the molten core of a volcano, Can live are a beautiful proposition to view from a safe distance—but get too close and your ass could get burned right the fuck off.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#18: Neil Young - Live Rust
Live Rust presented the writer of “Thrasher” and “Welfare Mothers” as an artist who says fuck it to the schism that made his oeuvre the most infuriating and rewarding of the decade. In other words, Young doesn’t square the infantilism of “Sugar Mountain” and the Wages of Fear apocalypse of “Sedan Delivery”—both are engulfed by the twin tidal waves of “Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane.” Concluding with the tasteless elegy “Tonight’s the Night” suggests that Young’s as guileless as his fans when it comes to objectives. He believes in neither America nor myths; he believes in platitudes, entropy, and gargled vocals.
[Alfred Soto]
#17: Johnny Cash - At San Quentin
Cash's onstage banter during At San Quentin is just as valuable as the stripped-down, shit-kicking country tunes. On the essential 2000 reissue, the entire set is presented, painting a picture beyond the scope of the original LP release. Cash's everyman appeal shines through, and by the time he drops the angry, bitter "San Quentin" (twice in a row, no less), he and the prisoners are unified. These men would follow him to hell. In between, things get maudlin ("I Still Miss Someone"), funny (unlikely hit "A Boy Named Sue"), and religious ("He Turned the Water Into Wine"), but Cash never loses that connection. Cash wears the outlaw hat so convincingly because he has been there himself. Never before or since have an artist and audience bonded on record so closely.
[Todd Hutlock]
#16: Bob Dylan - Live 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue
Nobody yells "Judas," but what this amalgamation of Rolling Thunder concerts lacks in historical color it more than makes up for everywhere else. Dylan's notoriously haphazard habits in the studio are liberating on stage, and the troupe he assembles—Roger McGuinn, Rambling Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, about four thousand more—is not only a lucky marvel of chemistry but the best backup Dylan ever enjoyed. The setlist makes all the necessary stops, but as good as the "Mr. Tambourine Man"s and "Blowin' in the Wind"s are, what you're going to come back to is the snarling, loping litany of injustice Dylan and company make of relative obscurity "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." This is no greatest-hits tour. This is a fiery excavation of twenty-two Bob Dylan songs that, with few exceptions, improve on their studio versions. Oh, and Scarlet Rivera.
[Theon Weber]
#15: Joy Division - Les Bains Douches 1979
Joy Division expressed displeasure upon the release of Unknown Pleasures with the way Martin Hannett made them sound. It's only long after the fact that we have the kind of official release that gives you an idea of what they meant. You truly have not heard “Shadowplay” or “New Dawn Fades” or “Atrocity Exhibition” until you’ve heard Les Bains Douches. The range exhibited here is breathtaking, from the grippingly abrasive takes on “Insight” and “Atmosphere” to the shoulda-been-a-hit highs of “Transmission” and “Dead Souls.” Les Bains Douches offers a different kind of thrill than their immensely controlled and compelling studio efforts, and no fan of the band can afford not to check out their red-in-tooth-and-claw live presence here.
[Ian Mathers]
#14: MC5 - Kick Out the Jams
Unique in that it was released without a proper studio album to support it, the (dare I say it) raw power of Kick Out the Jams nevertheless provided a blueprint by which all hard rock afterwards had no choice but to follow. On that Halloween night in 1968, on MC5’s home soil in Detroit Rock City, the rhythm section of Davis and Thompson ploughed through eight breakneck beats, Fred Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith played their guitars into molten metal, and Rob Tyner screamed for a “testimonial.” This was punk that quite awkwardly burst out long before it was supposed to be born. And that’s just what MC5 wanted. “Kick out the jams, MUTHAFUCKAS!”
[Mike Orme]
#13: Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
Considering how definitive Radiohead’s full-lengths are, the way they completely re-invent some of their most well-known and beloved album tracks on I Might Be Wrong is nothing short of stunning. “I Might Be Wrong” becomes the block-rocker it always had the potential to be, “Everything in Its Right Place” is turned from an ominous mantra to a crowd-pleasing barnstormer, and most notably, the backwards weirdness of “Like Spinning Plates” is recast as a torch ballad (causing at least one audience member to scream out “LIKE SPINNING PLATES!!” in the shock of recognition). Add the only officially released version of fan favorite “True Love Waits,” and you’ve got the only truly essential Radiohead release since Kid A.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#12: Portishead - PNYC: Roseland Live
The 90s produced exactly two indications that trip-hop was made by real people and not depraved, inhuman geniuses. The first is Tricky’s comical turn as a space-henchman in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, and the second is PNYC Roseland Live. Considering the emotional roller coaster of Portishead’s two preceding studio albums, PNYC came out of nowhere with an orchestra and singer Beth Gibbons in full-on croon mode. This jazzy set is notable for psyched-out, wall-of-sound re-thinkings of many of Dummy’s best cuts, but it’s perhaps best-remembered for its unexpected hit: the brass-enhanced re-invigoration of Portishead’s “All Mine.”
[Mike Orme]
#11: Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
The central proposition of Stop Making Sense is essentially paradoxical—the world’s most awkward band getting comfortable in their own skin. Stop Making Sense features the Heads at their peak of confidence, using drum machines, set gimmicks (in the definitive ’99 re-issue, the band members are introduced one at a time in each of the first four tracks), background vocalists, and an expanded band. Aside from essentially making Speaking in Tongues totally irrelevant by featuring superior takes of most of the album’s best tracks, SMS features panoramic live takes on “Once in a Lifetime,” “Life During Wartime” and even the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” that come dangerously close to equaling the classic originals. If previous live document The Name of This Band is Talking Heads showed why Talking Heads were one of the best bands of the early 80s, Stop Making Sense showed why they were also one of the biggest.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#010: Miles Davis - Live – Evil
Much has been made of the live / not live controversy surrounding this set (the second disc was recorded in Columbia's Studio B), but the thing of real importance about Live Evil is that it is a document of transition. A fiery, uneven transition that in some ways is the quintessential sound of electric Miles—teetering between the Hendrix-inspired rawbones of Bitches' Brew and the urban in-the-pocket groove of On the Corner. Parts of it smoke, parts simmer, and parts sound like bloody Nurse With Wound, but every minute of it is vintage big-sunglasses Miles, caught between rock 'n' roll and a hard place, leading his Merry Men through the choppy waters of protoplasmic fusion jazz.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#09: The Clash - Live: From Here to Eternity
It lurches from end to end of the band's career, it's sequenced with a distracted (and distracting) eye towards commercial viability, and it's got nothing you wouldn't expect—but this band could play, and you'll be surprised at how incompletely you understood that. You'll also be surprised at how good a thicker, jumpier "Train in Vain" is; at how much more forgivable—marvelous, even—"Should I Stay Or Should I Go" sounds when actually performed for the thousands towards which it always so nakedly reached; and at how perfect a keystone is the hoarse bleat from which Mick Jones squeezes every drop of wobbly tune. There's no specific context here—it's an hour of the Clash playing a bunch of songs at a bunch of concerts, no doubt with a bunch of guitars. If you like the Clash it's great; if you don't that's your own lookout. No wait—still great.
[Theon Weber]
#08: Led Zeppelin - How the West Was Won
If you’ve ever wondered why almost every teenaged boy at one point or another regards Led Zeppelin as the greatest band to ever live, all you have to do is listen to the first 15 minutes of How the West Was Won, which features the heart-palpitating, spine-tingling crunching thrust of “Immigrant Song,” a raucous seven-and-a-half minute rendition of “Heartbreaker,” and the song that wins every 13-year old’s heart: “Black Dog.” Taken from two otherworldly shows from June 1972 and not released until 2003, the collection encompasses most of the group’s greatest songs from their first four albums. Compare the studio versions to their live renditions, though. As each note thrashes, flails and explodes like colorful fireworks into the wine-dark sky, you’ll find yourself hearing these songs anew—and wondering why they didn’t put this out far earlier.
[Jeff Weiss]
#07: Kraftwerk - Minimum-Maximum
The idea of a Kraftwerk live album almost sounds like a bad joke—the basic concept of Kraftwerk was to deny the humanity behind the music’s makers: why should anyone want to hear or see them in the flesh? But, as it turns out, if robots are better at crafting immaculate, seamless, symphonic LPs than humans, apparently they’re also way ahead of us when it comes to getting the party started. Kraftwerk are much better crowd-pleasers than anyone could expect, whether they’re breezing through suites of new material, kicking out the electro-funk jams, playing an actually palatable nine-minute version of “Autobahn,” or playing foreign language versions of “Pocket Calculator.” Turns out, when the working day is done, robots just want to have fun too.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#06: The Who – Live at Leeds
Quotidian drama and combustible violence marked The Who more than any other 60s rock legend, so it should come as no surprise that they created the era's greatest live document as well. All that inarticulate adolescent yearning and pent-up fury spilled out in savage, lacerating takes on the hits "Substitute" and "My Generation," but the real distillation of the band's brutally self-abnegating ethos comes in their cover of "Summertime Blues," alternately indignant, hilarious, and physically punishing. A 1995 remaster amends several critical cuts, including absolute essentials "Tattoo," "I'm a Boy" and "A Quick One While He's Away," while a subsequent deluxe edition in 2001 would bring to light the remainder of the band's near-complete showcase of Tommy.
[Josh Love]
#05: Nirvana - MTV Unplugged in New York
This album should never have worked. Nirvana’s grunge signature was Cobain’s fierce, furious, frantically distorted guitar, and reframing it to suit MTV’s latest conceit should have torn out the heart of Cobain’s songs. Astonishingly, they sound natural and damn-near perfected. Cobain, Grohl, and Novoselic play with a loose, tangled empathy that stretches and contracts to let the songs breathe. The angst of Cobain’s guitar takes up residence in his voice, which has never sounded more potent. Dave Grohl fidgets and noodles nervously, irrepressibly between songs. The record is inescapably read in the light of Cobain’s suicide, but he sounds at home onstage, with quips about David Geffen and needing more guitars; “I guarantee I’ll screw this one up,” he announces before the definitive version of “Man Who Sold the World; “Yeah, like he only screws one up,” Grohl responds. But the album closes with the tortured dirge of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” reminding us that as comfortable as he seemed, as magnificent as he was, Cobain always knew he’d screw it up.
[Andrew Iliff]
#04: James Brown - Live at the Apollo
More than Sex Machine, more than Love Power Peace, and certainly more than any of his mixed bag of studio efforts, this is the ultimate proof of J.B. as pop’s ultimate performer—and, arguably, its most accomplished star, period. In terms of range, both musical and emotional, this legendary 1963 set runs the gamut. The opener, “I’ll Go Crazy,” remains an instant jolt of let’s-go adrenaline, but pay particular attention to the tremendous restraint with which Brown—known more as a primal force than a tender balladeer—delivers the next number, “Try Me.” The performance reaches a poignant peak with “Lost Someone,” our bandleader sounding palpably, affectingly wounded, before finishing off with “Night Train,” a funky suggestion of things to come.
[Josh Timmermann]
#03: Talking Heads - The Name of This Band is Talking Heads
Years after their influence faded, the curious had to rely on VHS copies of Stop Making Sense to review Talking Heads’ amazing live prowess. Now that their influence is acknowledged as definitive on a half-dozen acts who ooze the weirdness but not the funk, it’s time for owners of this double-disc live compilation, re-released in 2004 after more than 20 years of obscurity, to face facts: (1) The guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison never sounded more “African” than on pre-Remain in Light goodies like “Warning Sign”; (2) “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” is an obscure remix of a cut on side four of Donna Summer’s Bad Girls; (3) Byrne’s grunts, anhedonia, agoraphobia, and embrace of pussy-as-salvation make him a lovable, full-fledged member of the human race; (4) True Stories and Naked were inevitable.
[Alfred Soto]
#02: Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
While a great live album captures a moment, the best live albums exist as testaments to their creators, as definitions of their essence. On At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash, grappling with amphetamine addiction and personal troubles, inscribes his legend into stone. Every single strain of his personality is tied together: weary storyteller, jaded outlaw, hopeless romantic, impassioned activist, rustic folkie. Unified, Cash becomes a super/everyman—someone that common people understand but don't have the slightest clue how to replicate or imitate. And for a man both above and below the law, what venue is more suitable than a prison? From the onset, with those deep, drawling introductory words and the scorching "Folsom Prison Blues," the artist and his audience synergize, knowing that what's taking place is unique, monumental even. At Folsom Prison functions as the crest and the curtain-raiser of Johnny Cash's career, an album of raw passion and unfiltered humanity.
[Tal Rosenberg]
#01: Bob Dylan - Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966, “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
It's rock's most famous concert. The one after Dylan went electric and freaked everyone out. The one where someone called him Judas and his band played beyond belief anyway. The one that got bootlegged, misnamed, and became symbolic of an entire world-changing career. The second half gets most of the attention, but the opening acoustic set, which Dylan plays alone, contains a string of brilliant compositions and confident performances. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" encapsulates more meaning than studied explications ever dig out, and the captivating "Mr. Tambourine Man," which closes the set, makes even that fantasy concede to true sight.
Then everything goes crazy. Dylan and his backing band the Hawks (essentially what would become the Band) play with a vehemence they never possessed again, right through that final scene, where Dylan has the Judas exchange and tells the band to "play fucking loud" and they turn "Like a Rolling Stone" into the taunt of a knowing victor.
Forget the history. Here's why this disc matters: because nothing you play after it does.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
he
art of the live album seems antiquated these days. Back in the 70s,
artists like Kiss, Cheap Trick and Peter Frampton found their greatest
success with live albums, enjoying multi-platinum sales and even
spinning off radio hits, while other artists like The Allman Brothers
and the MC5 enjoyed their greatest artistic and critical successes with
live albums as well. However, somewhere along the line, in between
popular rock moving away from the ideals of virtuosity and pure energy
(and popular music moving farther away from rock in the first place),
live shows becoming excessively easy to bootleg, and supposedly
legendary live acts like Phish and Widespread Panic soiling many on the
form, the live album essentially lost its power, becoming increasingly
less of an artistic or commercial prospect and increasingly more like a
mere collector’s item. Here at Stylus, we present our list of the top 50 live albums of all-time, neither to support nor question this trend, but perhaps merely to demonstrate why the live album is an art worth saving in the first place. We may never see the likes of a Frampton Comes Alive! again (and to many, that isn’t such a bad thing in the first place), but as long as great artists are still touring with passion and a desire not to merely replicate the studio experience, the live album will remain relevant. We hope so, anyway.
#50: John Cale - Sabotage
The third bullet point on John Cale’s resume (right behind member of the Velvets and crucial proto-punk producer) is perhaps his most misunderstood. Sabotage adds to the reputation: critics called it a showcase for the dangerous and confrontational edge of the Cale persona. Me? I don’t get it. Cale’s tunefulness was hardly checked at the door. "Baby You Know" could be Springsteen's pervert doppleganger, "Dr. Mudd" is cleverly almost disco, and "Only Time Will Tell" and "Chorale" are Cohen-like nymphs of fragility. While Cale never had the ego to stride cocksure above the landscape like ex-partner Reed, his ability to sacrifice persona to the song itself ensured that performances like those on Sabotage captured another, slightly more elusive piece of the rock-and-roll myth.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#49: J. Geils Band - Live: Blow Your Face Out
Before the J. Geils Band transitioned to being a pretty decent pop group, they were a dirty R&B-influenced bar band, with an intense sound that remains the epitome of its style—like a more impressive Faces. Live, the band could be stunning, and Blow Your Face Out captures not only the group's musical strength, but also its idiosyncrasies. Charismatic vocalist Peter Wolf remains entertaining even when not singing, and guitarist J. Geils and harmonica player Magic Dick both shine individually. But the group performs as a tight unit, focusing on its rock roots, but succeeding in every style it attempts, from country ("Truck Drivin' Man") to straight-forward Motown ("Where Did Our Love Go"). Even with the group locked in, the concert constantly feels as if the wheels are about to come off. It's not a house party until something gets broken, and the J. Geils Band provides plenty of encouragement.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#48: Laurie Anderson - United States Live
This was my introduction to the avant garde in American pop culture, or at least pop(ular) music. What a way to go. Anderson was a semi-known quantity by the release of this four-hour-plus set (5 records, 4 CDs), having famously hit #2 in the UK charts in 1981 with “O Superman,” which also won the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll that year. But nothing prepared anyone—except those who’d seen United States performed live—for this. It misfires almost as often as it hits its mark, but for its mix of comment, art, and music, it still holds the power to astonish. This isn’t exactly a rockin’ good time, but as a document of the American avant garde in the early 80s, it’s invaluable.
[Thomas Inskeep]
#47: Curtis Mayfield - Curtis / Live!
If Mayfield's solo debut Curtis surpassed the expectations of people who thought of him merely as the guiding light behind the Impressions, his second release, Curtis / Live! went even further. Taking the sonic blueprint of Curtis and stretching it further and longer, jamming it harder and cooler, he even refigured early Impressions cuts to fit this new context, turning in smoking versions of "People Get Ready," "Gypsy Woman," and "Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey)," among others. Releasing a live record for your sophomore effort is brave in any genre—for a soul artist gone solo from a vocal group in 1971, it was the height of audacity.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#46: David Bowie - Stage
Now this is the way to sequence a live album—exile the hits on the second disc, frontload the first with the sepulchral instrumentals whose arctic drift lent your two most recent albums their unsettling majesty. Out of print for years, Stage was rereleased and rearranged a couple of years ago to reflect the universal acceptance of Low and Heroes as David Bowie’s crowning achievements; but let us imagine how an audience in, say, Houston responded to “Sense of Doubt” and “Warsawva,” both played in the first ten minutes, as the Thin White Duke, never thinner and whiter, accompanied his expert band on woozy chamberlain keyboard. As for the Ziggy Stardust material, well, they make splendid dinner-theatre material—by speeding up the likes of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Star” he schlocks’em up, winningly. But Bowie earns his reputation for incongruent hybrids on what is very likely the best live version of “Station to Station” recorded. Speed and schlock become art and ardor.
[Alfred Soto]
#45: Grateful Dead – Europe ‘72
Not long after the collective triumph of their two greatest studio albums, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, the Dead embarked on their first extended tour of Europe, and the result, Europe ‘72, is nothing short of classic Dead. Of course, the record features such Dead set-list linchpins as “Truckin,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and “One More Saturday Night.” But it also marked the first vinyl appearance of tracks like “Tennessee Jed,” “Ramble on Rose,” and “Jack Straw,” and as with any Dead show, the songs performed live maintain a flexibility and spontaneity impossible to capture in a studio. Shortly after the release of Europe ’72 the band switched labels and suffered the loss of one of its founding members, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, making it the last great album from the group’s original incarnation.
[Jeff Weiss]
#44: Erykah Badu - Live
The queen of ‘90s neo-soul released a live recording as her sophomore effort—and made it work. She didn’t even really have to try, because if there’s one thing Badu feels like live, it’s effortless. This album captures it all, from the expansiveness of her covers of Chaka Khan (the glorious “Stay”) and Roy Ayers (“Searching,” smooth as she does) to the grit and humor of the album’s lone new song, “Tyrone” (“I’m getting’ tired of yo’ shit / You don’t never buy me nothin’” is one of the greatest opening lines ever) and the lithesome, perfect takes on Baduizm favorites such as “Next Lifetime” and “On & On.”
[Thomas Inskeep]
#43: Bruce Springsteen - Live 1975 – 1985
By 1986, Bruce Springsteen was on top of the world. He had finally struck commercial gold with 1984’s Born in the USA, and the subsequent tour was a triumph, selling out stadiums and arenas around the globe. But before he turned his back on it all, with the introspective Tunnel of Love, “Brooce” had one last love letter to his fans in the form of this career-spanning three-disc retrospective. It’s all here, from the rollicking “Rosalita” and an epic “Growin’ Up” to a chill-inducing “Badlands” and a triumphant “Born to Run,” Springsteen and his crew bang it home song after song with precision, energy, and that inimitable, inspirational X factor that makes Springsteen the people’s champion, the man every guy wanted to be, and every girl wanted to marry. It ends with a magical rendition of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl,” showing that even though Bruce knows that he can’t go home again, he’ll never forget where he came from.
[Todd Hutlock]
#42: Spacemen 3 - Performance
What Performance has over other live albums released by Spacemen 3 isn’t volume or rawness so much as structure; this is an almost ideally paced live show, from the shaggy-dog opening of Juicy Lucy‘s “Mary Anne” to the truly epic pummel through “Suicide” that ends with looped crowd noise because, honestly, we need the break. Songs get smashed to pieces on the unyielding cliffs of J Spaceman and Sonic Boom’s guitars, they cover Sun Ra and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators as if they wrote the songs themselves, and they even play the best song ever titled “Come Together.” Performance is so intense, so transformative that some of us find ourselves rhapsodizing about its heady powers; it’s the live experience as something to be equally enjoyed and endured, the latter only feeding the former.
[Ian Mathers]
#41: Velvet Underground - Live: 1969
Set a tape recorder by train tracks overnight, listen to it in the morning, and you get: a low steady chug, a roar, and wind. What you don’t get is baseball stadium organ played with violence (“What Goes On”), a car-song-turned-lullaby (“Sweet Jane”), and a lead singer who in one minute banters with his audience about the Dallas Cowboys before launching into an exhortation to put jelly on your shoulder the next (“Some Kinda Love”). Lou Reed is so friendly that you want to braid his Afro, Doug Yule convinces you that John Cale was just a nightmare Reed had, and whether holding the rhythm or plucking limpid, graceful leads, Sterling Morrison soars as the album’s real star. All this—and Moe Tucker too, proving she’s a “real” drummer, thanks.
[Alfred Soto]
#40: The Band - Rock of Ages
The would-be Crackers toured relentlessly for the first decade-or-so of their existence, backing Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and others before realizing they had no need of a frontman. Recorded on New Year’s Eve, 1971, Rock captures The Band parsing their ridiculously rich rootsy catalogue with the benefit of a horn section playing charts arranged by Allen Toussaint. High points abound on the two hour-plus set (Richard Manuel’s ragged, desperate falsetto dissolving in the three part harmonies of “I Shall Be Released, the Aerosmith strut of “Up On Cripple Creek”), but it’s hard to beat Dozier-Holland’s “Don’t Do It,” now famous as the song that ended the Last Waltz concert and opened the Scorsese film. The reissue offers the additional pleasure of hearing Dylan totally flub the words to “Like a Rolling Stone.”
[Andrew Iliff]
#39: Bill Withers - Live at Carnegie Hall
Bill Withers, one of soul's most underappreciated writers and singers, assembled a flawless setlist for his live album, and while too many live albums serve simply as sloppy greatest hits productions, this one utilizes the setting to further express Withers's strong personality. His between-song banter develops the tracks' emotional content, and the stellar renditions resonate on every listen. With a tremendous artist at his peak and the crowd constantly engaged, Live at Carnegie helps define Withers as a songwriter and a performer, and remains a unique experience in itself.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#38: The Allman Brothers - Live at Fillmore East
Definitely the finest album of Southern rock ever seriously influenced by Miles Davis, the original At Fillmore East even manages the same trick as Bitches’ Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson; producer Tom Dowd is as crucial to At Fill East’s sound as Teo Macero was to the Davis albums. Sure, the sublime “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” was one performance, but the reputation-making performances of “You Don’t Love Me” and especially “Whipping Post” are subtly woven from a couple of nights to stunning effect. To this day the Allmans remain one of the few admirable acts lumped under the “jam band” tag, and on arguably their best official live album they bring the collaborative impulse and intelligence of the best jazz to bear on blues, hard rock, country music, gospel and the then-nascent beast that is Southern rock.
[Ian Mathers]
#37: Tom Waits - Big Time
The soundtrack to this singular, too-little-seen concept concert film finds Waits at his late 80s best. As with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, these performances inevitably lose some of their impact removed from the film’s precisely calibrated visual design. Still, Big Time’s renditions of the Swordfishtrombones classics “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six” and “Underground” effectively emphasize the weird brutality that defines Waits’ career-reinventing work from this period. If only he’d waited a few years to put this together, he might’ve rounded out the set with, say, “Goin’ Out West” and “Earth Died Screaming,” both of which would feel more than welcome here.
[Josh Timmermann]
#36: Jeff Buckley - Live at Sin-E
The subsequent “Legacy Edition” demonstrated that Buckley was as digressive, cocky, long-winded, and self-regarding as his extraordinary talent suggested, but it is the original four tracks, released shortly before Grace, that are indelible. As on the album, Buckley pairs originals with covers and nearly blows his own songs away with his firecracker interpretations. Nearly. Stripped of his band, we get, in headspinning succession, Buckley the intense young songwriter (“This is a song about a dream…” he introduces the disc), Buckley the bluesman (“Eternal Life,” in a more nuanced reading than the album’s hard rock grind), Buckley the Frenchy coquette (Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas Le Fin”). Concluding and encompassing the set, Buckley plays ten minutes of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do.” The convulsive, octave-tripping scat break was the sound of Buckley flexing his wings for what should have been a long, remarkable flight.
[Andrew Iliff]
#35: Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace
While that voice (Aretha’s the finest singer of the past 50 years, hands down) can sing anything, Aretha’s rarely sung as passionately as she does when singing about Jesus. She can make any song gospel: just hear the way she brings the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” to church. With the Southern California Community Choir backing her up and the Rev. James Cleveland (the Kirk Franklin of his day) at her side, this is one of the Queen’s crowning achievements.
[Thomas Inskeep]
#34: Charles Mingus - Mingus at Antibes
Legendarily infamous as iconoclast, raconteur, firebrand, and bully, not to mention arguably the most structurally sound composer since Sir Duke, Charles Mingus consequently doesn't carry the same reputation for performative genius as Miles, Bird, or Coltrane, but that undeserved second-tier status shouldn't cause you to overlook the great man's historic 1960 set in Antibes. Most importantly, owing to Mingus' near-peerless excellence as a melodist and architect of indelibly digestible jazz sounds (though of course he was a master of the indelibly indigestible as well), Antibes isn't solely a showcase for stunning improvisation but also a storehouse of unforgettably tight signatures, patterns, and grooves, particularly the insistent "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" and the deathless "Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul."
[Josh Love]
#33: Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert
Completely improvised from the moment Jarrett sat down to the last resounding note, The Koln Concert is a totally unique document—challenging, warm, bracing, alien, humane, atonal, sweetly nostalgic. At times, melodies like shards of standards from another dimension float through, but mainly it's nothing more than the free-floating orgiastic thundercloud of one human being communing with the wildest spirits through 88 keys.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#32: Jeff Mills - Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo
Techno figurehead Jeff Mills has had a prolific recording career to be sure, but his reputation is really cemented by this release—one of the most dynamic DJ sets ever committed to disc. Recorded live on October 28, 1995, with no overdubs on three (yes, three) turntables, Live at the Liquid Room effortlessly recreates the live club experience with relentless energy, frenetic mixing (Mills juggles the three decks better than many jocks handle two), and yes, bad sound, dirty records, and screaming crowd noise. Mills’ pumping hard techno set (nearly half of which is his own work) is spectacular and the audience eats it up—you can really feel that crowd/DJ interaction here, which is much of the reason why this set is so special. Mills’ technique is stunning throughout, mixing 38 tracks with no one track staying on for much more than two minutes. Warts and all, Live at the Liquid Room is literally the next best thing to being there.
[Todd Hutlock]
#31: Spiritualized - Fucked Up Inside
Initially only available via mail order and subsequently released in very limited quantities, Fucked Up Inside chronicles Spiritualized’s first major tour across seven tracks, but it might as well be one long song. Even in the band’s early days, Jason Pierce and Co. have a dynamic onstage presence, playing off each other like wily veterans. In direct comparison to the later, more readily available live chronicle recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, Fucked Up Inside is rougher around the edges, a bit looser and relaxed with the smaller line-up and shorter running time. With a set drawing largely from the band’s debut Lazer Guided Melodies and peppered with follow-up single “Medication” and Spacemen 3 chestnut “Walking With Jesus,” Fucked Up Inside shows that sometimes less really is more.
[Todd Hutlock]
#30: The Fall - A Part of American Therein, 1981
Strangely enough, “The NWRA” and “Hip Priest” are actually the least compelling parts of this compilation that culls together bits of an American tour, as if Mark E. Smith and company thought they needed to ease the States into their monolithic, barbaric yawp. It’s the album’s second half, starting with an intense “Cash ‘n’ Carry,” that truly conveys what a fearsome group they were. (The Fall at its best isn’t just Smith ranting over any old mess, it’s the World’s Best Rockabilly Can Cover Band.) From the faintly spectral “An Older Lover” to the gleefully noisy “Deer Park,” they demonstrate why they mean more to music than a hundred more famous acts—this isn’t a sound that wants you to like it, it’s out there doing it’s own thing, drinking and falling down and getting back up again.
[Ian Mathers]
#29: Sam Cooke - Live at the Harlem Square Club
You'd think grittier, more outwardly pained voices like James Brown's or Otis Redding's would have insurmountable advantages when it came to sweaty concert work-outs, but for my dime it's Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club that stands as the most vivid snapshot in the history of performance soul. Grit didn't define Cooke's recorded career, so when his supple tenor even suggests it here the effect is revelatory. There may be hurt and confusion at times, but Cooke retains a staggeringly masterful level of control over the proceedings, elevating the show above the suffering and creating a more effectively breathtaking form of drama in its place. Contrived as it may be, I don't know if I've ever heard a more thoroughly spine-tingling moment on any live disc than the build-up to "It's All Right/For Sentimental Reasons," Cooke lulling you first with banal-seeming advice on waking up your lover if you think she's been unfaithful and waiting until she gets the sleep out of her eyes, then effortlessly, stunningly slipping into song. A single heart-stopping "baby" and he's gone.
[Josh Love]
#28: The Jam - Dig the New Breed
When Paul Weller broke up the Jam in 1982, they were at the peak of their popularity. Shortly after that final curtain came down, Dig The New Breed was issued as a thank you to the fans for their support. A compilation of live moments dating as far back as 1977, Dig still plays like a unified document—save a stray horn section the band remained a power trio from first moment to last (on stage at least). While the set list features a handful of hits (“Going Underground,” “Start”), there’s also some key album tracks (a roaring “Set the House Ablaze” and surprise album closer “Private Hell”) and a charged cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Big Bird.” Dig The New Breed has been replaced by the expanded Live Jam, but in this case, less equals more. Seek out a copy for a peerless portrait of one of the era’s best live acts.
[Todd Hutlock]
#27: Japan - Oil on Canvas
A far cry from Japan’s aptly-named Adolescent Sex days, Oil on Canvas was actually a mixed bag of instrumental studio castoffs and assorted live snippets. The setup smacks of contractual obligation—the collection came out in 1983, two years after the eloquent Tin Drum—but the majority of the album serves as a career-spanning live retrospective that actually touches quite nicely on the band’s immovable highlights. Predicting many of the stylistic hallmarks that would take clearer form during David Sylvian’s early solo career, Oil on Canvas nonetheless captures the essence of the group that had impressed upon the New Wave movement such cuts as “Quiet Life” and “Gentlemen Take Polaroids.”
[Mike Orme]
#26: Van Morrison - It’s Too Late to Stop Now
Rock’s quintessential wild-eyed Irish eccentric—sorry, Bono—is clearly in his element on this vital 1973 set. Morrison shifts seamlessly from ethereal folkie to charismatic soulman, often within the space of a single song. The covers, most notably Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” are a treat, but the selling point here is the charge of energy inserted behind catalogue staples like “Into the Mystic” (the source of the album’s title) and “Cyprus Avenue” (the lone Astral Weeks inclusion). The two are possibly the definitive versions of each.
[Josh Timmermann]
#25: Underworld - Everything, Everything
The key question behind almost every live album released by an electronic group is the same: what’s the point? Everything, Everything doesn’t necessarily answer this question—outside of vocalist Karl Hyde’s crazed, half-preacher, half-beat poet rantings, it’s basically the sound of a series of buttons getting pushed. But what Everything, Everything demonstrates is that there doesn’t need to be a point, as long as the artist knows what buttons to push. On this 2000 live release, Underworld craft a perfect musical experience for their audience, with a choice tracklist, brilliant structuring, and versions of “Pearls Girl” and “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” that somehow manage to better their classic originals. But as in any great gig, Underworld saves the high point for the encore, a rapturous 12-minute mind meld of “Rez” and “Cowgirl.” One listen, and you’ll never be satisfied with their uneven full-lengths again.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#24: James Brown - Sex Machine
Sex Machine may not have the historical significance or the zeitgeist factor of either of James Brown's Live at the Apollo albums, and its inclusion of three studio tracks may cause some purists to dismiss it as artifice, but it’s arguably the most spirited, thrilling, energetic, and concise document of James Brown ever recorded. Rarely has Soul Brother #1 ever torn through cuts the way he does here, partially, if not mostly, due to the phenomenal assemblage of musicians, among them: Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, sideman Bobby Byrd, Johnny Griggs, and a young, then-relatively-unknown bassist named Bootsy Collins. The album is pure sweat-soaked exhilaration, peaking with the frenzied rapture of "I Got the Feelin'/Give It Up or Turnit a Loose”—Brown scats, howls, aches, and, at the storm's peak, unleashes a mind-boggling scream that is equal parts carnality and catharsis. Then, without losing a beat, the band brings it back to the beginning, he does the whole thing all over again, and Mr. Dynamite has suddenly become The Godfather of Soul.
[Tal Rosenberg]
#23: John Coltrane & Thelonius Monk - Live at Carnegie Hall
This album has all the trappings of a classic: two legendary figures, great compositions from a fertile period, and a killer backstory (the recording was lost for more than 40 years). Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane shows skill and expression, but the later live recordings on this Carnegie Hall release reveal more insistent takes on the music, with both "Nutty" and "Epistrophy" allowing the artists to get carried away (the latter surpassing its studio version easily). The quartet disregarded comfort with Monk's compositions and pushed themselves—rather than discovering beauty amidst the fluctuating success of ambition, they simply found flawless peaks.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
#22: Otis Redding - Live in Europe
On this 1967 set, Redding sounds like a man on a mission, hungry enough to eat Europe alive if it didn’t pay him his due. Compressing ten songs into a scant 36 minutes and backed by the never-been-hotter Stax house band Booker T and the MGs, Redding tears through Southern Soul classics with the fizzing urgency of a lit fuse, one song tripping into the next. The mix is muddy and heavy on audience noise, but it’s plenty clean enough to catch Redding’s proto-rap breaks on “Can’t Turn You Loose” (“You think I’m gonna stop, I ain’t gonna stop…”) and his affectionate introductions to songs, many of which he wrote. Don’t miss the breathless, hoarse coda to “Satisfaction,” and the moment when, after calling his audience in on “Fa-fa-fa-fa,” Redding steps back in and tells them, “Alright, let me handle it…” and does.
[Andrew Iliff]
#21: Jay-Z - Unplugged
It’s fair to assume that Jay-Z accepted this gig for no better reason than to prove that he can do anything—design a successful clothing line, run one of rap’s foremost record labels, even make Linkin Park sound good. But the real charm here is that hip-hop’s Renaissance man actually sounds like he’s having the time of his life, backed by the Roots for what he calls his “poetry readin’.” If Jay’s only half-successful at on-the-spot self-censorship (some “shits” and what have you inevitably slip in), he does a bravura job of reinventing back-catalogue staples from Reasonable Doubt to The Blueprint. “Ain’t No Nigga” is the seemingly impromptu audience sing-along, and “Song Cry” sounds genuinely soulful, with Hov himself shedding a tear or two. Jay takes a deep breath before launching into the first verse of “Big Pimpin’,” at which point there’s no question who’s running this rap, er, stuff.
[Josh Timmermann]
#20: Jimi Hendrix - Band of Gypsys
Ditching Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and their Artie Ziff afros and aligning himself with bassist Billy Cox and the bruising drums of Buddy Miles, Band of Gypsys showcases Hendrix at his most visceral, as each vertebrae-shattering riff pays tribute to the dead bluesman that wrote the first draft of his musical blueprint. His 12 minute rendition of “Machine Gun,” is often regarded as one of the finest guitar performances of all-time, and it isn’t hard to see why. A mess of snarls, squeals and apocalypse, the song purposefully evokes visions of soldiers exploding in Vietnam. As he sings his deranged and drugged dirge, Hendrix seems to capture the spirit of the times at the precise moment when the idealism of the 60’s met the hung-over glaze of the “Me Decade.” Indeed, one doesn’t need to hear the whirling stomp of the third song “Changes,” to know that the end was near.
[Jeff Weiss]
#19: Can - Can Box Live
So much emphasis is placed on Holger Czukay's revolutionary tape-splicing and Can’s masterful use of the studio that it's easy to forget how spliff-droppingly awesome the band were live. Can Box Live prove that the two main ingredients of the band remain: the monstrousness of their groove and the wobbly strangeness of all their unsettling mutations atop it—but in an even more unstable, rocking, and loose format. Smoldering like the molten core of a volcano, Can live are a beautiful proposition to view from a safe distance—but get too close and your ass could get burned right the fuck off.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#18: Neil Young - Live Rust
Live Rust presented the writer of “Thrasher” and “Welfare Mothers” as an artist who says fuck it to the schism that made his oeuvre the most infuriating and rewarding of the decade. In other words, Young doesn’t square the infantilism of “Sugar Mountain” and the Wages of Fear apocalypse of “Sedan Delivery”—both are engulfed by the twin tidal waves of “Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane.” Concluding with the tasteless elegy “Tonight’s the Night” suggests that Young’s as guileless as his fans when it comes to objectives. He believes in neither America nor myths; he believes in platitudes, entropy, and gargled vocals.
[Alfred Soto]
#17: Johnny Cash - At San Quentin
Cash's onstage banter during At San Quentin is just as valuable as the stripped-down, shit-kicking country tunes. On the essential 2000 reissue, the entire set is presented, painting a picture beyond the scope of the original LP release. Cash's everyman appeal shines through, and by the time he drops the angry, bitter "San Quentin" (twice in a row, no less), he and the prisoners are unified. These men would follow him to hell. In between, things get maudlin ("I Still Miss Someone"), funny (unlikely hit "A Boy Named Sue"), and religious ("He Turned the Water Into Wine"), but Cash never loses that connection. Cash wears the outlaw hat so convincingly because he has been there himself. Never before or since have an artist and audience bonded on record so closely.
[Todd Hutlock]
#16: Bob Dylan - Live 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue
Nobody yells "Judas," but what this amalgamation of Rolling Thunder concerts lacks in historical color it more than makes up for everywhere else. Dylan's notoriously haphazard habits in the studio are liberating on stage, and the troupe he assembles—Roger McGuinn, Rambling Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, about four thousand more—is not only a lucky marvel of chemistry but the best backup Dylan ever enjoyed. The setlist makes all the necessary stops, but as good as the "Mr. Tambourine Man"s and "Blowin' in the Wind"s are, what you're going to come back to is the snarling, loping litany of injustice Dylan and company make of relative obscurity "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." This is no greatest-hits tour. This is a fiery excavation of twenty-two Bob Dylan songs that, with few exceptions, improve on their studio versions. Oh, and Scarlet Rivera.
[Theon Weber]
#15: Joy Division - Les Bains Douches 1979
Joy Division expressed displeasure upon the release of Unknown Pleasures with the way Martin Hannett made them sound. It's only long after the fact that we have the kind of official release that gives you an idea of what they meant. You truly have not heard “Shadowplay” or “New Dawn Fades” or “Atrocity Exhibition” until you’ve heard Les Bains Douches. The range exhibited here is breathtaking, from the grippingly abrasive takes on “Insight” and “Atmosphere” to the shoulda-been-a-hit highs of “Transmission” and “Dead Souls.” Les Bains Douches offers a different kind of thrill than their immensely controlled and compelling studio efforts, and no fan of the band can afford not to check out their red-in-tooth-and-claw live presence here.
[Ian Mathers]
#14: MC5 - Kick Out the Jams
Unique in that it was released without a proper studio album to support it, the (dare I say it) raw power of Kick Out the Jams nevertheless provided a blueprint by which all hard rock afterwards had no choice but to follow. On that Halloween night in 1968, on MC5’s home soil in Detroit Rock City, the rhythm section of Davis and Thompson ploughed through eight breakneck beats, Fred Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith played their guitars into molten metal, and Rob Tyner screamed for a “testimonial.” This was punk that quite awkwardly burst out long before it was supposed to be born. And that’s just what MC5 wanted. “Kick out the jams, MUTHAFUCKAS!”
[Mike Orme]
#13: Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
Considering how definitive Radiohead’s full-lengths are, the way they completely re-invent some of their most well-known and beloved album tracks on I Might Be Wrong is nothing short of stunning. “I Might Be Wrong” becomes the block-rocker it always had the potential to be, “Everything in Its Right Place” is turned from an ominous mantra to a crowd-pleasing barnstormer, and most notably, the backwards weirdness of “Like Spinning Plates” is recast as a torch ballad (causing at least one audience member to scream out “LIKE SPINNING PLATES!!” in the shock of recognition). Add the only officially released version of fan favorite “True Love Waits,” and you’ve got the only truly essential Radiohead release since Kid A.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#12: Portishead - PNYC: Roseland Live
The 90s produced exactly two indications that trip-hop was made by real people and not depraved, inhuman geniuses. The first is Tricky’s comical turn as a space-henchman in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, and the second is PNYC Roseland Live. Considering the emotional roller coaster of Portishead’s two preceding studio albums, PNYC came out of nowhere with an orchestra and singer Beth Gibbons in full-on croon mode. This jazzy set is notable for psyched-out, wall-of-sound re-thinkings of many of Dummy’s best cuts, but it’s perhaps best-remembered for its unexpected hit: the brass-enhanced re-invigoration of Portishead’s “All Mine.”
[Mike Orme]
#11: Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
The central proposition of Stop Making Sense is essentially paradoxical—the world’s most awkward band getting comfortable in their own skin. Stop Making Sense features the Heads at their peak of confidence, using drum machines, set gimmicks (in the definitive ’99 re-issue, the band members are introduced one at a time in each of the first four tracks), background vocalists, and an expanded band. Aside from essentially making Speaking in Tongues totally irrelevant by featuring superior takes of most of the album’s best tracks, SMS features panoramic live takes on “Once in a Lifetime,” “Life During Wartime” and even the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” that come dangerously close to equaling the classic originals. If previous live document The Name of This Band is Talking Heads showed why Talking Heads were one of the best bands of the early 80s, Stop Making Sense showed why they were also one of the biggest.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#010: Miles Davis - Live – Evil
Much has been made of the live / not live controversy surrounding this set (the second disc was recorded in Columbia's Studio B), but the thing of real importance about Live Evil is that it is a document of transition. A fiery, uneven transition that in some ways is the quintessential sound of electric Miles—teetering between the Hendrix-inspired rawbones of Bitches' Brew and the urban in-the-pocket groove of On the Corner. Parts of it smoke, parts simmer, and parts sound like bloody Nurse With Wound, but every minute of it is vintage big-sunglasses Miles, caught between rock 'n' roll and a hard place, leading his Merry Men through the choppy waters of protoplasmic fusion jazz.
[Mallory O’Donnell]
#09: The Clash - Live: From Here to Eternity
It lurches from end to end of the band's career, it's sequenced with a distracted (and distracting) eye towards commercial viability, and it's got nothing you wouldn't expect—but this band could play, and you'll be surprised at how incompletely you understood that. You'll also be surprised at how good a thicker, jumpier "Train in Vain" is; at how much more forgivable—marvelous, even—"Should I Stay Or Should I Go" sounds when actually performed for the thousands towards which it always so nakedly reached; and at how perfect a keystone is the hoarse bleat from which Mick Jones squeezes every drop of wobbly tune. There's no specific context here—it's an hour of the Clash playing a bunch of songs at a bunch of concerts, no doubt with a bunch of guitars. If you like the Clash it's great; if you don't that's your own lookout. No wait—still great.
[Theon Weber]
#08: Led Zeppelin - How the West Was Won
If you’ve ever wondered why almost every teenaged boy at one point or another regards Led Zeppelin as the greatest band to ever live, all you have to do is listen to the first 15 minutes of How the West Was Won, which features the heart-palpitating, spine-tingling crunching thrust of “Immigrant Song,” a raucous seven-and-a-half minute rendition of “Heartbreaker,” and the song that wins every 13-year old’s heart: “Black Dog.” Taken from two otherworldly shows from June 1972 and not released until 2003, the collection encompasses most of the group’s greatest songs from their first four albums. Compare the studio versions to their live renditions, though. As each note thrashes, flails and explodes like colorful fireworks into the wine-dark sky, you’ll find yourself hearing these songs anew—and wondering why they didn’t put this out far earlier.
[Jeff Weiss]
#07: Kraftwerk - Minimum-Maximum
The idea of a Kraftwerk live album almost sounds like a bad joke—the basic concept of Kraftwerk was to deny the humanity behind the music’s makers: why should anyone want to hear or see them in the flesh? But, as it turns out, if robots are better at crafting immaculate, seamless, symphonic LPs than humans, apparently they’re also way ahead of us when it comes to getting the party started. Kraftwerk are much better crowd-pleasers than anyone could expect, whether they’re breezing through suites of new material, kicking out the electro-funk jams, playing an actually palatable nine-minute version of “Autobahn,” or playing foreign language versions of “Pocket Calculator.” Turns out, when the working day is done, robots just want to have fun too.
[Andrew Unterberger]
#06: The Who – Live at Leeds
Quotidian drama and combustible violence marked The Who more than any other 60s rock legend, so it should come as no surprise that they created the era's greatest live document as well. All that inarticulate adolescent yearning and pent-up fury spilled out in savage, lacerating takes on the hits "Substitute" and "My Generation," but the real distillation of the band's brutally self-abnegating ethos comes in their cover of "Summertime Blues," alternately indignant, hilarious, and physically punishing. A 1995 remaster amends several critical cuts, including absolute essentials "Tattoo," "I'm a Boy" and "A Quick One While He's Away," while a subsequent deluxe edition in 2001 would bring to light the remainder of the band's near-complete showcase of Tommy.
[Josh Love]
#05: Nirvana - MTV Unplugged in New York
This album should never have worked. Nirvana’s grunge signature was Cobain’s fierce, furious, frantically distorted guitar, and reframing it to suit MTV’s latest conceit should have torn out the heart of Cobain’s songs. Astonishingly, they sound natural and damn-near perfected. Cobain, Grohl, and Novoselic play with a loose, tangled empathy that stretches and contracts to let the songs breathe. The angst of Cobain’s guitar takes up residence in his voice, which has never sounded more potent. Dave Grohl fidgets and noodles nervously, irrepressibly between songs. The record is inescapably read in the light of Cobain’s suicide, but he sounds at home onstage, with quips about David Geffen and needing more guitars; “I guarantee I’ll screw this one up,” he announces before the definitive version of “Man Who Sold the World; “Yeah, like he only screws one up,” Grohl responds. But the album closes with the tortured dirge of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” reminding us that as comfortable as he seemed, as magnificent as he was, Cobain always knew he’d screw it up.
[Andrew Iliff]
#04: James Brown - Live at the Apollo
More than Sex Machine, more than Love Power Peace, and certainly more than any of his mixed bag of studio efforts, this is the ultimate proof of J.B. as pop’s ultimate performer—and, arguably, its most accomplished star, period. In terms of range, both musical and emotional, this legendary 1963 set runs the gamut. The opener, “I’ll Go Crazy,” remains an instant jolt of let’s-go adrenaline, but pay particular attention to the tremendous restraint with which Brown—known more as a primal force than a tender balladeer—delivers the next number, “Try Me.” The performance reaches a poignant peak with “Lost Someone,” our bandleader sounding palpably, affectingly wounded, before finishing off with “Night Train,” a funky suggestion of things to come.
[Josh Timmermann]
#03: Talking Heads - The Name of This Band is Talking Heads
Years after their influence faded, the curious had to rely on VHS copies of Stop Making Sense to review Talking Heads’ amazing live prowess. Now that their influence is acknowledged as definitive on a half-dozen acts who ooze the weirdness but not the funk, it’s time for owners of this double-disc live compilation, re-released in 2004 after more than 20 years of obscurity, to face facts: (1) The guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison never sounded more “African” than on pre-Remain in Light goodies like “Warning Sign”; (2) “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” is an obscure remix of a cut on side four of Donna Summer’s Bad Girls; (3) Byrne’s grunts, anhedonia, agoraphobia, and embrace of pussy-as-salvation make him a lovable, full-fledged member of the human race; (4) True Stories and Naked were inevitable.
[Alfred Soto]
#02: Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
While a great live album captures a moment, the best live albums exist as testaments to their creators, as definitions of their essence. On At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash, grappling with amphetamine addiction and personal troubles, inscribes his legend into stone. Every single strain of his personality is tied together: weary storyteller, jaded outlaw, hopeless romantic, impassioned activist, rustic folkie. Unified, Cash becomes a super/everyman—someone that common people understand but don't have the slightest clue how to replicate or imitate. And for a man both above and below the law, what venue is more suitable than a prison? From the onset, with those deep, drawling introductory words and the scorching "Folsom Prison Blues," the artist and his audience synergize, knowing that what's taking place is unique, monumental even. At Folsom Prison functions as the crest and the curtain-raiser of Johnny Cash's career, an album of raw passion and unfiltered humanity.
[Tal Rosenberg]
#01: Bob Dylan - Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966, “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
It's rock's most famous concert. The one after Dylan went electric and freaked everyone out. The one where someone called him Judas and his band played beyond belief anyway. The one that got bootlegged, misnamed, and became symbolic of an entire world-changing career. The second half gets most of the attention, but the opening acoustic set, which Dylan plays alone, contains a string of brilliant compositions and confident performances. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" encapsulates more meaning than studied explications ever dig out, and the captivating "Mr. Tambourine Man," which closes the set, makes even that fantasy concede to true sight.
Then everything goes crazy. Dylan and his backing band the Hawks (essentially what would become the Band) play with a vehemence they never possessed again, right through that final scene, where Dylan has the Judas exchange and tells the band to "play fucking loud" and they turn "Like a Rolling Stone" into the taunt of a knowing victor.
Forget the history. Here's why this disc matters: because nothing you play after it does.
[Justin Cober-Lake]
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