THE DEATH OF THE LIVE ALBUM: HOW AND WHY IT KILLED ROCK AND ROLL (PT. I of III)

            
PROLOGUE: 
DIARY OF AN OBSESSIVE COMPLETIST

              In music, my love for a great live album or film is second only to the live experience itself, as the journey I've undertaken in this disgusting, undying obsession with rock and roll generated from my first spins of Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out or the first few times playing live (with the band my brother and I started) on a makeshift stage on the side of the house we grew up in for the entire neighborhood to see, next it was the first time I saw the Rolling Stones and The Who in back to back years, capping off a childhood obsessed with all of the great British bands who started in the 60s, got drugged out and got better (if they survived) in the 70s, wore muscle tees and made bad records in the 80s and somehow stuck around into their elderly years thanks to living in a time when musicians made enough to survive, thrive and then pass it on many times over.
              As I reached my mid 20s and time went on and the golden era of the mid 2000s guitar rock revival died off in a wash of synths and glossy snot production, my appreciation for the bygone 60s-70s era of music has only grown in leaps and bounds. The limitations in which they made such iconic music, onstage and in the studio, is unheard of and can never be matched with today's kitchen-sink production on computers.
             Now it's getting all too easy these days and with this overwhelming convenience, creativity has died. 
             And as I'll point out, there's nothing more complicit in the death of rock and roll than the death of the live experience being captured on physical media. Even the justified wrath of the #MeToo movement couldn't kill rock and roll, it was always about the computerized destruction of something that was always meant to be physical.

IN THE BEGINNING 

               For the duration of the mid to late 60s, rock and roll live albums were merely considered stopgap, slapdash compilations thrown together without the band's knowledge or consent, buffered by fake crowd noise, augmented by studio outtakes and made for the manager to pocket untold amounts of royalties from these artists.
    

              Most of those recordings aren't even real at all, stuff like Andrew Loog Oldham's production of the first "live" Stones record Got Live If You Want It, The Kinks Live At Kelvin Hall, (going against the grain of most historians) James Brown's Live at the Apollo, and the live tracks from Big Brother and The Holding Company's Cheap Thrills (to name a few) all being doctored in the studio (1963-1967)...and you can't quite blame them: Live amplification was shit at the time, PAs' were shittier and the musicians weren't polished yet.
              However, beginning in 1966 when Bob Dylan went electric and the Beatles expanded their minds and sound with the fuzz and effects-drenched Revolver breaking new sonic ground (creating 4 different effects in flanging, auto double tracking, backwards instruments and chorusing aka the Leslie speaker, not to mention the invention of sampling) influencing effects and amplifier engineers like Roger Mayer to invent portable effects to replicate studio sounds onstage to these new prodigious customers. 

               As far as playing live is concerned, first came the fuzzbox, which finally provided guitarists with enough muscle and drive, distorting amplifiers for the first time onstage in late 1965 and early 1966 when guitarist Keith Richards plugged in the Gibson Maestro Fuzztone (the pedal heard on "Satisfaction") into his Vox AC-30 amp, followed by Jeff Beck using the Tonebender with The Yardbirds; then came the wah-wah (first heard on Cream's Disraeli Gears and Jimi Hendrix's mid-1967 single "The Burning of the Midnight Lamp"), next the Univibe (the first modulation pedal imitating the Leslie Speaker and phasing effects), quickly followed in 1967 when Marshall amps supplied Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page with a titanic high wattage sound.
              These are the most influential guitarists of all time, and they came out and exploded what our idea of live rock and roll should sound like and made the guitar the premier instrument in the world.

               Then in 1969, the Rolling Stones put on their first tour in the United States in three years, bringing with them state of the art PA systems, amplifiers and equipment capable of giving the audience a real show to capture their attention. 

                Everyone followed suit: their games were being raised, chops were being worked on and the songwriting improved; 2+ hour shows of improvisation, jams, unreleased material, random covers and attentive, worshiping audiences were in and 30 minutes of fainting, screaming girls were out.

THE BOOTLEGGERS 
STRIKE VICTORY FOR US ALL

                  With this new longing for musical transcendence, the fans had to have more: Beating the money-hungry, cost-obsessive managers and record label-heads to the punch were the bootleggers: first realizing their potential with unearthed gems from Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes (issued as Great White Wonder) then every band from Led Zeppelin, CSNY, The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Jefferson Airplane etc were being bootlegged by rabid fans wanting and needing more to the point they were willing to create it.

                  With this new DIY thinking came the advent of the live album as something more exhibitionist than merely a stopgap fake-crowd-covered commodity: they now had to compete directly with the fans and do their own "bootlegs", not only to help cure the nasty feeling artists usually had listening to the low quality audio presentation of bootlegs, but because now they all realized there was money to be made.
                 The first influential live record wasn't even completely live: Cream's celebrated Wheels of Fire was a double album with one side recorded in the studio (stuff like "White Room", "Politician") and one side recorded in San Francisco and Oakland during a personally-troublesome (though musically orgasmic) U.S tour. Blistering workouts like Clapton's Robert Johnson interpretation on "Crossroads" became one of the most widely covered guitar riffs and solos of all time: not only could American audiences hear the legendary live brutality of Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, they could take it all in whenever they wanted and considering Cream were such a short-lived band, the rarity in having actually seen them (in their 3 years of operation) made Wheels of Fire and the later issued Live Cream volumes I & II quickly became the favorite record of many a top notch guitarist, Eddie Van Halen and Duane Allman to name but a few.
                Influenced by the efforts of Cream installing their live legacy on to record that year and an obsession with the earlier mentioned James Brown masterpiece Live At the Apollo, a bomb dropped from little Ann Arbor, Michigan in early 1969 and it exploded upon the world of rock and roll...it took five more years for people to get what these five guys from the Motor City were doing, but it helped create a complete genre and way of life when a Malcolm McLaren bastardized version of their ethos became fashion later in the 70s after the MC5 dropped their seminal Kick Out The Jams.
                Not only is this record the debut album by the band, it was recorded entirely at the best studio in town...no, not Mr. Gordy's place, but Detroit's legendary Grande Ballroom on Hallow's Eve and Halloween night 1968, in the aftermath of the MC5 becoming the subjects of FBI surveillance in the wake of their performance during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago...and we all know what a bloodbath that turned into, as Hunter S. Thompson once dubbed DNC'68 the moment where "the American dream died".
              Add to that lead singer Rob Tyner's opening declaration to "kick out the jams, motherfuckers!", a lysergic Sun-Ra cover, white hot electric guitars, pulsating drums and a set of blitzkrieg originals, you knew the sound of live maximum rock and roll was coming out of turntables for the first time ever. 
                 Kick Out The Jams wasn't the first live record, but it may have been the first one to kick our ass and announce just what type of revolution a live album could offer.
                  And while the Motor City was burning from the live insanity of the MC5 and The Stooges, those record store bootlegs from that fall 1969 Stones tour (Live'r Than You'll Ever Be) influenced Mick and Keith to record their own shows in Baltimore and at Madison Square Garden which they released (with only minimal overdubs) in 1970 as the fantastic, iconic live album to beat all live albums, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out.

                 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young followed suit with their own bootleg-beating live album, this time putting out one of, if not the first ever double live album in Four Way Street, a template-setting collection that boasted previously unheard songs from the "American Beatles" (Crosby's threesome advocacy in "Triad" and the best song on the album "The Lee Shore")  and early versions of solo tracks from each member (Nash's "Chicago" and Stills' "Love The One You're With") making it a De facto 3rd CSN(Y) record itself.
                 Although the process in which it was conceived led directly to the initial group's destruction. 
                 Upon listening to hours and hours of live reels from Deja Vu tour dates in Chicago, the LA Forum and Fillmore East, Stephen Stills, ever the coked out, rage-aholic perfectionist ordered overdubs from all four members and even the backing musicians like drummer Dallas Taylor to all fix Stills' perceived errors.
                 Luckily, the other three vetoed this idea harshly, even criticizing Stephen Stills (the self-proclaimed "best guitarist outside of Jimi Hendrix himself") for attempting to falsify and bolster his live singing and guitar playing in the studio. Stephen, ever the grudge-holder, never forgave them and it took another 2 years for the band to take the stage together again.

                 In hindsight,  Four Way Street was a master-stroke victory and was the most successful live LP in terms of sales until 1976, yet still live albums were considered back-burner projects for record labels to fill their wallets with at Xmas time, nothing more than a book-balancing piece of commerce and a slight increase on their corporate quarters.

                  But even in the bizarre climate of early 70s mutating rock and roll trying to break free from the pretentious "singer-songwriter" movement (going off into radical directions like glam, prog, funk and gutter-rock dirtier and more raw than the Stones could ever dream of being), the mythology of the live experience captured as lightning in a bottle became embedded in us. 
                 And during this rock and roll metamorphosis, great live albums were still being produced in the early 70s, some of the best ever coming out at this juncture: Elton John's 17-11-70 proved a trio without a guitar could run the show to heaven's golden gates of musical nirvana, Humble Pie's Rockin The Fillmore, Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies, The Band's Rock of Ages setting the stage beautifully for the template of future live albums; but it was odd offerings like The Grateful Dead's trilogy of Live Dead, 1971's Skull and Roses and the following year's Europe '72 LPs, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma and the Allman Brothers eternal At Fillmore East that turned the live record from a re-recording of studio hits into high art.

                Influenced by these perversions of the traditional live record format, Neil Young's ultimate groundbreaking masterpiece Time Fades Away showed artists a new way to package and deliver unreleased songs (the second "non-compilation" live album after the MC5's debut). 

THE LIVE LP BECOMES HIGH ART 
OR STONED FABLE

               Time Fades Away had a low-key, yet evident impact on artists in the decade and beyond: Jackson Browne copied Neil's decision to record a new batch of art-imitating-life songs on a burning stage with a white-hot band as the 70s touring fable Running On Empty, all recorded live at Merriweather Post Pavilion (among other venues) on his 1977 tour before being doctored and juiced up by studio overdubs and gloss; R.E.M recorded their live/studio hybrid of all new songs played on the Monster tour as the 1996 masterpiece New Adventures In HI-FI, claiming Neil Young's 1973 record as an obvious touchstone.
               ZZTop executed the purest form of the strange half & half idea when it came time to put together Fandango in late 1974: the idea was to make half of it studio and half of it live...99% of it unheard-of tunes delivered hot, blue and righteous at one of the great unknown venues of the late 60s / early 70s (New Orleans' The Warehouse).
                It only turned the band into a multi-Platinum, stadium-filling world class rock and roll act. Shit, the Stones knew this in 1973 when they used them as openers on the Exile On Main Street tour's Pacific leg.
                Another format-crushing live disc was Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Animal, stretching 4 minute garage bruisers by the Velvet Underground into phaser-drenched symphonies for guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter to shred in circles, rewriting the guitar-histrionics playbook in the process.

                During these lost years, hippies from the Monterey and Woodstock eras either died in Vietnam, returned home from the jungle in an America that spat on and forgot them, or they dodged the war and became domesticated suburbanites, with their younger brothers, sisters, even sons and daughters beginning to unearth their vast record collections. 

               And in these weird years leading up to 1975, the live album grew as a household / neighborhood institution: whether to cure the blues of a missed opportunity to see your favorite band or to merely relive the glory you were lucky to have witnessed, the live album created a multi-faceted vehicle for partying it up.
               Friends, lovers, co-workers, family members, shit...even enemies would all gather at homes, in cars and listen: food would be made, children were conceived, divorces were finalized, joints were rolled, acid was dropped, booze was consumed, coke was snorted, heroin shot up all to the rotating sounds of live rock and roll.

               Parties in the 1970s weren't complete without a live album in the background to supply that auditorium hall echo and vibe to proceedings that studio recordings just couldn't provide. 

               And it was during these years (1970-1974) when record label executives began to take notice of the new phenomenon, but it took a group of made-up Jewish doods and one Italian from New York City to almost lose everything for the live LP to become something bigger altogether.

             When Kiss put out their career-defining Alive!: a two disc set showing off their Dressed to Kill tour in all its rock and roll all nite glory, then the industry really changed.

              Kiss were a band that was nearly broke, aimlessly theatrical (one publicity stunt after another), rudderless in the songwriting department and stuck with three horrid sounding studio releases that failed to capture the theatrics, sound and (most importantly) the energy of their extremely popular live show, a live show that was so powerful it kept this ragtag group fed; meanwhile they couldn't even pay people to buy a copy of second record Hotter Than Hell.

              So, knowing that a live record was easier to cut, cheaper to deliver to an extremely hesitant and nearly bankrupt record label itself (Casablanca Records), and hopefully sounding better than their lukewarm studio records, Gene, Paul, Peter and Ace (with the help of manager Bill Aucoin and veteran engineer Eddie Kramer) persuaded Casablanca to issue Alive! as a double album (cost-obsessive label execs were aghast): this was Kiss's last chance as a band...if Alive! failed, so did they. 

             Instead, it was a steady success and by 1976, Kiss were one of the biggest bands in America because of it and by 1977, they were arguably one of the biggest bands in the world.

             This was a huge underdog success story that inspired every hardworking band who couldn't find their sound in the studio to record their shows and issue them without fear, regardless of how many albums they'd released. 

              Rush were one of these bands, the Canadian trio putting out All The World's A Stage

after their own studio opus 2112 failed to gather momentum.        
             Just like Kiss, Humble Pie and the Grateful Dead, Rush were hoping to capitalize on the energy of their live show with a live disc serving not only as a compilation, but a statement of intent. Without these live records, we may never have seen The Grateful Dead become as big as they were, we may never even know who Steve Mariott is in the United States, Kiss would be the butt of even more jokes in 2019...All The World's A Stage, Kiss's Alive and Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Animal and Van Morrison's It's Too Late To Stop Now did what great live documents do: collected great songs that fans had overlooked from previous records and dedicated an entire side to single, 12+ minute epics, like Rush's show-stopping and legendary "2112 Overture", Kiss's "100,000 Years" or Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane" or ...Too Late To Stop Now's 9 minute epic rendition of Van's "CaraVAAAAN".

              Rush tried to do exactly what touring mates Kiss did and just like their "Kiss Army", newbie Rush fans (mostly disenfranchised Mid-Western American male youth who were deifying the rock and roll magic in front of their eyes) gathered at the feet of All The World's A Stage, turning one of the most fringe progressive bands into a world-wide success that is beyond Platinum sales, beyond Grammy-winning elitism, beyond cult status and its parameters...and the fans brought the band to this level of success in only a few years (1978-1981): 

            But make no mistake, it all began here with this energetic live LP. 
            It showed off the band's already extensive (though underwhelming) studio catalog with extra impulse and drive which demonstrated how ludicrous the musical relationship between Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neal Peart was and is, provided the outrageous jams in "By-Tor and The Snowdog", "Working Man" and the heavy, epic totality of "Anthem" and "Bastille Day" and helped create and hone their expansive cult following, providing a template for their late 1982 sequel from their Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves tours Exit..Stage Left; and while the album finally included a kick-ass version of "La Villa Strangiato" and "A Passage To Bangkok", it pales in comparison to the rugged innocence of their first live record.

THE TITANS OF MID 70'S ROCK 
GO FOR GLORY

               This was the era of the greatest live rock and roll performances of our time, before backing tracks, live mixers, state of the art P.A systems and at a time when touring operations were conducted from a suitcase and a telephone....

             ...to do what these musicians did was to love their instruments, to love their art and to be able to control all aspects of the show (just look at the stunning production of Genesis's Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour). 
            And with this improved commitment to their craft and a whole new ball game when it came to effects, amplifiers and professional lighting, bands felt it not only necessary in the post-Alive era to capture their sound on record, but their image too, if they could.

                Since the first 3-4 hour mammoth shows that Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead and the 1974 CSNY reunion tour were putting on, long shows became expected. 
               This phenomena of bands being willing to give the fan every drop they had night after night first began appearing through proven documented audio and video around 1971 when Fillmore East promoter Bill Graham allowed The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers amongst many others to play extremely lengthy sets pushing the 3-4 hour limit.
                Pretty soon, Led Zeppelin & The Grateful Dead just felt like playing extremely long shows anyway, eschewing an opening act for their future tours which helped them to avoid any conflicts with curfews of any kind. So, by late 1973, with the full knowledge that most of these artists had been doing this long enough to have a weighty discography, fans not only expected but demanded longer shows and

deeper cuts, album tracks that the radio wouldn't touch but showed the songwriters as they were: honest poets full of virtues and flaws like the rest of us.

               From 1974 to 1978, a pharmaceutical cocaine-fueled arms race was undertaken to see who could play the biggest, longest, most financially demanding (and sometimes, viable) show out there.

And when it appeared that the biggest sticklers of long shows (and giving the common fan anything during the 70s really) The Rolling Stones themselves approved this new format by playing 2 and a half hours on their 1975 Tour of the Americas, it became sacrilege to do anything less than 120 minutes. 

            
               Hell even Elton John was playing 3 hour shows at this juncture: 1974-1979 saw ambition, egotism, cocaine, heroin, the pills from tour-doctor Feelgoods, rampant alcoholism, intense competitive thrust and large amounts of weed drive these bands to the maximum (and minimum) of their abilities, and with the ego-tripping, cock-strutting showmanship came the intense desire to hear and see themselves from the bands and artists who could afford it. 

             Bands now realized, way before home video, that the best way to give their fans a peek behind the closed doors was a live album and these live packages

began to feature full booklets, stunning on-stage photos for fans to ogle and direct messages hidden in the liner notes, usually in codified, drugged out rants full of inside jokes and puns (written by the musicians themselves) that have become as legendary as the music itself...making the typical fan feel as if they're part of the crew.

             This type of on-record inclusion was a first for fans in the rock and roll era and played a big role in creating the urban legends and myth-making of these artists.             
           Across the world (wherever music wasn't banned or censored),

teenagers, their older siblings (and their parents) took part in stoned discussions for hours about a single paragraph in the liner notes of The Faces' 1973 live album Coast to Coast (everyone remembers it as the "one without Ronnie Lane"), laughing at the possibly fake dinosaur-sized packages in the pants of the strutting rock stars in the photos (the ladies dreaming of taking a peek inside those pants for male-ego-deflating clarification purposes and the boys clamoring for a Les Paul just like Ace Frehley's).

               It all became part of the myth.

              And by summer 1976, the biggest (definitely not the best) live albums of the era came out to put the auditory vibe of the live album towards perfected glory, making the argument that warts and all wasn't always as good as the "perfect, overdubbed concert hall".

For pt. II:
https://uninterruptedrockandrollodyssey.blogspot.com/2019/07/ii-death-of-live-album-how-why-it.html