By David Free
I’m not sure what the best live album ever made is, but I do know roughly when it came out. At least 30 years ago, before the internet murdered the live album as an art form. These days, YouTube is awash with fan-shot videos of every show an artist plays. The mystique of the live recording and its scarcity value is gone.
In the old days, your favourite artist issued a live album once or twice a decade if you were lucky. Only when bands were in peak form did the tapes roll. Dud numbers were weeded out. Each live album was a carefully curated work of art.
YouTube killed them. But the live album was once a cherished work of art.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald
A highlight of those classic live albums was the chat between songs. Generally, this patter was far less rehearsed than the music. But you heard it over and over, as often as you played the record. The rhythm of those one-off quips and asides stuck in your head as stubbornly as the songs did.
Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night, that unavoidable live album of the 1970s, was frequently on my parents’ stereo when I was little. Just before playing Solitary Man, Neil said something that really used to freak me out. He said: “Tree people out there, God bless you, I’m singing for you too.”
Tree people? I didn’t like the sound of that. I pictured a sinister race of mutant Diamond fans, half-human, half-arborous, like the terrifying tree puppets on H.R. Pufnstuf.
Only when I was old enough to read the liner notes did I get Neil’s reference. He had recorded the album at LA’s Greek Theatre – an outdoor venue ringed by pine trees. In the carefree 1970s, people would climb the trees and eavesdrop on concerts for free.
A mystery finally solved: Freddie Mercury’s stage banter on Queen’s Live Killers.
Sometimes, live albums contained mysteries the liner notes didn’t solve. On Queen’s 1979 album Live Killers, Freddie Mercury introduced the song Death on Two Legs by saying, “This is about a —” Whatever he said next was censored by three long, evenly spaced bleeps.
What on earth had Mercury said? To find out, you had to wait for the advent of the internet. What he said was, “This is about a real motherf---er of a gentleman.”
Speaking of the “mf word”, the Detroit band MC5 unsuccessfully tried to use it on their 1969 album Kick Out the Jams. Introducing the title track, the group’s frontman, Rob Tyner, yelled to the crowd, “Now it’s time to kick out the jams, motherf---ers!”
That’s what he originally said, anyway. The band’s record label didn’t want radio stations boycotting the song, so it removed the expletive and spliced in some audio of Tyner yelling the words “brothers and sisters” instead.
Thanks to the efforts of potty-mouthed pioneers like Tyner and Mercury, swearing on live albums was commonplace by 1981 when Cold Chisel released Swingshift. During a lull in the closing number, Goodbye (Astrid Goodbye), Jimmy Barnes delivered a quintessentially Australian piece of stage patter: “I bet you’ve all hated Billy on saxophone, David on harmonica … f---in’ classic.”
Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones: the evidence suggests they don’t take requests.Credit: AP
Sometimes, on live albums, the repartee was supplied by the audience rather than the performer. On her 1974 record Miles of Aisles, Joni Mitchell paused between songs to tune her guitar, whereupon some dude in the crowd very audibly shouted, “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon and Gomer Pyle combined!”
History doesn’t record who this wag was. But every time you play the album, there he is, delivering his dated zinger yet again, prompting Joni to utter a charmingly spontaneous giggle.
There’s another famous audience contribution on the Rolling Stones’ 1970 live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! Right before Sympathy for the Devil, a female fan can be heard vainly requesting the song Paint It Black. “Paint It Black,” she plaintively cries. “Paint It Black, you devil!”
No matter how many million times she issued this plea, on how many million turntables, the song that came next was always Sympathy for the Devil. Weirdly, the Stones re-used her interjection on another live album two decades later, mixing it into the crowd noise on 1991’s Flashpoint. This time, the song that came next was You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
Like old photographs, the patter on those live records preserves obscure little fragments of history that would otherwise have slipped into oblivion. On the Grateful Dead’s 1981 album Reckoning, while playing Ripple, Jerry Garcia briefly stops singing to utter the cryptic remark, “That’s Otis”.
Why? Because the band’s guitarist, Bob Weir, had a dog named Otis, who had chosen this moment to wander across the stage.
At the end of the Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 Fillmore Concerts, Duane Allman rejects the audience’s calls for a second encore by saying, “It’s six o’clock, y’all!”
Why? Because the theatre had been temporarily evacuated before the show, owing to a bomb threat. The Brothers had gone on late … and had jammed until dawn.
My favourite practitioner of stage chat is the guitarist Leo Kottke. On one of his concert videos, Kottke outlined his philosophy of patter.
“I’ve learned that it’s necessary by this time in the set to speak,” he says, after playing a few numbers, “because there’s a kind of tension and then a hostility that develops if there’s just complete silence. The hole I dig for myself by not saying anything is much deeper than the one I’m digging right now, so I go ahead and begin to speak, wondering at least as much as you what the hell it is I’m gonna say.”
That’s good patter. It isn’t just patter, it’s meta-patter. It’s patter about patter. And Kottke’s analysis is spot on. A live show without inter-song chat is like a steak without salt.
“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition,” quipped John Lennon on a London rooftop after the Beatles’ final performance. Left at the end of the Let It Be album by producer Phil Spector, Lennon’s gag sounded like an epitaph for the Beatles’ career. If he’d known his throwaway line would attain sonic immortality, Lennon surely would have phrased it more grammatically.
What’s your favourite ever live album and why? Let us know in the comments below.
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