What are the inessential live albums?

Stuckfast

I have quite often been stung by buying live albums by artists that I like, only to find that they feature lacklustre performances,  shockingly bad recordings, endless meandering jams instead of songs and so on.

But a special commendation has to go to The 13th Floor Elevators Live, which isn't even a live album at all. It's an album of studio out-takes and B-sides with the same piece of applause overdubbed between each song.

blobb

MAN - To Live For To Die

You can barely hear the music at all. 

EricTheWeary

There is a Creedence album which I owned a copy of, I forget the exact name but just Live I think, which turned out to be the studio recordings plus overdubs of crowd noise to cash in on a trend for live albums. Musically it’s fine but it is hugely pointless. 

I mentioned Rory Gallagher’s Meeting with the G Man ( I think that’s right) on the other Discussion which ( as best as I remember it) is a poor quality posthumous release with tapes of Rory on a bad day and best avoided. 

sweepy

Kiss Alive 1 and Alive 2

StageStruck

EricTheWeary said:

I mentioned Rory Gallagher’s Meeting with the G Man ( I think that’s right) on the other Discussion which ( as best as I remember it) is a poor quality posthumous release with tapes of Rory on a bad day and best avoided. 

There was a box set of more complete performances around the same time, but as far as I remember, the G-Man set was a bit of a rag-bag of stand alone songs from incomplete recorded shows hence the variable quality.
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A few more poor quality Live releases,

Jimi Hendrix - Live At The Scene Club, been released many times, but it's  a drunken after-hours jam with a few guests (Jim Morrison, Johnny Winter). Badly recorded, poor performances all round. It's a poor quality bootleg but somehow it managed to get a load of semi-official CD releases.

Deep Purple - Last Concert In Japan, Tommy Bolin took a bad hit of Heroin a few days before this show was taped. His parts were pretty much mixed out of the original LP release.

Beatles - Live At The Star Club, An interesting curio, but easy to see why all of the Beatles tried to block its release. Recorded on an early 60s domestic reel to reel tape machine with a single mic, the first rock bootleg?

The Who - Who's Last?, not especially bad, but certainly lacking the impact of their 70s peak without Keith on drums. The band were close to going on a 6 year hiatus at this point.

Honourable mention for a Free bootleg recording I have from 1972. Paul Kossoff was in the full effects of his heroin habit by this time and can barely string two notes together at any point of the show. Sad really, and a cautionary example of the pitfalls of drug addiction

ICBM

Leonard Cohen - Live Songs.

I’m quite a fan of his, but I gave this one away. It’s just not good, until you get to the interminable Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)... it is, and I did. Maybe it would have come over better in person.

I couldn’t stand Derek & The Dominos Live At The Fillmore either... endless tedious self-indulgent jamming masquerading as a performance.

Almost forgot... Evanescence - Anywhere But Home. I think Amy Lee’s monitor was broken for the entire gig. That’s the usual excuse, isn’t it? Amazingly, it was released as an official live album.

Jalapeno

Poppa Chubby - One Night Live In New York City

Really bad mains hum throughout - dreadful experience. Really shoddy, should never have been released

LightB4sound

As much as it pains me to say snoring bad about my favourite band...A real live one and a real dead one are not Maiden's finest outings.

thecolourbox

Interestingly I put a box up in the loft the other day containing a load of CDs and DVDs, in amongst them were the following 

Razorlight live at Brixton academy
Babyshambles - oh what a lovely tour
Jet (of "are you gonna be my girl" fame) - family style live DVD

I did think why on earth did these seem like a good idea but I figured no charity shop would want them and as such would just go to landfill

Philly_Q

Hard to think of specific cases, but I'm not really a fan of live albums in general.

Most of the ones I do really like, I either bought those live albums before I was familiar with the studio versions, or they're the best representation of a band which was often relatively lacklustre in the studio (e.g. Humble Pie's Performance, UFO's Strangers in the Night or Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous - studio-tweaked or not).

pintspiller

Even though the remaster had extra tracks when it was issued in the 90s, I preferred the original issue of Live at Leeds version of My Generation.

monquixote

sweepy said:

Kiss Alive 1 and Alive 2

I think they are good albums but fall down on the being live part.

monquixote

I think considering they are considered by some to be the greatest live act ever Song Remains the Same and especially Celebration Day are quite ropey.

How the West Was Won and BBC Sessions are both great though.

boogieman

monquixote said :
Song Remains the Same is quite ropey. 

FTFY 

Whitecat

Spotify and Amazon Music are absolutely chock full of major artist radio bootlegs at the moment, and it's f*cking annoying. The quality is sh*t, the performances are often terrible, and they gum up the artist pages when organised by "release date" because it's a relatively new phenomenon. I'm not sure who figured out they could post all those "albums" and make money, but it can't be the artists, and I'm surprised nobody is doing anything about it.

So yeah, to answer your question, those ones.

fretmeister

I've got a live compilation album from either Ozzfest or Download.

Every band on it sounds awful. Would have been better if they had recorded it with an iphone in the audience behind a fat guy wearing a rustling poncho in the rain.

fretmeister

LightB4sound said:

As much as it pains me to say snoring bad about my favourite band...A real live one and a real dead one are not Maiden's finest outings.

Agreed. Bloody awful.

joneve

fretmeister said:

LightB4sound said:

As much as it pains me to say snoring bad about my favourite band...A real live one and a real dead one are not Maiden's finest outings.

Agreed. Bloody awful.

Yep. Terrible. 

Live After Death is great...but Bruce's tired vocals from so much touring of Powerslave lets it down a bit. 

Philly_Q

Whitecat said:

Spotify and Amazon Music are absolutely chock full of major artist radio bootlegs at the moment, and it's f*cking annoying. The quality is sh*t, the performances are often terrible, and they gum up the artist pages when organised by "release date" because it's a relatively new phenomenon. I'm not sure who figured out they could post all those "albums" and make money, but it can't be the artists, and I'm surprised nobody is doing anything about it.

Yeah, it is quite tedious.  You spend ages scrolling down - confused further by the fact that the remasters and ultimate editions are also organised by release date (as opposed to original album release date) - and then when you finally get to the bottom you find the first four albums aren't there at all because they were on a different label.

freakboy1610

The Beatles in Italy.  It looks like a live album and that's why I bought it when I was a kid but it's just a compilation of studio tracks. Apparently released in Italy to coincide with touring and it would have no doubt disappeared had it not been mentioned by John Lennon who incorrectly referred to it as a live album. 

Redlester

Morrissey Live at Earls Court. I left that Gigi early. Boring. And it came only a year after his ‘comeback’ gig at the Albert Hall which is one of the best gigs I was ever at. 

@ICBM Derek at the Fillmore I think is great for the first two tracks. I don’t think Clappo has ever soloed better than on Got to Get Better and the first bit of Why does Love. But I rarely listen to it past those two tracks.