Top 10 Live Rock Albums of All Time!
Admittedly, this is a seemingly impossible task. But to hell with it, we’re doing it anyway. This list compiles some of the greatest live performances ever – Rock n’ Roll renegades with no laurels to rest on and even less of a desire to stop. Some are still stunning audiences into a state of mesmerised euphoria – sending thousands of dreaming minds into a tail spin year after year. New fans formed each time they take to the stage, the next batch of loyal disciples converted with every symbol crash and telecaster screech. They won’t stop until they drop. Some have done just that. Poured their soul onto the stage until there is literally no more to give. Life’ll kill ya, ey? So here goes – The French Inhaler’s Top 10 Live Rock n’ Roll Albums of all Time in the Whole of the Universe Ever.
Before we start. One Rock n’ Rule the list must abide by!
No Anthologies! Each of these live offerings has to have been (majority) recorded on either the same night or across the same tour! That immediately disqualifies Tom Petty: The Live Anthology (2009) and Bruce Springsteen Live 1975 – 1985 (1986). Good news really, as it frees up two spaces in the Top 10 list, as this pair of albums perform a musical karma sutra on your eardrums the like of which you’ll never hear anywhere else.
And quickly – some special, special mentions:
Nirvana – MTV Unplugged (1993)
Pink Floyd – Pulse (1995)
Elvis – NBC TV Special LIVE (1968)
The Who – Live at Leeds (1970)
Jimi Hendrix – Live at Monterey (1967)
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Live at the Hammersmith Odeon (1975)
Without further ado, let us begin the countdown:
10. Live at Madison Square Garden – Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
Recorded: 2000 Released: 2001
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Bruce Springsteen is almost too good – every reincarnation that the E-Street mob go through seems to better the last. How this hardened pantheon of musical gods can play for four hours without so much as a solitary stoppage is beyond belief. Four hours!? Four hours and Bruce’s voice doesn’t falter. Four hours and Lil Stevie’s licks are as on point as they were in minute one. Max Weinberg literally does not stop pounding the drums. Don’t take that word lightly – he literally does not stop. They are magicians who come together as a merry band of mates to put on the greatest show in heaven, on earth or in hell. At one point the guitarist quartet was Springsteen, Lil Steve Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren and Tom fucking Morello. I mean, come on! This could easily have been a Top 10 Bruce Live concerts list, but let’s just try and reign ourselves in for the sake of variety!
It was a toss-up between Live at The Hammersmith Odeon (1975) and this chosen chalice. The former was Bruce’s first foray into the European touring scene and he duly made an expected impact. It’s hard to comprehend the range of songs that the E Street Band had at their disposal even then, 41 years ago, before Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Born In The USA and Wrecking Ball. He kick starts that concert with the astounding Thunder Road, a song repeated in all its nostalgic glory on the bands subsequent returns to London.
It’s the even greater breadth of work that led to Madison Square Garden 2001 taking the prize. Lest we forget the occasion. It was the E Street posse’s first concert tour together in over 11 years. The camera’s rolled as Springsteen rocked the occasion, smashing the millennial doors wide open and declaring themselves back with a bang. They sounded like they had never been away. Atlantic City, Badlands, Murder Incorporated and Born In The USA, to name but a brazen few, were revamped and reintroduced that night in New York. It is The River that takes the crowning glory – a scintillating, heart wrenching 11-minute version, led by a heavenly harp and defined by Clarence ‘The Big Man’ Clemons’ cataclysmic saxophone.
What followed that concert was a whole host of new hits. Albums such as The Rising and Wrecking Ball further solidified the E Street Band as the greatest at what they do, when they do it, ever. Clarence is no longer with them, but they’ll keep on rocking until The River runs dry, and until you see them live you will never understand why.
9. Stand in the Fire – Warren Zevon
Recorded & Released: 1980
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A game changer at the time of its release, Warren Zevon’s first official live offering capitalised on the commercial success of Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School (1980), Excitable Boy (1978) and Warren Zevon (1976). It is a no holds barred, rambunctious rip tide of a recording which, over five nights of a Roxy residency, gave the world a glimpse in to the mind of LA’s finest songwriter and self-proclaimed desperado.
Zevon’s last tour, following the release of Excitable Boy, was a distant memory shrouded in a vodka induced haze. The audiences may have remembered it. Warren didn’t. He was subservient to the bottle, and his attempts to take to the stage consequently proved laughable at times. Stand in the Fire was a different affair, but not without its own “lunatic quality”, as Zevon himself put it. Booze was off the menu, at least for now, replaced by painkillers and steroids (a partnership prescribed by a physician recommended by Glen Frey). The result was the antithesis of calm and collected, with Jackson Browne describing it as the “karate on speed period”. Hardly ideal for the heart, but it made for a hell of a show.
The album is a run through of Zevon’s greatest hits from the previous decade, seasoned with a sprinkling of new songs, the standout being a cover of Bo Diddley’s self-titled piece de resistance. It boasts the best version of Jeannie Needs a Shooter you will ever hear, which is unbelievably crisp and clean given the backdrop. Zevon tinkers with each of his hits to capture the local focal points of present day popular culture. When a little old lady gets mutilated late last night, this time it’s “Brian De Palma again”, whilst the werewolf will rip your lungs out, “looking for James Taylor!”.
Stand In The Fire captures the gun slinging, bombastic first ten years of Warren Zevon’s solo career in spectacular fashion. These first ten are likely his best, though some would feverishly argue the last ten just as emotive, perhaps with more sustained flashes of genius. Zevon would go on to release many a live offering, pre and posthumously. Learning to Flinch (1993), an unplugged offering with an 11-minute version of Roland The Headless Thomson Gunner, is an instant classic. Nothing, however, can compare to this exquisite masterpiece.
8. At Folsom Prison – Johnny Cash
Recorded & Released: 1968
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“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” breathes Old Golden Throat down a prison microphone, to rapturous applause from the incarcerated crowd. They can’t get out, and that day they wouldn’t want to. Not since Cool Hand Luke ate 50 eggs had there been such simmering anticipation in the slammer!
Hard to believe this was Cash’s 27th album, finally stepping into the Folsom foray, a smooth 13 years after its accompanying hit track was released. He had always been somewhat obsessed with prison life, a regular addition to his writer’s rhetoric and the main stay of some of his more famous tracks (San Quentin, Folsom Prison Blues, Starkville City Jail).
Cash wasn’t the only one strumming a banjo behind bars that day. Carl Perkins opened proceedings with a rebel rousing Blue Suede Shoes, followed by the Statler Brothers who performed a number of country music’s finest records. Then up jumps Johnny with that famous line to rapturous applause, before diving head first into it – “I hear the train a’coming, it’s rolling round the bend”. The hooting and hollering starts here and doesn’t finish until release day. The incarceration theme continues with a frankly perfect version of Dark as The Dungeon, bettered still by the applause enticed by Cash exclaiming the inmates are being recorded.
Cash didn’t go in to appease. He went in to rouse. Rebel. He possesses an intense, perhaps devilish rancour that he isn’t in there with them. The largest riotous howl (apart from upon the introduction of June Carter) is saved for Cocaine Blues – “Early one morning while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down”. It’s unusually emotive – you laugh and sing along when Johnny plays, but there’s something sinister about a room full of bandits, thieves, addicts and berserkers cheering at the idea of a bloke shooting his wife stone cold dead.
Johnny holds each and every one of those prisoner’s hearts and heads in his hands. With each song we walk further down the track – closer to the end of the mile. The boisterous joy of before begins to evaporate as the realisation of what’s about to happen hits. You can almost taste the tears of tormented men as Cash reaches the climatic final four tracks. Give My Love To Rose, a lullaby about letting your love go as you can’t provide for her, surely resonates with each and every one in the room – even the guards! I Got Stripes revisits the prison theme, before Green Green Grass of Home and Greystone Chapel leave the inmates, and every listener since, longing for home.
7. Time Fades Away – Neil Young
Recorded & Released: 1973
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It had been a turbulent time for Good Ol’ Neil. Unfathomable success with Harvest was followed by a period of fan disillusionment, substance abuse, and ultimately, death. Time Fades Away wasn’t going to be the last time Young strayed from the norm, giving a hefty Canadian middle finger to the middle-of-the-roaders and folk rock aficionados that had thus far heralded and worshiped him. This was his first ‘Dylan Goes Electric’ moment. Not wanting to be outdone, Young plugged in and powered up, hired a motley crew of meticulous session musicians and hit the road.
Neil, as is clear from the variety splattered through his body of work, does exactly what he wants, when he wants. Not just musically. Personally too – strained relationships with band mates, wives, fans, friends, all too common a theme. Time Fades Away wasn’t a kamikaze dive into hard rock by any means. Young was to become the Godfather of Grunge, but not yet. Jack Nitzsche’s paralysing piano made sure that the Neil from Harvest hadn’t gone anywhere. He was still there, just shrouded in a significantly more weathered coat of emotion. 1972 saw the death of Danny Whitten, long time friend and Crazy Horse bandmate. God like success, significant loss and drunken sleeve wearing of the heart led to the creation of a live masterpiece.
The album opens with its namesake, an instant classic which stands alongside some of Young’s best. Journey Through The Past is a juxtaposition in name and style. It combines the transcendent, wondrous Neil Young wail with a piano piece so often utilised by his fellow Canyonistas. At the start of Yonder Stands the Sinner Neil proclaims, “This will be kind of experimental”. At the time perhaps revolutionary for an artist such as he. Now however, it all makes sense – the ingredients put to work time and time again throughout his repertoire since. L.A. is another instant classic, followed by the heart breaking Love In Mind. Don’t Be Denied echoes Young’s good natured sparring partners Lynyrd Skynyrd, presenting a similar message to their hit of the same year, Simple Man, as well as CCR’s 1972 hit Someday Never Comes – It’s testament to the manoeuvrability of subject across different strands of the genre.
Time Fades Away continues in the same vain throughout. A mash up of newly discovered rock intensity and fiercely emotive folk. Neil Young would continue to make albums of varying quality, some dreadful even by his own admission. In his view, this may have been one of them. Wrought with wrenching heartbreak, the tour was overshadowed by the loss of Whitten and Young’s reliance on the bottle, so much so that Messrs Crosby and Nash had to step in and help with vocals towards the end. It must be this, not the quality of the output, that causes him to look back less than fondly. Time may fade away, but the enduring brilliance of this live offering never will.
6. Get yer Ya Ya’s Out – Rolling Stones
Recorded: 1969 Released: 1970
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“The biggest rock & roll band in the world, The Rolling Stones!” pelts the compere over the tannoy system at Madison Square Gardens. He was right – in 1970 The Rolling Stones were categorically the biggest rock n’ roll band on the God forsaken planet. Just as they are in 2017 and will be in 2027, that is as long as Keef’s deal with the devil don’t run out before then.
There was no worry of that in 1969 mind. The Stones were on top of the world and the only way was up, up, up. The sacking and soon following death of founder (and nutter) Brian Jones proved somewhat horribly to be a bittersweet series of events. Mick Taylor joined the band as they hit the road for their first live tour in two years. They hauled in some heavyweights as support too, in the form of Ike & Tina Turner and B.B. King. It was destined to be a jaunt of career defining proportions.
They jump start the garden with Jumping Jack Flash – Jagger on point and band extraordinarily crisp. Jagger oozes cool – at home on the stage, being adorned and fawned after. “I’ve broken a button on me trousers” he proclaims in his quasi estuary-come-gentry accent. “You don’t want my trousers to fall down do you?” he asks to rapturous applause. Of course they do. He knows it, he loves it, and we love him for it. Carol, Stray Cat Blues and Love in Vain are beyond perfect in their delivery, Robert Johnson’s Love in Vain particularly powerful in its ability to transport you back 45 years to the Garden.
45 years ago. Jesus. If the Stones had stopped then they’d still perhaps have the most enviable catalogue of records in music history. Consider this. Love in Vain wasn’t just perfect. It was new. As was Midnight Rambler, off of the soon to be released Let It Bleed. Imagine hearing Midnight Rambler for the first time at MSG. Imagine it and remind yourself that 2017 is awful. Inconceivable now to think Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want from the same album didn’t make it on to the touring playlist. Then again, who would’ve known they were going to be huge hits? Everyone, really.
An understated, casual but instantly recognisable intro to Honky Tonk Women is a welcome overture to a powerful, lyrically moderated live offering. Under My Thumb is a killer, underestimated and overwhelming, whilst Satisfaction is unbeatable in its case for best ever close to a live album. There’s a reason Lester Bangs called GYYYO ‘without a doubt the best rock concert put on record’. It is Rolling Stones personified, from hard rocking riffs, to oozing blues and playful prancing. The inclusion of B.B. King and Tina Turner’s pre show is an added bonus (including the superfluous cover of CCR’s Proud Mary), and the cover is Charlie Watts clowning around with a guitar wearing donkey. That’s pretty fucking special.
Next week – The Top 5 Live Rock n’ Roll Albums Ever!
The French Inhaler.
