[Green Day Live Albums
Melvin Amey
Green Valley was live streamed to fans and as such sounds radically different to most live albums. There are no hoards of screaming fans in the background and the audio quality is substantially clearer than if this had been recorded on stage. There are flaws of course, occasionally a note will be flubber or a beat occasionally missed but this brings with it a special kind of charm.
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It was 1998 and Rick Smith had a vision. With his years of experience in the music industry, he realized that many of the distinguished legends of country music were without, or in between, record label deals. At the same time Rick could feel the extraordinary energy of fans responding to these artists during their live shows.
Rick Smith approached Billy Minick, then chief of Billy Bob's Texas, to discuss an idea to document these celebrated artists on live albums. The fit was natural. Billy Bob's Texas was the reigning king of Honky Tonks. Historically, no other venue had more country music legends grace the stage and the future continued to look promising. Together, Rick and Billy set out to create one of the largest libraries of live country music with Billy Bob's Texas as the backdrop... "Live at Billy Bob's Texas" was born.
State of the art recording equipment was installed backstage, with the first artist set to be Merle Haggard on New Year's Eve 1998, but Billy and Rick agreed that they needed to record someone before Merle to test out the system. Along came an unsigned Texas singer/songwriter with great promise for the future. Pat Green became the first artist to record a "Live at Billy Bob's Texas" album on December 4, 1998.
Now 50 artists (and counting) are on the "Live at Billy Bob's Texas" label, from the greatest country music legends to the brightest stars of the future from the Texas and Red Dirt scene.
Live at Billy Bob's Texas... country music history- one record at a time.
A pre-sobriety Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars and Bob and Tommy Stinson alternate between the best and worst bar band of all time on Twin/Tone's cassette-only The Shit Hits the Fans. Recorded with two hanging mics at Oklahoma City's converted church venue the Bowery in 1984, these 24 songs (19 of which are covers) are a lubricated mix of blues, metal, soul and spilled-beer wankery. "I asked Paul or somebody if he minded that I record the show," Bowery manager and DJ Roscoe Shoemaker recalled in the Replacements oral history All Over But the Shouting. "'Why? We suck.' Typical Westy response." Between the comical breakdowns, the 'Mats show off the bruised slack-rock template of the Let It Be era that eventually inspired Nirvana, Wilco and thousands of other pop-loving punks. Faithful and furious takes on "Sixteen Blue" and "Can't Hardly Wait" are balanced out by decidedly insincere covers of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" and Led Zeppelin's "Misty Mountain Hop." By the time it's done, they've artfully mangled R.E.M., U2, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. Reed Fischer
The album that brought Little Feat back to their, well, you know, Waiting for Columbus was recorded in London and Washington D.C. in August 1977. It was released six months later to become the band's best selling record, renewing the Feats' credibility in the process. The notion to record a live album was pushed by their producer, Lowell George, whose flagging writing chops had alienated his bandmates. Columbus, however, demonstrated that the band was still a New Orleans-funk powerhouse, with energy and improv skills to spare, as demonstrated by "Dixie Chicken" and "Tripe Faced Boogie." Lowell later overdubbed most of his lead vocals and many guitar solos to great effect, giving the album an engagingly punchy sense of detail. Indeed, Columbus's reputation has grown steadily over time, with Phish complimenting it with a live cover version on Halloween 2010. Richard Gehr
Backed by a combo that included Chicago session vets such as guitarist Philip Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and drummer Fred White (who later joined Earth, Wind & Fire), Donny Hathaway swings with vividness on this brilliant live set and the audience responds ecstatically. When he runs through a 12-minute version of "The Ghetto," playing the Rhodes electric piano with intensity, his fans soul-clap in time; a woman screams delightedly when he gives a gospel lilt to Carole King's "You've Got a Friend." Meanwhile, "Little Ghetto Boy," which was released the following year as a classic single from the Quincy Jones soundtrack collaboration Come Back, Charleston Blue, earns a life-affirming preview. Live cracked the Top 20 and became Hathaway's first gold album, but the noted perfectionist was typically self-critical. "I'm naturally happy with the sales but the album itself isn't as good as I would have liked it," he told Blues & Soul magazine. "I've got to polish myself up for the next one." Sadly, he never got that chance: The album closes with a 13-minute rendition of "Voices Inside (Everything is Everything)," a song that inadvertently predicted his struggles with schizophrenia, and his eventual suicide in 1979 at the age of 33. Mosi Reeves
In 1978, the then-red-hot Thin Lizzy decided that they wanted to work with producer Tony Visconti, who had made his name working with fellow glam travelers David Bowie and T. Rex. Time was tight, so a live album was in order: Live And Dangerous was the snarling result, a document of a band that took no prisoners even on mellower tracks like "Dancing In The Moonlight." How exactly the Irish outfit came to be captured so effectively is still in dispute; Visconti has asserted that 75 percent of Dangerous was recorded in the studio in order to smooth out the rough spots, but the band vehemently disagrees. "We are a very loud band," guitarist Brian Robertson told Guitar Player in 2012, "me being the loudest of all of us. So how are you going to replace my guitar when it's so loud that it's going to bleed all over the bloody drum kit?" Maura Johnston
A live recording that features real danger. When U2 played Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver on June 5, 1983, the weather was so terrible that less than half the sold out crowd showed up, and both opening acts (the Alarm and Divinyls) canceled over safety concerns. That did nothing to deter U2 and especially Bono. In 2004, guitarist The Edge told Rolling Stone that Bono "scared the shit out of me" by climbing a lighting rig to wave a white flag during "The Electric Co.," coming close to live wires. But the real lightning came from this live album, concert film and the fog-shrouded "Sunday Bloody Sunday" music video. Even though most of Under a Blood Red Sky's album tracks came from shows in Boston and Germany, the Red Rocks visuals stand as U2's last moment of young, ragged glory before mega-stardom set in. "It was a benchmark," said Adam Clayton. "We could say now: 'Right, we've got to a point where we're contenders. We're at the starting gate." David Menconi
Perhaps more than any other show, Phish's New Year's Eve 1995 (to 1996) extravaganza at Madison Square Garden set the commercial and artistic bar for the jam legions that followed. Bordering on musical theater starring four longhaired nerds, their three sets packed in one stunt after another. But as always, the band's most impressive tricks were in their improvisation, including a delicate second set-ending delay loop motif that later turned up on Trey Anastasio's homemade side project One Man's Trash as "That Dream Machine." "It felt like an era was coming to an end," Anastasio told Parke Puterbaugh of the band's massive extended fall 1995 trek, featuring some of the Vermont quartet's all-time noisiest excursions. New Year's '95 would prove to be a renewable resource, yielding an instant classic tape, months of fan debate ("Did Trey tease 'Fire on the Mountain' in 'Drowned'?"), a three-CD set and, most recently, a six-LP Record Store Day edition. Jesse Jarnow
Joni Mitchell's first live album arrived at the peak of her fame. Recorded a couple months after her breakthrough Court and Spark debuted, the Canadian singer-songwriter documented the California stops on the tour supporting the new LP. Performing an expansive collection of tracks from her 1968 debut Song to a Seagull onward, Miles of Aisles carefully avoided the hits. "No one ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a "Starry Night" again, man,'" said Mitchell before playing "Circle Game." In 1991, she revealed to Rolling Stone why she made the comparison: "I never wanted to turn into a human jukebox. I haven't used up all my ideas yet. But I'm working in a pop field, and whether they're going to allow an older woman to do that is an open question. It requires a loyal, interested audience who believes in my talent." Brittany Spanos
Neil Young should have been on top of the world in 1973. The incredible success of Harvest finally took him out of CSNY's shadow, "Heart of Gold" was a Number One hit in 1972, and a 62-date arena tour sold out all over America. But the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, a painful back disorder and the endless infighting of his backing band turned the tour into an endless slog. He had a ton of hits by this point, but he opted to devote a big chunk of the set to gloomy, brand new tunes like "L.A.," "Don't Be Denied" and "Yonder Stands The Sinner." The new songs were captured on the live LP Time Fades Away. It was greeted by a collective shrug when it came out in 1973 and its been out of print for decades, but Neil diehards recognize it as an absolute classic and original vinyl copies are highly prized. Unsurprisingly, Young has a wildly different take. "My least favorite record is Time Fades Away," he said in 1987. "I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn't even look at each other. It was a total joke." Andy Greene
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