Live and Let Live
A brief exploration of the evolution of the live album, accompanied by five of my favorite live records.
Within a few days of getting back from Japan a couple weeks ago, the stylus on my turntable decided to give out, just a few LPs into the considerable stack I brought back with me. I immediately ordered a replacement, only to have the Postal Service ship my package from Brooklyn to Chicago… and then back to Brooklyn, for some unexplained reason. It’s been a little frustrating having so many new-to-me records that I’d like to listen to just sitting around, but it’s given me a chance to catch up on two weeks worth of new music that was released while I was abroad (and plenty of time to spend with the album that inspired this week’s feature). I’m happy to report that — after taking a very circuitous, scenic route dictated by the USPS — my new stylus finally arrived last Friday, and I put it through its paces over the weekend.
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We’ll Do It Live
I’ve been listening to William Tyler’s recent live album Secret Stratosphere quite a bit lately, documenting a performance at an Alabama brewery in early 2021, just as music venues were beginning to slowly reopen and artists were apprehensively returning to stages. Backed by a trio credited as “The Impossible Truth,” Tyler embarks on a brief survey of his catalog, blending the instrumental vistas of cosmic country music with the bristling energy (and scope) of prog-rock.
Secret Stratosphere succeeds as both a document and a listening experience by establishing its own mood and atmosphere, resolutely separating the captured renditions from their studio counterparts without obscuring what made the instrumental compositions compelling in the first place. The dialed-up overdrive and spaced-out crescendos are just the intriguing icing on an already-delicious cake.
There’s a virtuosic playfulness to the set that’s exemplified in a performance of the mellow track “Highway Anxiety” that melts into a slightly twangy cover of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” (which Tyler wryly describes as “our favorite Blue Öyster Cult song”). And there’s also some functionality to this live album, as it contains the first official recording of non-album track “Area Code 601,” a longtime staple of Tyler’s live sets that begins as a psych-rock boogie tune and eventually settles into a motorik groove.
Listening to Secret Stratosphere and feeling transported to a gig I never attended got me thinking about how the live album has evolved alongside the ability to document and disseminate live music. The onward march of technology plays a big part, obviously, as downloadable music gave way to session-based operations like Daytrotter (RIP… I think) and lots of bootleg trading via filesharing networks, while the rise of streaming made it easy to hear (and see!) official recordings of festival sets, KEXP in-studios, or Tiny Desk Concerts. Some band (like Wilco, Bruce Springsteen, and Phish) have been selling archival and contemporary live recordings via services like Nugs.net for years now. The internet is swimming in live recordings, even if they’re not exactly delivered to us in the form of an album.
Once a convenient way to quickly deliver a contractually-obligated record to a label (and maybe sell a few million LPs along the way), a glossy live album that’s pressed to wax feels like a much more calculated product in a time when highly-produced soundboard recordings compete with amateur YouTube videos. Today, it’s most often a capstone to a hugely successful tour from the likes of pop superstars like Taylor Swift or The Weeknd, or a way to provide a “new” release from a legacy act on Record Store Day — who knew there were so many recordings of Hawkwind concerts in the vaults?
While they aren’t exactly a mainstay of my day-to-day listening, I find myself gravitating to live albums that imbue the performances with some context — whether it’s overt, hidden in the liner notes, or something that I personally bring to the listening experience. Listening to Secret Stratosphere brought to mind five more live records that I view as being something more than a simple document of a performance.
10cc - Live and Let Live
If this had been recorded a year earlier, it might have captured the original 10cc lineup, when the pop-minded duo of Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart were working alongside more experimental songwriters Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Put to tape in 1977, Live and Let Live came on the heels of Godley and Creme’s departure from 10cc and the release of the band’s first album to be written entirely by Gouldman and Stewart (Deceptive Bends). As such, the tracklist is dominated by Deceptive Bends cuts, but it’s still a fascinating snapshot of a band just past its creative prime, armed with the chops required to pull off an incredibly taut rendition of “The Second Sitting For the Last Supper” or the 13-minute, multi-movement prog-rock epic “Feel the Benefit.” I’ll never see my preferred version of 10cc live, so this record is the next best thing.
Nils Frahm - Spaces
Taking two years to record a live album feels like overkill, but it worked out nicely for composer and multi-instrumentalist Nils Frahm, yielding a breakout record and a crop of songs that are among his most beloved. An arrangement of recordings from a variety of sources (Frahm has referred to it as a “sound collage”), Spaces feels like a studio album that happened to be recorded in front of various audiences. The different spaces (ah ha!) and rustling audiences lend a heightened intimacy to the subdued, solo piano arrangements that make up the bulk of this record. But it’s the album’s sole arpeggiated synth-driven track (“Says”) that offers a glimpse of the more experimental electro-acoustic compositions that would come to define Frahm’s future output (documented on his more conventional live album, Tripping with Nils Frahm).
The Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full of Blues
John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd donned suits and sunglasses to sing a few songs on Saturday Night Live in 1978, but their debut album released later that year was proof that the Blues Brothers were more than just a couple of costumed characters. Recorded years before their silver screen debut, Briefcase Full of Blues established the Blues Brothers as an actual band (the presence of Stax Records legends Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn certainly helped) and showcased Belushi and Aykroyd as charismatic frontmen who could both carry a tune. A beat-up hand-me-down copy of this record was my crash course in blues and soul music as a kid, introducing me to artists like Junior Wells, Otis Redding, and King Floyd — not bad for a couple of guys wearing sunglasses in the dark.
Wilco - Kicking Television
A few months after I saw Wilco live for the very first time in 2005, the band cut this live record over the course of four nights at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. They trashed an accompanying film of the shows, but kept the audio, marking the beginning of new era for the band that was ushered in by the then-recent addition of guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone to the lineup. The tracklist is heavy on songs from A Ghost is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but they all sound a little safe and overly-faithful when compared to more contemporary live versions of the tunes imbued with nearly two decades of onstage embellishments. It’s a live record that I return to for nostalgic purposes, and to hear the wonderful cover of Charles Wright’s “Comment (If All Men Are Truly Brothers)” that closes it out.
Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert
Sometimes the makings of a fiasco are also the perfect conditions for an outright success, which is essentially the story of The Köln Concert. Sleep-deprived and malnourished, Keith Jarrett was convinced by an 18-year-old German concert promoter to get on stage and play a broken piano at a concert that was being recorded for posterity (the biopic pretty much writes itself). Thank goodness an engineer and some microphones were there, because the resulting recording is an intricate and joyous one, documenting Jarrett nimbly improvising a piece that contends with the instrument’s defects. Despite the circumstances, it’s a performance that feels remarkably in-control and self-assured — and it’s a testament to the fact that, sometimes, it’s worth just winging it.
A Fist Full of Links
I’ve read a lot of coverage of the Writers Guild of America strike that oversimplifies the motivations and stakes of the action. This Vox explainer by Alissa Wilkinson is one of the more thorough summaries of why the strike is happening, the immediate repercussions, and the subsequent Hollywood union strikes that could take place if no resolution is reached in the coming weeks/months.
Legacy media doesn’t have a great track record covering video games, but I loved this New York Times piece (by Zachary Small and Rumsey Taylor) exploring the legacy of the Legend of Zelda franchise, the game mechanics that make it tick, and the upcoming sequel (only a couple days away!) Tears of the Kingdom.
If you’re the type of person who checks the weekend box office returns every Sunday afternoon, you’ll probably want to try your hand at the Summer Movie Wager, a friendly competition overseen by the folks behind The Filmcast. You can attempt to predict the top 10 movies of the summer (May 4 - September 4) ranked by their domestic box office haul — no easy feat considering that there’s a long list of big releases over the next four months.
The Russian government has made it very difficult for its citizens to access genuine journalism about the war in Ukraine, which is why a Finnish newspaper has started distributing reports through a video game. On Kotaku, Sisi Jiang wrote about a Counter-Strike map that’s doling out uncensored newspaper headlines via a “secret” room.
Chicago Reader writer Leor Galil published a really interesting dive into the story of Jim’s Grill, a vegetarian-friendly Lakeview diner where members of ‘90s-era Chicago bands like U.S. Maple, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Tortoise were among the regulars. Yes, Jim O’Rourke ate there, too.
Speaking of Jim O’Rourke, I thoroughly enjoyed this non-comprehensive guide to his work that Marshall Gu wrote for Bandcamp Daily. It’s missing a couple of my favorite Steamroom releases, but it’s packed with a wealth of other worthwhile listening material (frankly, I had no idea that a lot of these records were available via Bandcamp).
That’s all for now. I hope it’s as beautiful where you are as Chicago was this past weekend (summer finally feels as if it’s just around the corner). If you enjoyed what you read and know of someone else who might be interested in it, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with them. Until we meet again!