12 Songs: Live and Dangerous
“All right you assholes, you want to hear Louie, Louie? We’ll give it to you.” —Iggy Pop, Metallic K.O./Live 1974
The live album has become somewhat of a lost art over the years. Since the golden age of the live album in the ‘70s, when most groups were contractually obligated to do so by their record labels, it’s become significantly less common for touring bands to commit their live show to tape.
It was meant as a method of stripping back the layers of artifice inherent in most professional studio quality recordings, leaving the artist’s songs crudely exposed in all of their raw, unprocessed, lo-fi glory. A musical self-portrait medium of sorts.
Lucky for us, live series like Castleface’s Live in San Francisco, Shout’s Beat Sessions and Levitation’s Levitation Sessions keep the flame alive today, and serve as proof that there is still an audience (albeit a niche one) for this kind of thing.
Die-hard collectors continue to carve entire lifestyles out of collecting vintage live bootlegs, dropping hundreds at a time on über-obscure recordings from 50 years ago that sound like they were recorded via walkie-talkie (hit me up if you’ve got copy of Television’s Double Exposure).
In this spirit, here’s a compilation of gems culled from various live albums and semi-official bootlegs. Highlights include a synth-heavy take on a Berlin-era Bowie classic, a rare field recording of the Minneapolis Uranium Club in the wild, and a blissed-out version of Vini Reilly’s instrumental opus Friends in Belgium.—Jackson Todd
