30 best live albums countdown: 15 – Live/1975–85 by Bruce Springsteen and The E Street band

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It’s not enough. By anyone else’s standards, of course, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 is an embarrassment of riches — five albums and ten years’ worth of barroom, hockey-arena and baseball-stadium dynamite; greatest hits, ace covers, love songs, work songs, out-of-work songs — the ultimate rock-concert experience of the past decade finally packaged for living-room consumption, a special gift of thanks to the fans who shared those 1001 nights of stomp & sweat and the best possible consolation prize for the poor bastards who could never get tickets.

~David Fricke – rollingstone.com

Jon Landau sent a four-song cassette of ‘Born in the U.S.A.‘, ‘Seeds’, ‘The River‘ and ‘War‘ down to my house with a note attached saying he ‘thought we might have something here’. Over the following months we listened to 10 years of tapes, the music did the talkin’, and this album and its story began to emerge. We hope you have as much fun with it as we did. I’d like to thank Jon for his friendship and perseverance and the E Street Band for 1,001 nights of comradeship and good rockin’. They’re all about the best bunch of people you can have at your side when you’re goin’ on a long drive.”
– Bruce Springsteen (liner notes)

Live/1975–85 is a live album by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. It consists of 40 tracks recorded at various concerts between 1975 and 1985. It was released as a box set with either five vinyl records, three cassettes, or three CDs. There was also a record club only release which came on three 8-track cartridges, which is extremely hard to find.

Thunder Road – October 18, 1975 at The Roxy Theatre:

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Bob Dylan & Phil Lesh: Friend OF The Devil, Baltimore, Maryland 8 November 1999 (video)

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I lit up from Reno
I was trailed by twenty hounds
Didn’t get to sleep that night
Till the morning came around

I’m not 100% sure this is the Baltimore-1999 show, it could be Amherst, Massachusetts – 18 November 1999.

Baltimore Arena
Baltimore, Maryland
8 November 1999

  • Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
  • Phil Lesh (bass)
  • Charlie Sexton (guitar)
  • Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
  • Tony Garnier (bass)
  • David Kemper (drums & percussion)

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30 best live albums countdown: 16 – Get Yer Ya-Ya’s out! The Rolling Stones in Concert by The Rolling Stones

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#16: Get Yer Ya-Ya’s out! The Rolling Stones in Concert – The Rolling Stones

“I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.”
~Lester Bangs

“Recorded during their American tour in late 1969, and centered around live versions of material from the Beggars Banquet-Let It Bleed era. Often acclaimed as one of the top live rock albums of all time, its appeal has dimmed a little today…  it’s certainly the Stones’ best official live recording.”
~Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)

Carol – 27 Nov 1969:

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30 best live albums countdown: 17 – Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads

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#17: Stop Making Sense – Talking Heads (1984)

Stop Making Sense is a live 1984 album by Talking Heads, the soundtrack to the film of the same name. Stop Making Sense spanned three live shows at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles (Dec 1983).

“Stop Making Sense the album” cannot be separated from “Stop Making Sense the movie”, this is a two for one deal. When I write Stop Making Sense I mean them both. I’ve seen Stop Making Sense 4 times in the cinema and countless times on video/dvd/blu-ray. I have the album on vinyl, cd and digital files. When I hear the music I see the movie in my head.

And it’s a great movie!

The beginning is iconic. David Byrne comes shuffling out on an empty stage, starts a cassette-player with a rhythm track and play along with an acoustic guitar as he sings Psycho Killer.

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August 19: Neil Young and Crazy Horse released Greendale in 2003

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Greendale is the name of an album, movie and graphic novel by Neil Young. As the twenty-seventh album by Neil Young, Young and Crazy Horse’s Greendale, a 10-song rock opera, is set in a fictional California seaside town. Based on the saga of the Green family, the “audio novel” has been compared to the literary classics of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio for its complexity and emotional depth in exploring a small town in America.

Greendale combines many themes on corruption, environmentalism and mass media consolidation. The album, concert, film and DVDs have produced a vast divergence of critical opinion ranging from being called “amateur” to being voted as one of the best albums of 2003 by Rolling Stone magazine music critics.

Falling from above:

The CD was originally released with a DVD of live “Neil-only” acoustic performance of the Greendale material from Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland. In 2004, the CD was released with a new DVD containing a live performance of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. A DVD-Audio version was also released, with both Advanced Resolution Stereo and 5.1 Surround sound mixes, and a video of “Devil’s Sidewalk” from the film. In late 2004, the feature-length DVD with actors lip-synching the material was released.

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