I love listening to live albums for a lot of reasons. Live albums don’t get any respect anymore like they used to. People don’t like live albums ’cause they don’t like hearing the crowd cheering in the background. I like to listen to a lot of live albums especially live albums by artists such as Led Zep, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Joe Satriani are the ones who put out the best live albums, in my opinion.

Live albums are awesome ’cause it’s better hearing music that is live and it’s more real that way. When you’re playing live there are no “takes”. You know how when you record in a studio, you have to re-record it over and over again until it’s right? Well playing live, there is no such thing. You have to play the song in one take on stage. If you mess up riffs, chords or lyrics… who cares just keep playing right through it. If bands/artists mess up certain parts during the live recording, they are mostly edited out in the studio anyway. There is also more freedom of playing your songs on stage than in the studio. In the studio you are only given a certain amount of time for recording songs while on stage you have all the time you want. You can play your song for as long as you want and you can make it sound as different as you want. When playing, you never want to play the same song the same way twice at every show. You want to play it different at every show. Give it a different feeling. A different energy.

Led Zeppelin and Hendrix may have played the same songs at their concerts over the years in their tours but each version sounded so different at each concert. They never sounded the same. If you want an example listen to Hendrix’s “Hear My Train A Coming” at various live shows of his. All of his jams of that song are so different every time. Different solos, different guitar parts… he would even make the singing different too. More improvisation.

Listening to live albums is exciting and unpredictable. In my opinion, I find that listening to live albums more powerful than studio albums. Hendrix “Live at the Fillmore” is one of my favorite live albums of all time and David Bowie’s “Live at the BBC Sessions” is another one.

In live albums, it really shows that an artist have talent.

Why do you think bands like Led Zep, Hendrix, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Grateful Dead, Hendrix, etc. do a lot of live albums more than their studio albums? It’s because they were meant to be for “live” music.

These bands see their live concerts as their 1st priority for them. The studio albums are just secondary. All studio albums do is help get people know their songs and get familiar with them for their live concerts.

Live albums are awesome. I love listening to them. I wish people wouldn’t neglect live albums. They are pretty important to listen to that a lot of people are missing.

I love it when people expect bands to play their favorite songs the same way on the CD when you know that’s never gonna happen, and then they walk out of the show complaining about it. I’ve seen people like that before and it makes me sick. Bands never play their songs live the same way on the CD ’cause why? They can’t help themselves. It’s called jamming. Improvisation.

Respect the live album. I have quite a lot of live albums in my CD collection.

Kev