It's hard to believe that it's taken this long for a live album from The Rolling Stones' prime era to be released officially by the band - if only in digital online format (this concert can be purchased exclusively from The Rolling Stones Archive website). Considering the band's penchant for releasing live albums to commemorate the tours in support of their later albums from the '80s onward, long after the band had reached their peak, you'd think they might be more enthusiastic about demonstrating the power and energy they had when they were still young and contemporary and their reputation as the world's greatest rock n roll band was still fresh and self-evident. Granted, we've had Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! from 1970, but that's like Led Zeppelin's Royal Albert Hall compared to Madison Square Garden. It's good, but this new concert from the Stones' 1973 tour benefits from more of their best material (including tracks from Exile on Main St and Goats Head Soup), while the band is still in their stride, and before Mick Taylor left to be replaced with Ronnie Wood. The tracklist from this concert is fantastic, and the quality of the performance is sublime. If I had to choose only one Stones concert to demonstrate the band's classic stage presence, I would not hesitate for a second in picking this one.
It's a great recording for sure. A lot of people are rooting for a physical release.
ReplyDeleteI also always wonder about why you'll have ten live albums from 1990-2010 but 2 from the classic period... Maybe newer releases are a lot less complicated, technically speaking. Maybe they have to go back and tread carefully trying to get early recordings up to par sound-wise for a release. Who knows.
It could also be a matter of getting the rights to those early recordings, considering how the music business is, and how naive a lot of bands probably were at the beginning of their career.
ReplyDeleteIt also might be the case that with the newer albums/tours, bands want to rely more heavily on releasing a live album, because it's bound to contain a lot of hits from their earlier days, which they think people are going to be more excited to hear than the new stuff they've released (even if, I guess, they've already heard it a hundred times before).