Live Death

Bill Wyman has a piece about live rock albums, a species that I didn't realize had died out until Wyman pointed it out. I grew up in the golden age of sludgy-sounding two-LP sets, or at least the golden age of listening to them after you'd inherited them from your older brother, so this does feel like the end of an era.

It's a great piece, though I have to admit that one area where I part company with Wyman is his contempt for "the rise of the boutique live DVD, in which an antiseptic, camera-friendly "show" is set up to film. I hate these; the insular feel is the antithesis of a real concert. (It's why I've never warmed to Stop Making Sense, the bee's knees to some folks.)" I had a religious experience at Stop Making Sense, which I remember seeing four times in one week, in those last five minutes when "seeing" meant "at a movie theater, having paid money to get in." (If I remember right, I was alone in the theater except for the first time, and two of the three other people in the room that time left once they figured out that no car chase would be forthcoming. Small town.) I'd seen a bunch of "classic" rock-concert movies from the '70s by then, and could never figure out why they kept cutting to crowd reaction shots, as my desire to see, say, Led Zeppelin do their thing could in any way be served by seeing some other people getting to see Led Zeppelin do their thing. What Wyman describes as "antiseptic" and "insular", I would describe as "actually getting to see the performance promised by the name on the label, shaped to the demands of the medium." But then, on reflection, I'm not sure that I've ever had as good a time at an actual rock concert as I have at Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's films with Neil Young, or for that matter Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Sometimes I think I'd be a really good living brain in a jar.