Week 20: 25 Greatest Live Records of All Time

[Swish]

It was great to see the overwhelming number of responses to the post for last week's selection :rolleyes: and perhaps this one will get maybe 5 or 6 to reply. Who knows?

6) It’s Alive--The Ramones: 1-2-3-4…and they’re off. You own the T-Shirt. Or least everywhere I go children of all ages from 6 to 60 are wearing it. Now it’s time to seek out this live album that peels off an insane barrage of tunes in the shortest amount of time possible without sounding like they want to get it over with, since this was recorded back when they were still within their first bunch of years together. That’s one of the problems with bands who put out live albums later in their career (Loco Live, anyone?). They start to sound impatient and mess with the songs just to keep them interesting to themselves. And they always sing them slightly worse.

Yeah, we have some Ramones fans here, most notably J and Jim Clark, the the latter rarely visits this days.

Swish

[Mr MidFi]

This is not just the greatest live punk album ever...it's the best punk album ever. Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.

Take it, Dee Dee. ONETWOTHREEFOUR...

[3-LockBox]

Remoans

meh

[Troy]

Lame-ones.

meh-squared

[Stone]

An all-time classic.

I had to get it on Japanese import when I bought it in the 80s.

[MindGoneHaywire]

It was the only live Ramones album that existed for well over ten years & since it was limited to the first three albums, I thought that stuff that came later was a little more representative. Of course, when your first three albums are considered your best, pretty much, that mitigates that, but they became a completely different band with an actual drummer in the chair playing a style that a non-drummer invented.

My favorite live recording of theirs was a radio broadcast, New Year's Eve 1979. It's better than this record, I think. More energy. But I like Loco Live, too, for different reasons. That sounded like the band I saw so many times. The Greatest Hits Live, from a show I was at, was unnecessary at best.

A live show was released a few years ago that was from a few weeks after the It's Alive show, and it sounds pretty much the same. Once they had a different drummer it was very different. I like both for different reasons, but from what I've seen, they were most interesting live at the very beginning, and strongest musically the first couple of years Marky was in the band (which covers the live radio show, which I have CDR'd from an ancient cassette), and the period Richie was in the band. After he left, it wasn't long before Dee Dee left, and they were largely nostalgia by that time even though they continued to put out relatively crappy records.

I understand the choice, but I think it's one of those critics' darlings that I never really agreed with. The 2-disc live DVD that came out a year or two ago does a pretty good job illustrating how their live show changed over the years. (The US Festival footage is very interesting) I'm glad to see this on the list, but it's kinda the wrong record, and probably for the wrong reasons.