Wherein soul’s most frank, straight-talking diva proves herself the missing link between Moms Mabley and Azealia Banks
Of all the crimes the internet has committed, perhaps the most heinous is the fact that there are millions now living who only know Millie Jackson as that women straining on a toilet as featured in countless clickbait ‘Worst Album Covers Ever’ lists.
There’s a case to be made that her 1989 album Back To The S**t! in fact boasts one of the greatest album covers ever. It’s funny, makes no concessions to decorum, and perfectly suits a potty-mouthed concert recording wherein Millie advises her female fans on how to best cover up their flatulence in front of their partner (“I know you all ‘How’m I gonna *poot* without him hearing me?’ You just get a lot of toilet paper, and you wrap that shit together, and you cup it… Put a muffler on that fart!”).
On Back To The S**t, Millie admits that “over the years I know I’ve told you bitches when to fuck, how to fuck, how long to fuck, who to fuck, and everything…” Certainly, Millie has spent a glittering career offering her fearless, forthright and acerbic take on sex and relationships, never feeling the need to prettify her blunt home truths. Her 1974 masterpiece Caught Up is a conceptual piece, its first side exploring infidelity from a most controversial angle: that of the ‘other woman’. This was a radical stance: much classic soul balladry is penned from the perspective of the wronged lover, or the repentant adulterer; even The Dark End Of The Street celebrates its illicit love under a veil of guilt, haunted by the possibility of discovery (the refrain of “They’re gonna find us”).
Not so with Caught Up; here, Millie boldly stakes her claim to another woman’s husband, placing her pleasure, her illicit love, over the bonds of matrimony and the responsibilities of fatherhood. On (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right, as the Muscle Shoals Swampers strike up a groove that wouldn’t have been out of place on labelmate Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, she summons a great gospel roar to declare “there ain’t no power on this Earth to ever separate us, baby”, as she seeks to put asunder that which God hath coupled together, a more profoundly sacrilegious moment than any pimply metal group ever managed. On that first half of Caught Up (she takes up the role of the wronged spouse for Side Two), morality doesn’t come in to play: Millie is selfish, taking that which doesn’t belong to her; still, that doesn’t make her yearning, her lust, her anger or her pain any less real, any less affecting. If anything, her songs are all the more powerful for the taboos they break, the tastefulness they disregard.
Like Hayes on Hot Buttered Soul, Millie fleshes out the dramas within her songs via spoken-word spiels. Live, these raps become ribald sermons, Millie sharing filthy jokes with her audience and driving her point home with smouldering black comedy. Capturing a set performed at Los Angeles’ The Roxy in 1979 by Millie and her Easy-Ak-Shun Band, backed by both the East Coast Horns and the Muscle Shoals Horns, Live And Uncensored finds those raps running long and wild. It plays out like some canny fusion of concert album and comedy record, and is certainly a funnier listen than Live: Take No Prisoners, the infamous Lou Reed live set recorded at New York’s The Bottom Line the previous year that saw the Velvets frontman indulge in lengthy, bitter and vitriolic monologues, taking acerbic swipes at Hollywood stars, rock critics and even the Bottom Line audience themselves.
The Roxy audience similarly were not spared by Millie’s wit: a number of her celebrity peers were in the crowd that night, including The Pointer Sisters, for whom Millie raises a round of applause. The Pointers, she says, “be talking the same old shit I be talking, they just clean it up.” That’s not how Millie rolls. “I got to put a little cursing in my shit,” she grins, “or y’all won’t even buy it. There’s some people here who think I’m dirty. I really couldn’t give a shit, cos you all buy my records. Them same ones be talking about I’m dirty be buying my shit and hiding it. I do not resent that, I’ll take the sales any way you wanna give them to me.”
This spiel precedes one of Live And Uncensored’s more remarkable tracks, Phuck You Symphony training Millie’s crosshairs on everyday hypocrisy and po-facedness. She’s talking about those fans who buy her records but stow them away when company comes round, leaving more respectable disks on display atop their music centres, “Bach, and Beethoven, and all that other shit that y’all can’t even pronounce… So people think that’s what you really into.” For this portion of the audience, for “all you hiding my shit”, she assembles a chorus of backing singers (including labelmates Ray, Goodman & Brown and occasional James Brown duettist Brandye) and has them sing symphonic “Fuck You!”s through a bravura Beethoven pastiche. Legend has it (via the estimable Bill Brewster, author of the excellent Last Night A DJ Saved My Life) that Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan would play this track at his legendary club-nights if anyone crossed him.
Hypocrisy, it is clear, is a game Millie Jackson doesn’t play, and she applies her razor-sharp honesty to her own shortcomings and failings as surely as she does the lovers who don’t meet her high standards. She’s mischievous, transgressive, deriving power from saying the unsayable – during the rap at the heart of the Roxy performance of (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right, asking her audience to sympathise with the Other Woman, she declares “what gets to you most of all is these god-damn holidays, gotta always be by yourself. Can’t even see the n***** at Hallowe’en, he got to be with the kids.”
Seconds later, she’s advising the audience on “getting yours” from their men: “They like them sweet ‘I love you’s… That’s why their wives’ blowing it – she figures she done had him long enough to stop lying.” Moments later, she’s skewering her man’s lame bedroom talk, his vanity, his neediness, his credulousness, yelling “Lie your ass off, they like that shit. I’m telling you, they love it.” She’s shocking in her unvarnished truths. She’s also hilarious, her indecorous peeling away of social taboos recalling Richard Pryor at his then-contemporary peak, or the raunchy party albums cut by blue-talking black-vaudevillians like Rudy Ray Moore and Moms Mabley.
Live And Uncensored is more than just a comedy album, however. Millie’s Easy-Ak-Shun group are in the pocket throughout, lucid and supple enough to pull back into bristling holding-pattern grooves when Millie gets talking, snapping into action when she needs them to. On the smouldering Put Something Down On It they follow Millie flawlessly, as she slips from passages of quavering vulnerability to righteous, angry hollers, even segueing into a fierce minute or so of Do You Think I’m Sexy with enough venom to leave Millie audibly breathless, chuckling that she’s got to “slow this shit down… This god-damn disco shit will kill an old bitch like me.”
Millie’s intolerance of bullshit, her straight-talking, her truthfulness, lend extra weight to Live And Uncensored’s softer moments. She covers Just When I Needed You Most, which singer-songwriter Randy VanWarmer took to #4 in the Billboard charts that summer, and recasts the saccharine MOR as the sweltering southern-soul barn-burner it always should have been, thanks to blistering saxophone from pre-fame Hendrix collaborator Lonnie Youngblood, and Millie’s additional extemporised verse, which evokes the song’s stung and betrayed heart: “someone as slick as me, I don’t know how you managed to do this, but I do believe I got screwed while screwing”. A cover of Kenny Rogers’ Sweet Music Man, prefiguring her later sortie into twang territory with 1981’s A Lil’ Bit Country, the song’s lachrymose tale of moments of onstage magic undone by the indignities of life as a touring singer grounded by a lewd preamble exploring how artists are expected to trade sexual favours for fame. Meanwhile, in Millie’s hands, Toto’s AOR cornerstone Hold The Line is transformed into a storming, scouring attack on the latest in a long line of unworthy lovers.
Millie sure could sing: gospel strong when she needs to be, soulfully sweet when the song deserves it, draping the mournful bones of I Still Love You (You Still Love Me) with bruised, gauzy grace. But it’s the way she talks that makes Live And Uncensored such a remarkable set. And the title doesn’t lie: much of Live And Uncensored deserves the “Rated XXX” appended to 1982’s similarly raw Live And Outrageous, whether its Logs And Thangs (a speech dropped in the middle of opener Keep The Home Fires Burning that chides her lover for “flicking your bic so much elsewhere that you’ve run out of fuel”, announcing her intention to get “one of them ‘outside fires’ started”, and an extended, unabashed single-entendre about how larger ‘logs’ are better than smaller ones), or The Soaps (an unexpected ten-minute digression halfway through All The Way Lover that attacks “black bitches” for watching soap operas that only feature black actors as maids and servants, predating Public Enemy’s Burn Hollywood Burn by over a decade), or A Moment Of Pleasure (a seething bedroom scene that would make even Betty Davis blush, as Millie breathes “I love the way you doin’ it to me, baby… The sheets getting all wet… Gotta change the sheets! We keep this up, we gonna have to change the mattress!”).
In Millie’s world, love was no pageant of candy, flowers and Hallmark Valentine’s cards, and sex was no soft-focus, de-odorised and artfully choreographed exercise. You don’t go to Millie Jackson for the fantasy, you go to her for the truth. And on Live And Uncensored, that’s what she delivers: the scabrous, hilarious, painful truth, soulful as all get-out, searing and essential. Laugh all you like at that album cover with her sat on the toilet; Millie Jackson for sure gives you the real shit, if you can take it.
Wherein the leader of soul and gospel chart-toppers The Impressions recasts himself as a serious (and seriously powerful) solo singer/songwriter, fit for some challenging times
In the Autumn of 1961, the debut issue of The Fantastic Four crash-landed at newsstands all over America. The series – which, starting with its fourth issue, would feature the not-entirely-hyperbolic claim “The world’s greatest comic magazine” emblazoned across its covers – marked the birth of Marvel Comics, a publishing company that would, under the guidance of larger-than-life writer/editor/publisher Stan Lee, challenge industry leader DC Comics for domination of the super-hero market in the decades to come, adding elements of humour, soap-opera and social commentary to the genre’s well-worn recipe of costumed hi-jinks.
The Fantastic Four’s debut issue opened with an origin story, a fable of far-fetched science-hokum that saw egghead scientist Reed Richards and his three sidekicks take to the stars in an inadequately tested spacecraft. Shortly after leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, however, our intrepid adventurers are caught in a “cosmic storm”, bombarded with interstellar radiation that, upon their subsequent crash-landing back home, causes them to develop freakish superpowers.
While I am no scientist, I’m pretty sure that’s not how cosmic radiation works. Still, I find something compelling about the Fantastic Four’s back-story, its tale of transformation seeming to anticipate the very course of culture and entertainment throughout that decade. Change was the tenor of those times, artists and art-forms exiting the decade altogether different from how they entered it, transforming in response to all manner of external stimulus during these inarguably turbulent years. Developments in recording technology, civil rights conflicts, drugs, sexual liberation, the war in Vietnam and a wealth of further elements served as the ‘cosmic rays’ that would accelerate artists’ evolution across the decade.
These metamorphoses mostly flowed in one direction, performers shedding their more showbiz-y affectations in favour of something more serious-minded and ‘real’, shifting from ‘mere entertainers’, to artists with loftier ambitions, both for their art, and for its effect upon the larger world. New paths and roles were opening for ‘pop’ artists, and, as a result, many found themselves feeling restlessly itchy in the pigeonholes in which they’d previously nestled.
So it was with Curtis Mayfield, as the 1960s drew to a close. In 1956, aged only 14, Mayfield had joined Chicago vocal harmony group The Roosters, who later shed most of their original line-up and became The Impressions. Fronted by Mayfield, who penned much of their output (along with writing and producing for other acts as staff producer at Okeh Records), the Impressions would score multiple hits across the decade, with aching love songs, tender gospel reworks and, as the 60s wore on, anthems of black pride and unity, inspired by and inspiring the Civil Rights movement, like 1964 Top Ten hit Keep On Pushing, a favourite of Martin Luther King, or People Get Ready.
While such politicised pop struck a powerful chord with Mayfield’s audience, keeping the Impressions near the top of the singles charts throughout their career, the group’s albums weren’t quite so distinguished. Like the Temptations – whose LPs, even at the height of their ‘psychedelic soul’ era, would balance a side of inspired Norman Whitfield acid-funk with a side of ballads, so the Temps didn’t lose their bookings at Vegas or their place on the cabaret circuit – the Impressions’ albums were decidedly mixed bags, with the couple of gospel/protest nuggets on each often awash in a sea of rote filler.
By the mid-60s, however, rock artists were no longer approaching the Long Player as a ruse by which to sell their gullible fans the hit single and eleven clunkers; album tracks began to hold the same respect as their 7inch brethren, as more ambitious stars embraced the format as a vehicle to further express their ideas and concepts, and explore their art. Mostly, soul and R’n’B labels were slow to pick up on the trend: when Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder wanted to compose albums that veered from the Motown’s typical factory product and were, rather, expressions of themselves, they could only do so against the company’s wishes, by shaking off the interference of Motown’s legendary Quality Control department (no easy feat).
In 1970, Curtis Mayfield had found himself at a similar crossroads, electing to leave the Impressions in favour of a solo career, and forming his own Curtom Records with business partner Eddie Thomas. In Craig Werner’s excellent book Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield And The Rise And Fall Of American Soul, Marv Stuart, a white rock promoter Curtis had latterly befriended, recalls that he told Curtis “Everyone makin’ it is a singer-songwriter. You’re an artist, you should go out on your own.”
Shorn of his harmony singers, Mayfield would go on to cut a brace of solo LPs demonstrating a newfound focus and ambition, taking an altogether more conceptual approach to the album format, culminating in 1975’s powerful There’s No Place Like America Today. No longer the leader of a group who – their fiery, gospelised protest songs notwithstanding – were very much mainstream, middle of the road entertainers, Mayfield now recast himself as a soul/funk auteur, as the Serious Artist he was, a singer-songwriter whose words carried weight, whose songs were statements on Our World Today as resonant as Dylan’s ever were – moreso, I’d argue.
His debut solo album Curtis, released September 1970, was a fine statement of intent, its first single (Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go an acrid take on race relations in America that married Johnny Pate’s dramatic string arrangements to roiling funk guitar and a withering lyric that scourged “political actors”, shaming Nixon by name. The Other Side Of Town and We People Who Are Darker Than Blue furthered this noir-ish take on social turbulence, the former a blossom of broken pride, an admission that “depression is part of my mind / the sun never shines”, the latter leavening the ache with a little of Mayfield’s trademark gospelised hopefulness.
Curtis marked a definitive step forward for Mayfield, shedding the tuxedos and the cabaret milieu for something closer to the soothsaying folk singer-songwriters of the time, albeit empowered by the lean funk orchestra behind him. Mayfield’s next release would mark a further stride away from his past, even while Curtis was revisiting some of his Impressions back pages. Gone this time were Johnny Pate’s lush strings, those last vestiges of Mayfield’s glossy past. Instead, Mayfield stripped his songs back to their lean core so their rawest, purest qualities could shine. They were performed by an edgy, whip-smart band, led by a relaxed Curtis who, abandoning the showbiz patter of the cabaret days, now spoke of the issues behind his songs, humbly and proudly assuming the mantle of protest singer and joking with his audience and his musicians, making 1971’s Curtis/Live! an informal but often profound experience.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Bitter End is proud to present…”
With the Curtis album topping Billboard’s Black Albums chart and edging into the US Pop Top 20, Mayfield booked four dates at New York nightclub The Bitter End in January 1971. His first concerts as a solo artist, Mayfield’s performances across those four nights would be recorded by Curtom and released late that year as a live album that, like the shows it was culled from, stood as a portrait of an artist in transition, but at the heady apex of his powers.
A canny choice of venue, The Bitter End was an esteemed Greenwich Village hangout, a launching pad for iconic comedians like Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, and for the rising folk movement: Dylan, Joan Baez and Judy Collins had cut their teeth at the club’s early 60s hootenannies. Far removed from the larger, glitzier halls the Impressions previously toured, it was intimate, seating only a couple of hundred within its bare brick walls. But this intimacy would only make Curtis/Live! a more rewarding album.
The modest venue also necessitated the absence of strings and horns, Mayfield instead playing with a small band of musicians. The group was led by bassist Joseph ‘Lucky’ Scott – “Lucky the Freak,” according to Mayfield. “He’s our director,” Curtis tells the Bitter End audience. “I don’t really know why we call him the director, we ain’t got but three pieces up here. I think that was his idea, to get more money…” Those ‘three pieces’ were rhythm guitarist Craig McMullen, drummer Tyrone McCullen and, on percussion, Master Henry Gibson, a legend on bongo, conga and tumba who also recorded with Donny Hathaway, The Rotary Connection and Aretha Franklin.
For Mayfield’s group during these January dates, less was more. They played sparely, sparsely, listening to each other, calling and responding to each other, loose and open to improvisation. Opener Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey) set the mood; when the Impressions originally cut the track (and ill-fated Mayfield discovery Baby Huey covered it with his Babysitters), it was as a tight and brassy vamp, an urgent stomp fashioned for the dance-floor. At the Bitter End, however, the song is transformed into a lucid groove, fluid, liquid, sloshing loud and quiet, rising and falling away so Curtis can preach, calling to the room “We don’t need no music, we got soul”, before a brief showcase for Master Henry Gibson gives way to a hush so Curtis can confess he “got to say it loud… got to say it louder… I’m black and I’m proud”, the drums rolling and that groove driving on home.
The minimal instrumentation gave space for Mayfield’s guitar-playing to take the fore; not giving to grandstanding soloing, he preferred to embroider his songs with beautiful melodic flourishes, that emotive playfulness Hendrix invoked on Castles Made Of Sand and Little Wing. Sometimes they drew everything back, like on the hushed Stare And Stare, a slow, spacey, trancey blues eked out by muted guitar wails, Gibson’s foreboding conga rumbles, and Mayfield’s fraying vocals. Sometimes they hustled into a bristling psychedelic-funk tornado, guitars shrieking over freakbeat breakdowns on Check Out Your Mind. The seething voodoo groove of (Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below – all writhing polyrhythms, strobing wah-wah guitar, ground-shaking bass and Mayfield’s falsetto declamations – reaches a frantic, freak-out pace that outdoes the studio original for intensity.
“Trying not to offend anyone, but just basically trying to tell it as it is…”
Mayfield’s first solo single, (Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below had evidenced a newfound nihilism within his political song-writing, swapping the optimism of Impressions-era anthems like We’re A Winner and People Get Ready for something bleaker, its pre-apocalyptic hurtle echoing the violence of recent years, the hopes quashed, the arrival of Nixon in the White House. If the Impressions’ righteous anthems were penned to stir their audience to toil in service of the Civil Rights movement, Curtis’ solo songs were darker, more complex, more personal, and more honest – their moral landscapes were often scored by grey areas between right and wrong.
A run of songs early in the Curtis/Live! program spans the development of Mayfield’s protest songs, beginning with a new song that never made any of Mayfield’s studio albums, I Plan To Stay A Believer. A fragile flourish of qualified optimism that reaffirms his faith in the Civil Rights movement in the face of cynicism and disappointment, its placid glide is preceded by Curtis musing that America is “a country that is so far advanced, we seem to be able to do everything except get along.” Darkly, he chuckles. “There’s even a bit of humour in it when you think of such people as [rightly reviled racist vice-president Spiro] Agnew…”
Next, Mayfield flips the mood with Impressions hit We’re A Winner, a mild sass to its upbeat lick, to Curtis’ cries of “We’re movin’ on up, movin’ on up”. Mid-song he pauses, wryly, and grins, taking a swipe at the radio stations that banned the song upon its release in 1967 – an action that still didn’t stop the track topping the Billboard R&B Chart. “You may remember reading in your Jet Johnson publications, a whole lotta stations didn’t want to play that particular recording,” he smiles, gently. “Can you imagine such a thing? Well… We don’t give damn, we’re a winner anyway! Right on? I see I got a little strength out there tonight… Put a little fire under ya… Alright now…”
Mayfield’s warming to his role as emcee now, telling the stories behind these songs, spelling out his vision. Everything is political, and in such times, even his cover of Roger Nichols and Paul Williams’ We’ve Only Just Begun – a lachrymose easy listenin’ hit for white-bread duo the Carpenters the year before – is transformed into a hymn to the Civil Rights movement: still so far to go, but a mission shared by many. “A lot of folks think this particular lyric is not appropriate for what might be considered ‘underground’,” Mayfield says, by way of introduction. “But I think ‘underground’ is whatever your mood or your feelings might be at the time, as long as it’s the truth.” Their cover version is charming, Mayfield and McMullen’s guitars chiming together, that fragile quality to Mayfield’s falsetto lending a sweet, human vulnerability to its Hallmark lyrics.
The song segues into People Get Ready, perhaps the strongest and most powerful of Mayfield’s Impressions-era protest songs, and certainly his most-covered standard. Its lyric found Mayfield at his most churchy, explicitly intertwining the Civil Rights movement and religious belief, suggesting that emancipation is as inevitable as deliverance to Heaven, and that the key to both lay in faith. “All you need is faith, to hear the diesels hummin’” he sings, “You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the lord…We’re gonna make it one day / Brothers, I believe.”
People Get Ready closes this spree of Impressions-era protest anthems. The next song, Stare And Stare, announces the change in Mayfield’s outlook and temperament immediately. Over minimal, slow-burning funk, Mayfield narrates tensions during a long journey on public transport – the contrast between People Get Ready’s “train to Jordan” couldn’t be clearer, and couldn’t be a coincidence. It’s a sharp, sour lyric, one that takes a dim view of all players in the game, one that seems better suited to a hip cubby hole like the Bitter End than the optimistic homilies of Mayfield’s Impressions-era songs – his opening lyric, noting that even within the black community there’s precious little unity (“I look across the aisle at the process he wears / While people sitting back digging my nappy hair”) draws knowing chuckles from the audience. Mayfield offers some perspective of his own, but there’s precious little hope in his words: “Like it’s a crime to do of good and brotherhood… What a way to waste the day… It seems here lately, we have nothing to say.”
Stare And Stare’s mood is one of resignation, of sad defeat – perhaps that’s why Mayfield never saw fit to record it on any of his studio albums. On his best solo material, this bleakness, this honesty, was allied with a fierce sense of direction, a fiery anger, a biting wit. And so it is with Curtis/Live!’s final trio of tracks, which include three of Mayfield’s finest songs, and also capture his live quintet at their most inventive, most restless and most searingly funky.
“I ain’t gonna point no fingers… I don’t want nobody to point no fingers…”
With his Impressions songs, Mayfield wasn’t writing so much for himself as for his community, his people, rallying their faith in their shared goal, bolstering their belief in themselves and their right to equality – a preacher who used the recording studio and concert stage as his pulpit. These songs were true anthems, truly and truthfully rousing and moving.
With his solo material, however, Mayfield freed himself from this responsibility to always be marching selflessly towards freedom, to always be positive, allowing himself to air darker feelings: anger, resentment, uncertainty, self-doubt. Much of his greatest material – the bitter, aching, painfully real funk of Do Do Wap Is Strong In Here, the hard-edged streetscapes of his Superfly soundtrack – stems from this darkness, from Mayfield’s attempts to reconcile his altruism, his desire to enact real and meaningful social change, with his own limitations, his fallibility, with the reality that man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
The times were a-changing, at fearsome pace. Only a few years before, black radio stations had banned We’re A Winner, even though its lyrics harboured nothing more incendiary than a churchy call to “Keep on pushin’”. Now Mayfield sang and spoke frankly of a country in disarray: Martin Luther King’s dream deferred following his murder, following the murders of Malcolm X and RFK, with the bloodshed in Vietnam ratcheting upwards, and Nixon installed in the White House believing he had a mandate to ignore the turmoil in the inner cities, where poverty, crime and drugs formed a brutal, dehumanising trifecta. Jim Crow was history, in word if not entirely in deed, and yet the world – especially for those people who were darker than blue – seemed a worse, more dangerous and less ‘free’ place altogether, an uneasy truth from which Mayfield refused to flinch.
The stage of the Bitter End was no pulpit, and Mayfield’s audiences on these New York nights weren’t looking for soothing homilies or simple words of hope, but for someone with the strength, the clarity of vision to tell it as it was, to share in some communal truths. During We People Who Are Darker Than Blue, Mayfield invokes the criticisms of those who look down upon the poor and needy in the inner cities: “We’re just good for nothing, they all figure,” he murmurs, “A boyish, grown-up, shiftless jigger”. It’s a powerful line, all the more powerful here thanks to the microphones that pick up a member of the audience issuing a stunned, gasped “wow” after Mayfield delivers it.
During the mid-song breakdown, the group really begin to cook, Master Henry Gibson beating a violent call to arms on his conga, “Lucky” Scott plucking some bad-ass low-end on his bass, McMullen and Mayfield sparring guitar lines like lit molotovs, McCullen pummelling taut, triumphant drum-rolls and cymbal splashes from his kit. Within this funky maelstrom, Mayfield raps some hard-edged and hard-to-shake questions: “Should we commit our own genocide,” he asks, “Before we check out our minds?”, the song’s downcast mourn giving way to an urgent, restless call to action.
(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go picks up this intensity and runs as far as the quintet can take it. Lyrically, its State Of The Real World Address is far removed from the blessed trains and heavenly gates of People Get Ready: now, Curtis only sees corruption and decay wherever he looks, bereft of answers but with a litany of culprits he spits out over the bristling funk. On the studio cut, heavy reverb lent Mayfield’s vocal the booming weightiness of a God itself while spieling the track’s scornful roll-call of Hell-worthy scoundrels, Pate’s symphonic flourishes lending further weight to the declamations.
At the Bitter End, McCullen’s hi-hat rasps in conversation with Gibson’s percolating congas, “Lucky” plucking rubbery basslines, Mayfield and McCullen firing off lean and spare flashes of wah-soaked guitar – compared to the sturm-und-drang of the original, it’s restrained, pared-back, an undergroove for Mayfield’s high-toned, acid-dipped croon. Here, it’s less a brimstone sermon, more a matter-of-fact conversation, but more effective, the crowd clapping along, laughing when Curtis whispers “And Nixon says, ‘Don’t worry’.” That line, repeated throughout, lends the track an uneasy edge, “Don’t worry” the sound of the oblivious, partying while Harlem burns, while students lie dead at Kent State, while Hell rises up and subsumes America.
Six minutes in, Curtis breaks from his singing, and addresses the audience. “Sisters… Whiteys… Niggers, heheheheh… Jews… Police and they backers…” The Bitter End punters, a mightily mixed bunch according to the 1999 reissue sleeve-notes, laugh uneasily along with him, and it’s an electrifying moment, Mayfield turning his accusations upon them, upon himself. Everybody’s implicated; if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. It renews a sense of community that runs throughout Mayfield’s songbook, only it’s different here than before – that community is fallible, is a community of sinners, and if they’re not willing to repent their failings then they’ll burn, in this life if not the next.
And yet there’s still something hopeful in there, a chance for retribution in the fact that if everyone’s to blame for how things are, then everyone has the agency to right all these wrongs, if they try. There’s no mystical hand-of-God waiting to deliver them from Hell, and if they want to escape, they’d all better pull together. Upon this revelation, Scott’s bass kicks back in with the track’s serpentine riff, and the band chase it along, the crowd clapping and cheering on, Mayfield’s guitar wailing some delirious, ceiling-scraping solo, like if the song gets funky enough then maybe the end-times won’t come, seeking deliverance in the groove.
“That hit home everywhere…”
Just when you think Curtis/Live! is done, as the emcee announces “Curtis Mayfield,” and we imagine his little troupe marching off the cramped Bitter End stage, as voices from the room call for more and you’re wondering just what more Mayfield has left to give, the band return for the encore, Stone Junkie, a druggy-as-fuck anti-drug song loping with a side-eyed, wasted magic, and making Funkadelic’s majestically slackadaisical Loose Booty sound like Minor Threat. It’s of a piece, lyrically, with If There’s A Hell Below; where that song observed that “Everybody smoke / Use the pill and the dope”, Stone Junkie claims that “Times have now arrived in this nation… Black and white, yellow, red and blue / All in the same bag, we know it’s true.”
A year or so later, Mayfield would deliver his final word on the issue of drugs with his epochal sound-track to Blaxploitation smash Superfly, undercutting the movie’s arguable glamourisation of the drug-dealer archetype with songs that portrayed pusherman and addict alike with a grittier, bleaker, more truthful vision, concluding with No Thing On Me, where Mayfield declares “My life is a natural high / The Man can’t put no thing on me”. Stone Junkie – another track Mayfield never cut on any of his studio albums – finds Curtis feeling his way towards the conclusions of Superfly, an edgy, knowing, streetwise musing on recreational chemicals of all stripes that’s also wickedly funny, in a way Mayfield, for all his strengths, rarely is.
“This is something I know everybody knows about,” Curtis says, by way of introduction. “I ain’t gonna point no fingers… I don’t want anyone to point no fingers,” he adds. “Right on… Yeah…” It’s 1971, New York City, a roomful of hipsters, at least a bunch of whom are probably high themselves, and Curtis is fronting a funk band, hardly the most abstemious demographic in the world. Again, while dropping these serious truths, Mayfield’s not looking to judge, to moralise, but to tell it like it is, and the track plays out like a communal airing of sins and failings, a dark, wry smile at the pill-popping rich folks and skin-popping paupers alike, over a squelching, giddy, see-sawing funk, a puncturing of hypocrisies.
Three or so minutes in, the groove drops back, and Curtis takes the microphone. “I know everybody, whose heart is still thumpin’,” he sings, “Is drinkin’, shootin’, snortin’, or smokin’ on somethin’,” to the audience’s ribald guffaws. “That hit home everywhere,” he laughs, and another voice – in his band, or in the crowd – answers, “A lotta junkies out there!” “That ain’t my business, you know what you do,” he sings again, before the song builds into a mass sing-a-long of its hypnotic chorus, the Bitter End’s huddled hipsters in fine voice, until the final run-out groove.
And so closes what is surely, without doubt, one of the finest live albums of all time, although the nascent rock press – the very audience Marv Stuart was presumably suggesting Mayfield redirect himself toward – were slow to pick up on this fact. Rolling Stone magazine – your source for curiously positive reviews of dreadful Mick Jagger solo albums since 1967 – had given 1970’ Curtis a tin-eared pan upon release, scolding If There’s A Hell Below for “dealing with ‘social issues’ in a nice, bland, inoffensive, inconclusive way,” and arguing that Move On Up, perhaps Mayfield’s brightest, boldest anthem, only had “some life to it”. Reviewing Curtis/Live! for the same magazine, Jon Landau – best known for claiming Bruce Springsteen to be rock’n’roll’s future, and emasculating the mighty MC5 as producer of their tinny Back In The USA album – posits that “Mayfield has ignored his melodic gifts while turning out a series of Sly Stone-Norman Whitfield influenced tunes that have been singularly undistinguished… He concentrates more on the lyrics these days and those have become increasingly political and pretentious…. Curtis Mayfield, solo artist, just ain’t happening.”
But listen to the audience at The Bitter End on those four nights – listen to the band playing to them – and you’ll hear the actual truth. Curtis Mayfield, solo artist, was totally happening, a man in transition, creating the greatest music of his life. And tapes were rolling all four nights of Curtis’ Bitter End residency, so here’s hoping some enterprising record label shares some more of that magic at some point in the very near future, so we can again hear that humble soulful man, not trying to offend anyone, but basically telling it like it is. It’ll hit home everywhere.
Wherein the biggest band in the world run aground, leaving the tape recorders rolling to capture rancour, pathos and grace under pressure…
The best live albums are often more than just an artist’s greatest hits recreated in concert: they can offer glimpses of vulnerability beneath an artist’s PR-upholstered surface, illuminate a chapter in their existence, tell a story all their own. And so it is with Fleetwood Mac’s 1980 live album, gleaned from the global tour in support of their 1979 album, Tusk.
It’s an oft-told tale, but the last of a series of seismic membership upheavals that shook Fleetwood Mac throughout the seventies proved the making of the group. Following the traumatic acid-fuelled breakdown of genius founder guitarist Peter Green in 1970, the next few years saw Mac bid farewell to guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan, along with their replacements, Plymouth-born Bob Weston and laconic Californian Bob Welch. The next guitarist to grasp this seemingly poisoned-chalice was young Californian Lindsey Buckingham, who’d previously recorded a 1973 album, Buckingham/Nicks, with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks, with precious little success; Buckingham joined on the understanding that Nicks would also become a member of Fleetwood Mac..
While the arrival of Buckingham/Nicks to the ranks put an end to the constant reshuffling that had plagued Mac in the preceding years, life within the group was no less tumultuous. Infamously, during the writing and recording of the line-up’s second album together, 1977’s Rumours, Nicks parted from Buckingham and the marriage between bassist John McVie and singer/keyboard-player Christine dissolved; in the aftermath, Nicks began an affair with Fleetwood, who was in the process of divorcing from Lloyd. Such soap opera should’ve sunk the band; instead, it was the undercurrent that electrified the group’s best-selling album (and, indeed, one of the best-selling albums of all time).
It was this energy that first entranced me when I was twelve, catching an old Fleetwood Mac concert from their 1982 Mirage tour, rerun on British TV to promote 1987’s Tango In The Night LP. The only Mac I really knew at this point was their latest single, Big Love, which crackled with a delicious darkness, a danger signposted by the guttural love grunts that punctuated its chorus. The group’s performance of The Chain on that 1982 concert tapped into that same dark undertow, from its slow-build open – Buckingham’s bitter dustbowl blues licks coiled menacingly beneath haunted three-part harmonies – to the rage with which Buckingham and Nicks spit lyrics that marked the end of a relationship, very possibly theirs: Lindsey raging in straw cowboy hat, eyes piercing, voice breaking as he barked “If you don’t love me now, you will never love me again”; Stevie, similarly intense in peasant skirt and screwed-tight eyes, incanting “Never break the chain, never break the chain”. The palpable sense of emotional violence between the pair, looking for all the world like their bandmates were gonna have to pull them apart in a couple of moments, left me rapt, and not a little scared.
It wasn’t just the opportunity Rumours offered for listeners to rubberneck at these conjugal dramas that made the album a phenomenon. In the hands of these lyricists, set to such lean, tightly-constructed and melodically sophisticated pop, couched in pristine production by the group (mostly Buckingham) and Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, an alchemical transformation occurred, making irresistible ear-candy of these emotional agonies. Rumours sat atop the Billboard album charts for 31 weeks, won that year’s Grammy award for best Album Of The Year, and has since shifted over 40 million copies.
Like most multi-platinum pop phenomena, at their peak Fleetwood Mac appeared invincible, having survived such profound internal ructions and, indeed, turned them into even further success. And like most multi-platinum pop phenomena, success bred excess, on every level. Tales of Fleetwood Mac’s extravagance during this era are legendary: on tour, the band established a standard for both luxury and hedonism that followers would be unwise to imitate: they travelled in separate limos from show to show, staying at only the finest hotels, and weren’t averse to having grand pianos winched up to Stevie’s hotel room if the whim took her. They played all over the world, to ever-larger audiences in ever-grander surroundings: the tourdates printed on the dust jackets of this live album show that Mac’s nine-month 1979/80 Tusk Tour voyaged from America, to Japan, to Australia and New Zealand, back to America and Canada, over to Europe and finally back across America once more, ending up at the Hollywood Bowl on September 1st 1980.
And yet Fleetwood Mac Live, the album culled from this tour, is no triumphant experience. The band don’t sound invincible; they sound vulnerable, wounded, tentative, haunted. And it’s probably an accurate portrait.
For the 1979 follow-up to Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had taken their excesses with them into the studio. By the group’s own later admission, the endless sessions for the album were fuelled by copious amounts of cocaine, which perhaps exacerbated the perfectionist tendencies of Buckingham. Producing the album in concert with Caillat and Dashut, Buckingham spent over a million dollars tweaking every last note at Los Angeles studio The Village Recorder, enlisting the aid of the University Of Southern California Trojan Marching Band on the album’s title track and lead single, recorded at Dodgers Stadium. They weren’t idling while at the Village Recorder, however, cutting enough material to make Tusk a double album.
It was the most expensive rock album of its time; as the sequel to the massively lucrative Rumours, however, Tusk seemed like a good bet to repeat its predecessor’s success. But the song Tusk, the album’s lead single, was no Go Your Own Way, no Don’t Stop, no Dreams. It was weird, wired, edgy, informed by aftershocks from punk-rock and subsequent movement within rock’s underground, which had somehow reverberated as far as Fleetwood Mac’s lofty strata.
Uninterested in producing a carbon copy of Rumours, Buckingham had indulged more experimental whims; his own songs on Tusk were strange, fitful things, the likes of That’s Enough For Me, Not That Funny and I Know I’m Not Wrong jagged and tense, playful and off-kilter, and not remotely anthemic. Nicks and McVie, meanwhile, delivered some of the best songs of their career, songs of substance, profound and haunting. In fact, there was much magic contained within Tusk’s four lengthy sides, as later critics would recognise.
In 1979, however, Tusk received a cool welcome. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, admiring Buckingham’s unique production, wrote “This is like reggae, or Eno,” but also added that “Buckingham is attuned enough to get exciting music out of a sound so spare and subtle it reveals the limits of Christine McVie’s simplicity and shows Stevie Nicks up for the mooncalf she’s always been.” In the US, it charted no higher than #4, and while it was awarded Double Platinum status for sales of over 2 million copies soon after release, sales swiftly dropped off, as word-of-mouth circulated that this was no Rumours II.
So it’s perhaps unsurprising that, when Christine McVie introduces Over And Over at the end of Fleetwood Mac Live’s first side, the audience’s response is so muted. “Well, we haven’t played anything off Tusk yet,” she begins, with a tentativeness a million miles away from the show-bizzy grandstanding of, say, Kiss’s Paul Stanley. Having name-checked the title of the group’s latest album, she might’ve expected some applause of recognition from the fans at Oklahoma City’s Myriad Arena that night. But it never really comes – they’re here for Rumours, not its red-headed stepchild of a sequel – and Christine sounds a little shaken as she continues: “So we’re going to try some out tonight… For you… And, uh, the first one of which is actually the first track on side one…”
There’s a fatalism to her voice, as she continues, that suggests this isn’t the first night that a mention of Tusk has failed to fire up the faithful; indeed, the Myriad show, on August 24th 1980, came seven nights before the tour’s end, and only Christine can answer how many such moments she endured over the 105 shows that preceded it.
The real mystery of Fleetwood Mac Live is why the group would allow the release of a document that preserves such moments for perpetuity, capturing what was evidently a difficult tour for the group. Given the relatively disappointing sales of Tusk, especially in reference to its budget, it’s likely that Fleetwood Mac Live was assembled as a sop to the label, a quick, cheap release to make some money from the franchise.
It’s a strange album, and, especially, a strange live album. Its tracks were culled from eleven dates on the Tusk tour, and while some selections clearly capture something remarkable that happened that night – the fiery, epic I’m So Afraid in Cleveland, an intimate performance of Landslide from London’s Wembley Stadium – the reasoning behind why certain other tracks were chosen for release is opaque. For example, Dreams and Don’t Stop, the smash hit singles from Rumours, are represented here by cuts recorded at a Paris sound-check, the former a sleepy glide that’s far from magical, the latter a shoddy, half-hearted take that just sort of peters out to silence, evoking absolutely none of the optimism of the Rumours original. Why so exacting a studio maven as Buckingham would allow these substandard tracks space on Fleetwood Mac Live is a mystery suggesting indifference or perhaps even self-sabotage on the band’s part.
Or perhaps it was their intention all along for Fleetwood Mac Live to offer up an unforgiving portrait of where the group were at on the Tusk tour, warts and all. The album sleeve bears a soft-focus black and white shot of the band onstage, taking their bows at the close of a show. The reportage photos from the tour contained within the gatefold capture Stevie all draped in flowing dresses and playing up to her hippy witch persona, Lindsey kohl-eyed and lean, screaming and pressing his head into John McVie’s chest during one mid-song crescendo, Christine peering shyly over her accordion. Bottom left, Mick Fleetwood is captured in three frames, slobbering and mad-eyed behind the kit, looking frankly deranged, and perhaps rabid. Across the centre of the gatefold are individual close-ups of the group looking glamorous but roadworn (or roadworn but glamorous), a bearded, sweaty, dead-eyed Mick looking like a junkie rabbi, while Lindsey stares on, pin-eyed and intense. The vibe of these candid snaps is edgy, suggesting just how unhinged a circus a Fleetwood Mac tour might be.
Some of the best moments of Fleetwood Mac Live – and there are many –come when this vibe surfaces onstage, and the band cut loose and get weird. Not That Funny, an odd three-minute New Wave-y sketch on Tusk, stretches out to nine minutes of gonzo glam-rock gooning here, Lindsey hollering and howling and screaming throughout like Hasil Adkins in Gucci pants, and nudging the song into a one-sided call’n’response through another Tusk oddity, Don’t Make Me Wait. A muscular barrel through Peter Green-era blues Oh Well, meanwhile, sees Buckingham pull off needling, hard-nosed solos that prove California hadn’t made the Mac go soft.
A mordant, dread-wreathed I’m So Afraid is even more impressive, Buckingham closing the song with a four-minute solo that begins by mirroring the song’s bleak medley, before maniacally twisting it into a shrieking, screaming din heavy with drama and menace, jerky screeches of guitar ringing out like the staccato strings of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho theme. It’s the sound of someone at the end of some particular rope, the sound you might imagine the tantrum-tossed, ragged, hedonistic types captured on the sleeve to Fleetwood Mac Live making. It’s the sound of falling apart.
The charms of Fleetwood Mac Live don’t just lie in such fried freakouts. While the aforementioned Rumours singles suffer in comparison to their studio counterparts, Nicks hits Rhiannon and Sara are, respectively, fierce and luminous, while the riffing camaraderie of Monday Morning and the devil-on-its-heels rockabilly of Don’t Let Me Down Again rock out with vigour. A feral Go Your Own Way channels the spiteful energy I’d seen on the 1982 concert version of The Chain, a stung and cuckolded Lindsey letting loose. And two new songs, Stevie’s Fireflies and Christine’s One More Night, recorded at a special show before crew and friends at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, hold their own against the more familiar material.
But it’s the quieter moments that touch deepest here, perhaps lent extra poignancy by the vulnerability Fleetwood Mac display more readily on Live than on their multi-platinum studio outings. The mood backstage at these shows was possibly anything but triumphant; it’s hard not to imagine a melancholy pervading the ranks. It’s a mood that haunts Live’s gentlest tracks.
Live certainly plays to the group’s supernatural ability to conjure intimacy even when playing vast barns like Wembley Arena, before tens of thousands. That first track off Side One of Tusk that stirred so little applause from the Oklahoma City audience, Over And Over, is one of the album’s best: fragile, bruised, Christine pleading gently, “Don’t turn me away, no, don’t let me down,” followed by a hopeless, aching sigh of “What can I do to keep you around?” that leads into Lindsey’s sad, delicate guitar coda, a solo by turns stricken and heroic, like Christine’s lyric, its bittersweet chime shaded by her mournful Hammond chords.
Most remarkable, however, are the two folkiest moments on Live. Looser, slower than its Rumours counterpart, Never Going Back Again finds a lone Buckingham bringing a hush to the McKale Centre in Tucson, Arizona, four nights before the close of the tour, whispering and crooning and hollering as his acoustic plucks the haunting melody though ringing highs and pain-etched lows.
Stevie, meanwhile, brings the hush down to a total silence at London’s Wembley Arena for Landslide, a song I’ve since heard played many times over on countless Mac and solo Nicks bootlegs, though never so plaintively, so gently, so movingly. Cradled by Lindsey’s acoustic guitar, and later joined by Christine’s sun-dappled keys, Stevie brings alive the song’s dashed hopes, sounding by turns forlorn and hopeful and wise and sad. At times, she sings the song’s fragile tune in milky sweet tones, the dignity within a struggle; at others, her voice breaks, but not her spirit, urging the words on to the next chorus, sounding so small but still making a sound, and finding her strength again to sing of her reflection in those snow-covered hills one more time. The final note draws the loudest, longest ovation of the album, and deserves every second of it.
Upon its release in 1980, Fleetwood Mac Live rose as high as #14 in the Billboard album charts, a more-than-respectable placing for a live album, especially one following the disappointment of Tusk. The album would be trailed by two singles, Nicks’ previously unreleased Fireflies, which charted at #60, and a backstage recording of the Beach Boys’ Farmer’s Daughter at the Santa Monica concert, which didn’t chart, but was entirely charming, stripping the band’s sound back to just John McVie’s chugging Cali-surf bassline, Mick Fleetwood’s toms, and Lindsey, Stevie and Christine’s spectral three-part harmonies.
In the years that followed Fleetwood Mac Live, the group’s commercial fortunes waxed and waned some more, before Lindsey exited after 1987’s Tango In The Night, marking the end of the Rumours-era line-up. Tusk has latterly been recognised as something of a ‘lost classic’, redeemed in adulatory essays by the likes of Simon Reynolds, while the Mac themselves have enjoyed something of a critical renaissance, and are certainly held in much higher esteem than many of their 70s pop megastar contemporaries.
The Eagles, say, with their cocaine fantasies and their cod-Western fringing, seemed to have so little going on beneath their Hollywood veneer, and perhaps that was their attraction: they were a fantasy to be bought into. But there was flesh and blood, self-doubt and agony, behind the airy polished gossamer-pop of Fleetwood Mac, rancour hiding beneath the FM-friendly sheen. In an era when rockstars were aloof and superhuman, Fleetwood Mac weren’t afraid to get hurt and show you the bruises.
That’s what you hear on Fleetwood Mac Live: a vulnerability, a nakedness, amid the grandiosity that makes everything suddenly real, and all the more affecting. As documentary evidence of where the group were at at this point in their turbulent career, it’s pretty damned vivid, lurid sleeve and all. But it also offers irrevocable truth that, even in their lowest moments, Fleetwood Mac could conjure up brilliance.
To some, live albums are the worst kind of fan exploitation, playing upon the dedicated fan’s completist impulses, labels reselling the kids songs they already own as superior album versions without even having to pay for studio time (indeed, the artist probably got paid for the live performance itself). Not a bad gig: you bet the music industry wishes it could get away with it today.
To such critics, the live album is, at best, unnecessary discography clutter, though live albums commit more serious sins as well. There are the fake live albums, studio sessions over-dubbed with canned audience noise and passed off as verité concert recordings. James Brown’s 1970 double set Sex Machine is one such counterfeit: while touted as a concert album “Recorded live at home in Augusta, Georgia with his bad self”, only the second disk was taped at Augusta’s Bell Auditorium in 1969. The entire first disk was instead recorded in the studio in Cincinnati, Ohio with the Godfather’s new band the JBs almost a year later (though perhaps the crowd sounds date from the Augusta gig). Doesn’t make the performances any less electrifying, though Sex Machine does remind us that the Hardest Working Man In Show Business could be one of its canniest businessmen as well.
Then there are the live albums that aren’t quite as live as they should be, where the artists’ egos have pushed them back into the studio to tweak imperfect performances with overdubs. This, of course, defeats the purpose of the live album – to capture the artist in the moment, their talents unadorned by studio trickery – though many celebrated ‘live albums’, including Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous, are rumoured to be guilty of this misdeed. And perhaps tidying up the bum notes in the studio delivers a ‘better’ listening experience than serving up the warts and all, although in Jimmy McDonagh’s masterful biography of the grungefather, Shakey, Neil Young’s longtime producer foil David Briggs argues that Young’s sweetening of the vocal harmonies on the 1991 Crazy Horse live album Weld robbed the raw tapes of their rustic bite).1
Perhaps the worst live albums are the ones the preserve for perpetuity an artist’s off-night, concert recordings that add nothing to the studio originals, and maybe even subtract from them. Quite why Mick Jagger decided the world needed to hear him breathlessly yelp and bark noises that only vaguely approximate the lyrics to If You Won’t Rock Me on the Stones’ pedestrian Love You Live from 1977 is anyone’s guess, though I’d wager the answer came with a dollar sign at the end of it. And Love You Live is by no means even the worst Rolling Stones live album out there.
Live albums can also hold a freakish fairground mirror to an artist’s worst qualities and grotesquely magnify them. Case in point: the soundtrack to Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert movie The Song Remains The Same. Now, I’ve a hard drive full of illicit soundboard recordings from Zep’s first few US tours that attest to their lean, leonine majesty, and I’ll concede that there are some tracks on Song that are keepers, even their infamous half-hour descent through Dazed & Confused, which in places summons a furious dread akin to Miles Davis’ Agharta. But seriously… Moby Dick? I’m a man who loves drum solos – a man who once purchased a bootleg CD that was just an hour of John Bonham rehearsing his drum parts for In Through The Out Door – but without the movie’s accompanying visuals of Bonham hammering a tom with his Barnsley Chop fists, Moby Dick is everything clueless rock hacks used to pillory Led Zeppelin for: leaden, bloated and pretentious. I’m stunned to discover that it lasts only eleven minutes, as it has always felt at least twice as long as Dazed.
Regardless, I love live albums. I love everything about the live album format, the idea that the moments or evenings they document are epochal and worthy of preservation, the narratives they aim to present and the stories they sometimes tell in spite of themselves. I love them, bum notes, indulgent solos, excessive stage banter and all.
I grew up in a home where music was forever playing somewhere. My dad had spent the Swinging Sixties as a young man in Swinging London, first as a Mod and then as a Hippie (of sorts), but at all times an omnivoracious music lover who made the very most of his teens and early twenties in what must have very much felt The Right Place at The Right Time. Dad was out every night of the weekend, and weeknights too when he could afford it, staying out as late as amphetamines would allow.
Shortly before I was born, dad had developed multiple sclerosis, and was often confined to a wheelchair. He liked nothing better than to spin yarns about his wild, golden youth, when love was free and thrills were cheap and he could get within arm’s reach of rock and pop’s greatest legends. He saw them all: The Who and The Stones and the Small Faces, the Cream and Vanilla Fudge, Georgie Fame and Geno Washington, the Pink Floyd and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and so many more. He saw them at clubs like the Ricky-Tick, the Marquee, the Bag O’Nails, the Roundhouse, bringing these magical evenings to life in his reminiscences. And, as some classic album spun on the stereo, he’d swear that it didn’t sound anywhere as good as ‘the real thing’, live onstage.
By the time I was old enough to rifle through the family record collection on my own recognizance, it had been somewhat impoverished by what my dad alleged were a series of light-fingered house-movers who’d pilfered his Led Zep and Velvets albums (but had curiously left all his Manhattan Transfer and Leo Sayer records exactly where they’d found them). When, as a budding young rock freak, I started to get curious about The Who, the only album of theirs dad still owned was Live At Leeds. With its paltry six tracks and warnings on the hand-written label of “crackling noises”, it scarcely seemed an ideal introduction to the band. But the internet wouldn’t be invented for several more years, so I made do and laid the vinyl on the turntable.
In my memory, what followed was much like the scene in Almost Famous where the young ‘Cameron Crowe’ experiences some kind of nirvana sat beside his sister’s record player, but that might just be the power of cinema at work. What’s for sure is I was immediately swept up by Live At Leeds’ unbridled power, how very loud it sounded even at modest volume, the opening thunder-crack of Young Man Blues, and the epic, adventurous detours of the album’s sixteen minute excursion through My Generation. I can, have and shall again wax at length about the brilliance of Live At Leeds, but for this introduction, suffice it to say it was enough to win me over to the live album’s cause.
As I began my own journey through music, live albums became the route via which I explored the gaps in our family record collection, the ocean of sounds that lay beyond it. Live albums were a better first taste of an artist than a Greatest Hits, I reasoned, because the performances were often wilder, the solos often longer and because – precocious rockist that I was – if a band couldn’t ‘cut it’ on the live stage, they probably weren’t worth hearing in the studio. As theories go, well, it wasn’t watertight. But I did get to hear a lot of great live albums along the way.
One of the reasons I started this project of writing a series of essays about the most memorable, remarkable live albums was because I thought that the live album was pretty much dead as a format.
That’s not exactly true, though. While the record store shelves might no longer creak under the weight of standalone live albums by the stars of the day, the live DVD has replaced them, fulfilling the purposes of the album with the added dimension of visuals. Unheard live recordings are regularly excavated to bolster the track-listings of deluxe reissues, further incentive for the fans to repurchase albums they already own. Pearl Jam press up and sell ‘official bootleg’ albums of every show they play, Fugazi are in the process of making hundreds of hours of archival live tapes available to fans, while Concert Live is just one of a number of companies who set up next to the merch stand at concerts, offering freshly-burned CDs of the show the fans have just seen.
The arrival of the internet, meanwhile, has liberated the formerly-underground world of bootlegs, illicit live tapes recorded without the artists’ approval.2 Formerly, to get your hands on a muddy audience recording of your favourite band in concert you’d have to lay down heavy cash at a record fair or trade with a stranger via snail-mail, hoping you weren’t about to be ripped off worse that the bootlegged artist. Now there exist a plethora of online file-trading networks and sites offering Recordings Of Indeterminate Origins from the past, helping establish a vast communal library of unofficial tapings, enriching our knowledge of modern music’s history, if not the artists who performed it. And many current artists share a more benevolent attitude towards the tapers, authorising fans to make and share their own live recordings, since it clearly never did The Grateful Dead any harm.
Clearly, fans still want live albums, and not just so they can own a further relic of their heroes. Sometimes they serve simply as mementoes, aides de memoire of a wonderful show the purchaser might have attended. Sometimes they capture artists performing with a freedom, an abandon suffocated by the studio, the roar of the fans urging them on to perform wilder solos, curios from their back catalogues, choice cover versions or radically different readings of familiar favourites.
Some chronicle a key moment in an artist’s development, illuminating the narrative like a chapter from a particularly fine biography, affording the listener the chance to listen in on some history happening, like James Brown performing Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud at Dallas Memorial Auditorium a mere three weeks after he cut the single, during the fiery Summer of 1968, or a reformed Johnny Cash singing Cocaine Blues before the cons of Folsom Prison, or, in the case of one Stones bootleg, Mick Jagger preening through Under My Thumb as Meredith Hunter is murdered in the audience at Altamont Speedway.
Some serve to fill the void left by an artist’s sudden passing. Jeff Buckley’s slim catalogue has been swelled by several posthumous live releases; the best, by far, is the Legacy Edition of his 1993 EP Live At Sin-E, expanding the 4 song original to 34 tracks of originals, unlikely covers and banter that bring to life Buckley’s legendary pre-fame coffee house shows in all their impromptu, mercurial glory. Some further reveal the skill of the artists who performed them, as they play without the aid of studio wizardry, flying without a net, recreating their opuses with only the tools before them and making their achievements all the more impressive.
Some evoke a unique context and ambience that complements the music, be it Iggy Pop dodging beer bottles thrown by angry bikers as his Stooges play some of their sleaziest material near the end of their career, or the Velvets providing background music as New York street poets order drugs near Brigid Polk’s tape recorder, or a newly-solo Curtis Mayfield performing a hushed intimate set at legendary folk club The Bitter End and proving that, stripped of the expertly orchestrated strings that upholster his excellent studio albums, his songs were still sublime.
Some are simply those artists’ definitive statements. High Time is one of the greatest rock’n’roll albums ever, but it’s the MC5’s debut album Kick Out The Jams – a chaotic set of “liquid frenzy”, feedback and free jazz-fried rock’n’roll recorded live at the group’s regular hangout, Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, in 1968 – that articulates their revolutionary, incendiary mission best out of their whole discography. And Live At Leeds, the disk that first sold me on live albums, captures the primal, adventurous might of The Who better than any of their studio releases and, in its original vinyl incarnation, contains not a wasted second.
Its live albums like these that I want to celebrate in the essays and postings that will follow. Some albums you’ll already be familiar with; others, perhaps, you won’t. Most will be commercially available live albums, though I also have in mind a few ROIOs and concert DVDs that I also want to talk about. Hopefully I can throw some new light on this maligned genre. At the very least, again, I’ll get to hear a lot of great live albums along the way.
Stevie Chick
Footnotes 1 The cut’n’paste work isn’t just limited to the artists’ performances, either – I swear that if you listen closely enough to The Rolling Stones’ 1991 live album Flashpoint you can hear a pissed-off girl in the audience shouting “Paint It Black… Paint It Black… Paint It Black, you assholes!”, which seems unremarkable – Paint It Black is, after all, an awesome song, perhaps even when performed by Steel Wheels-era Stones – until you spin the Stones’ far-superior 1970 LP Get Yer Ya-Yas Out: The Rolling Stones In Concert and hear exactly the same voice begging for Paint It Black before that album’s version of Sympathy For The Devil.
2 For a thorough exploration of the phenomenon, I rabidly insist you read Clinton Heylin’s excellent tome Bootleg.
