live from your speakers

An Alice Cooper live record is missing something – something essential to the understanding of who Alice Cooper was (and largely is, even to this day). That something is the visual experience of seeing Cooper in a concert setting, a...

Live albums – particularly, those from the ‘70s, the veritable dawn of such things – make great time capsules, terrific snapshots of a particular moment in time. For most artists of a certain vintage, they represent the highest of high...

Any conversation about socially conscious pop and R&B of the ‘60s and ‘70s needs to include Curtis Mayfield, though his name is often overshadowed by those of other artists who were doing career-best work in that era. It was a...

Boy bands currently making a killing on the charts and concert circuit should take a look back in the annals of pop music history to see how global domination was really done. Of course, they should start with the Beatles...

So many bands break up in a state of acrimony, and that’s a shame. When the singer and lead guitar player, for example, can’t be in the same room anymore, much less share the same stage, and the band blows...

Let’s admit it – most of our most beloved live records have had some studio sweetening performed on them. Some EQ here, a nudge of the vocal level there. Sometimes a guitar might have fallen out of tune, or a...

The tragedies that befell Rush drummer Neil Peart in 1997 and 1998 – his daughter was killed in an auto accident, followed less than a year later by his wife’s death from cancer – shut down the band for four...

At the time of its release in late 1980, Fleetwood Mac’s LIVE seemed like an afterthought – a contractual obligation, or at least a stop-gap effort between the 1979 double album TUSK and 1982’s MIRAGE (a period also filled by...

Lou Reed’s death in 2013 gave critics and listeners alike a reason/excuse to revisit his body of work and the opportunity to reassess what they heard. Some of the most interesting artifacts could be found on Reed’s live records –...