Much like young Hesh Slay’s aversion to Title Tracks, I also had an inexplicable distaste for Live Albums for my first couple of decades. Albeit mostly circumstantial; I didn’t have access to many growing up. Not that I cared either way.
Thinking back on it now though, that aversion may have been born out of my preference for the sonic polishing of studio albums, a result of growing up on 90s radio and then, later, MTV. Radio hits were held to a particular production quality so that they would still sound good on anyone’s shitty car speakers.* This was all I knew. But live records just aren’t made the same way as studio albums; they’re at the mercy of the band’s sobriety, or potential lack thereof, of the cat at the soundboard, of the temperament of the gear that night. During a live recording, every little *whatever* you make will stay there. When you’re used to polished music, the imperfect realness is almost jarring.
In my twenties, I found myself managing a skate shop with a cat named Javier. One day, he asked me how I felt about live albums, barely waiting for my reply before he turned toward the aux, and tells me, “this one’s gonna change your life.” Yeah, sure man, heard that before. I braced myself for the incoming dread, but that ship never came to port. The shop’s speakers surrounded us with the intensifying volume of a roaring crowd. From behind the mic, a blasphemous “woo!” of a man whose identity I was still yet unsure. Then, the drummer counted us in, and the guitarist chugged riffs like the lone oarsman for Charon on the River Styx sailing straight for the Underworld. And then, the lone beckoning of what can only be described as a madman, ”Come on! Let’s go fucking crazy!”
Oh shit. It was the Prince of Darkness himself, exactly how he sounds day-to-day: unedited, unmixed, and completely out-of-his-mind Ozzy. Through his unprocessed voice, I could feel his mission to let the world know that he’s more than just Black Sabbath. I could just feel it - that he IS darkness manifest, the Madman. My conversion was quicker than if John the Baptist himself dunked my head in the Jordan River. The catalyst was the 1982 live recording of Speak of the Devil blasphemed upon us at The Ritz in NYC.
The reality of my aversion was that I just didn’t get it. I had never set foot on a stage or in a studio yet. It didn’t take long after I experienced both to appreciate the unprocessed versions of the same exact songs I loved once they had been mixed, mastered, and packaged for MTV. I understood what lies behind that rawness. I realized that a live album is so much more than a sub-par recording of songs I can hear better elsewhere. A live album is archival. It’s a moment frozen in time. Every time you put one on and the needle starts scratching, a weird temporal anomaly happens that not even Einstein, Tesla, or Hawking could explain nor theorize. I didn’t understand any of this until I finally grasped the raw purity behind the live album, and I have Ozzy - and Javier - to thank for it.
Whenever we first hear a song, it imprints itself upon our brain, etching itself into our memory with everything else that we’re thinking and feeling and experiencing at that point in time. It becomes OURS. But a live album is THEIRS - it’s the artists. It’s THEIR memory and their experiences and their feelings on that night, recorded for all of time. Live albums are, dare I say it?, the purest of albums. When a recorded set is pieced together complete with fuck ups, rushed tempos, missed fills, and everything in between, it feels timeless and real. And that’s what makes a live album fucking rad.
*An actual quote from one of my own recording sessions from a previous life
So anyway, here’s April.
“[APRILIVE]”
APRIL 1 - SLADE - SLADEST, “LOOK WOT YOU DUN”
APRIL 2 - GEORGE THOROGOOD & THE DESTROYERS - BAD TO THE BONE, “BAD TO THE BONE”
APRIL 3 - CIRCLE JERKS - GROUP SEX, “BEVERLY HILLS”
APRIL 4 - OZZY OSBOURNE - SPEAK OF THE DEVIL, “FAIRIES WEAR BOOTS”
APRIL 5 - NIRVANA - ALMOST EVERYTHING / THE BBC SESSIONS, “SPANK THRU”
APRIL 6 - HORRORPOPS - HELL YEAH!, “GHOULS”
APRIL 7 - DESAPARECIDOS - READ MUSIC/SPEAK SPANISH, “MAÑANA”
APRIL 8 - THE CRAMPS - NEW YORK LIVE 1979, “TEENAGE WEREWOLF”
APRIL 9 - EVERY TIME I DIE - EX LIVES, “TYPICAL MIRACLE”
APRIL 10 - ZZ TOP - DEGÃœELLO, “CHEAP SUNGLASSES”
APRIL 11 - AEROSMITH - ROCKS, “BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN”
APRIL 12 - THEM CROOKED VULTURES - THEM CROOKED VULTURES, “MIND ERASER, NO CHASER”
APRIL 13 - ROD STEWART - EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY, “MAGGIE MAY”
APRIL 14 - DOLLY PARTON - 9 TO 5 AND ODD JOBS, “9 TO 5”
APRIL 15 - WU-TANG CLAN - THE W, “GRAVEL PIT”
APRIL 16 - STYX - PIECES OF EIGHT, “RENEGADE”
APRIL 17 - COMMODORES - MIDNIGHT MAGIC, “SEXY LADY”
APRIL 18 - BLINK - 182 - TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS AND JACKET, “FIRST DATE”
APRIL 19 - GRAVEYARD - HISINGEN BLUES, “AIN’T FIT TO LIVE HERE”
APRIL 20 - CHEECH & CHONG - CHEECH & CHONG, “UP IN SMOKE”
APRIL 21 - BAD COP / BAD COP - NOT SORRY, “I’M ALRIGHT”
APRIL 22 - THE RUNAWAYS - THE RUNAWAYS, “CHERRY BOMB”
APRIL 23 - GODZILLA JAPANESE HARDCORE COMPILATION
APRIL 24 - AFI - BLACK SAILS IN THE SUNSET, “NO POETIC DEVICE”
APRIL 25 - THE MONKEES - THE MONKEES GREATEST HITS, “(I’M NOT YOUR) STEPPIN’ STONE”
APRIL 26 - RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE - RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, “KILLING IN THE NAME”
APRIL 27 - DOLLY PARTON - LITTLE SPARROW, “SHINE”
APRIL 28 - MUDHONEY - DIGITAL GARBAGE, “NEXT MASS EXTINCTION”
APRIL 29 - STANLEY BLACK - CUBAN MOONLIGHT, “AQUELLOS OJOS VERDES”
APRIL 30 - QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE - ERA VULGARIS, “3’s & 7’s”
You know the drill by now. I’ll surface again sometime next month with yet another list and rambling. As promised, here’s my playlist of savory savvy selects from this months albums. Enjoy blasphemously.
Skål, scalawags.
In Hesh we trust,
S. Jones