Rush - All The World's A Stage - Not Recorded Live

Another from my Not Live series.

I could have been a massive Rush fan. I had tickets to see them on one of their first headlining tours during my formative years but the Blizzard of 78 snowed me in. I often wonder if I had seen them live, would I have reacted differently to them.

I have nothing but love and respect for the guys and their talent but I lost interest from Hemispheres on. The song Tom Sawyer did nothing for me. I was never much for prog and it seemed they were heading more in that direction.

That said, I did listen to the live album and 2112 often and the followup to the live album contained my favorite Rush song, Closer To The Heart which I included as a bonus encore song. Enjoy.

01 Bastille Day
02 Anthem
03 Fly By Night
04 In The Mood
05 Something For Nothing
06 Lakeside Park
07 2112
08 By-Tor & The Snow Dog
09 In The End
10 Working Man
11 Finding My Way
12 What You're Doing
13 Closer To The Heart

Reality Notes

For me Rush suffered the fate of most of the popular bands of the mid 70s. I had just entered my unhappy, anti-radio, folky/glam rock phase and anything I wasn't already emotionally attached to went by the wayside. It wasn't until the mid 80s that I opened myself up and discovered a new appreciation for artists like Prince and Elvis Costello though I never really re-warmed up to many of those mid 70s bands I shunned back then. Mostly I discovered a lot of artists that I never gave a fair chance to back in my snobby phase.

This collection can be seen as a roadmap of Rush's journey from young upstarts to established mega stars. Every studio album before the live album is represented. The band had a unique sound that they honed and developed over the years which for me culminated with the A Farewell To Kings album. After that they seemed repetitive to me but that observation comes from someone who hasn't really listened to much after that anyway so take that with a grain of salt.

I modified the original cover a bit using the pic from the back of the 2112 album.

KISS - End of the Road - Not Live

I had other plans this week but this one needed to go up instead. This is part of my now ongoing Not Live series. This was thrown together at the last minute so there might be some volume matching issues. I'll do an update if needed.

Last week KISS played the first show of their End of the Road tour. I'm not going to get into any of the "debates" that the different fan factions are having. For me this is the time to be celebrating one of my favorite bands as they say good night one more time to their fans.

KISS was my first musical obsession. My brother brought home the first KISS album in 1976 and by the time Destroyer came out he had all of the back catalog. My first KISS LP purchase of my own was Love Gun in 1977. 1977 was also when we first saw them live on the Rock and Roll Over tour which still featured the Destroyer stage set and costumes.

I had originally planned on making studio versions of their first two live albums (might still post then in the future) but someone posted the setlist for the first show of the new tour online and I decided to recreate that instead. It's a great setlist full of classic KISS from all eras. While a little light on the non-makeup era and a bit heavy on tracks from the first album and Destroyer, really, in the end the only song I could do without is Beth. It will be interesting to see if the setlist changes throughout the three year tour. Enjoy.

01 Detroit Rock City
02 Shout It Out Loud
03 Deuce
04 Say Yeah
05 Heaven's On Fire
06 War Machine
07 Lick It Up
08 100,000 Years
09 God Of Thunder
10 Cold Gin
11 Psycho Circus
12 I Love It Loud
13 Hide Your Heart
14 Let Me Go Rock 'n' Roll
15 Love Gun
16 I was Made For Lovin' You
17 Black Diamond
18 Beth
19 Do You Love Me
20 Rock And Roll All Nite

Reality Notes

I took a couple of liberties with the song sources. I chose alternate sources for three songs. Detroit Rock City and Black Diamond are the Double Platinum mixes. Detroit Rock City is minus the intro/outro vignette. It's cool when you listen to the album as a whole but gets a bit annoying after repeated listens in a mixtape setting, just get to the song already. Black Diamond, which closes the first album, has an effect at the end of the tape slowly slowing down until it stops. This goes on for at least a full minute and like the vignettes on Detroit Rock City. can get frustrating on repeated listens. The Double Platinum version does not do this.

The last alternate version of a song is I Was Made For Loving You. For those of you that do not know, the original version from the Dynasty album was KISS' disco hit. In 2008 KISS released the album Jigoku-Retsuden, at first only in Japan, then later included as a bonus disc with Sonic Boom. The album consisted of 15 re-recorded classics. For the most part the re-recordings are faithful to the original but I Was Made For Loving You was done more in the style of how they were playing the song live. With tougher guitars and stripped of it's disco beat the song is much more listenable if not actually enjoyable.

I assembled the cover using elements from the KISS Online landing page announcing the tour.

REO Speedwagon - Not Live: You Get What You Play For

A while back I posted a Peter Frampton comp that recreated his Comes Alive! album using the studio versions. I was wondering if other live albums could be given the same treatment. Here is the first of those efforts.

In the 70s, double live albums were all the rage. For many artists, their live albums were their breakthrough moment when the general public took greater notice of them. Some breakthroughs had long lasting results pushing the band into the upper elite of rockdom, others were brief flashes of stardom that gave them their 15 minutes of fame before being sent back into near obscurity.

REO Speedwagon fell somewhere in between. Their live album gave them enough of a push to see them through at least two albums that would spawn several chart hits.The hits would slow down as they seemed to push their MOR ballads over their more snappier rock tracks. By the early 90s they were once again playing clubs and the festival circuit. They still tour and record but only the singer Kevin Cronin and keyboardist Neal Doughty are from the classic line-up and the keyboardist being the only founding member. Gary Richrath, the guitarist from the classic line-up who sparred many times with Cronin over creative control left the band in 1989 and passed away in 2015.

01 Like You Do
02 Lay Me Down
03 Any Kind Of Love
04 Being Kind (Can Hurt Someone Sometimes)
05 Keep Pushin'
06 (Only A) Summer Love
07 Son Of A Poor Man
08 (I Believe) Our Time Is Gonna Come
09 Flying Turkey Trot
10 157 Riverside Avenue
11 Ridin' The Storm Out
12 Music Man
13 Little Queenie
14 Golden Country
15 Roll With The Changes
16 Time For Me To Fly

Reality Notes

In the 70s it seemed everyone and their grandma released double live albums. Some were good, some were not so good and a few were amazing. REO's was good but I'm not sure about amazing. I think the downside of these albums is that if this was the band's breakthrough then the live versions of their songs become the definitive versions over the studio versions. This tends to minimize the importance of those studio albums that came before. Though the die hard fans will seek out anything and everything related to their favorite band the casual fan will stick with the live album or the greatest hits package.

Personally I prefer the studio over the stage. Even as a musician I prefer recording over performing. While I enjoy the immediacy and 'in the moment'-ness of performing live, the studio has an additional creative layer to it. Painting with sound as the cliche goes.

For REO, their live album was where it all came together. They had struggled through their six previous studio albums, riding out personnel changes that included three different singers. Kevin Cronin joined the band for their second album and quit while recording their third. His replacement lasted two more albums before Cronin rejoined them for the sixth album. The setlist for the album draws from four of the six studio albums. Completely ignoring albums four and five which Cronin had no input into, being recorded during the time he was away from the band.

So this comp features three different singers. Although the band has released some tracks from the third album that feature Cronin's voice before they were replaced I chose to stick with the officially released versions. As a bonus, similar to what I did with the Frampton comp, I included the hit songs from the follow up album.

I used the original album cover as a template for the cover I made. Turned out nice I think.

Peter Frampton - Comes Alive! (The Studio Versions)

Here's one just for fun. Back when I was putting together "Best Of" comps of bands that I did not want their full discography on my iPods I threw this one together for Peter Frampton. Even though I have most of his catalog those songs that demand repeat listenings are mostly all contained on his live album Frampton Comes Alive!. There are not too many live albums that I can call "go to" listens and this one, while great, was played so much that it has almost worn out its welcome. So I gathered all of the studio versions of each song from Comes Alive! and duplicated the track sequence. As a bonus, I included I'm In You, Peter's hit from his follow up album of the same name.

A new way to listen to a classic album and it will fit on a single CD.

01 Baby (Somethin's Happening)
02 Doobie Wah
03 Show Me the Way
04 It's a Plain Shame
05 All I Want to Be (Is by Your Side)
06 Wind of Change
07 Nassau/Baby, I Love Your Way
08 I Wanna Go to the Sun
09 Penny for Your Thoughts
10 (I'll Give You) Money
11 Shine On
12 Jumpin Jack Flash
13 Lines on My Face
14 Do You Feel Like We Do
15 I'm In You

Reality Notes

As you can see not a lot of imagination went into this. I almost considered not posting a download for this one as all songs are available for purchase. The cover is another of the many iPod small screen friendly covers I was making at the time.