The Best Live Albums of All Time

Despite their tremendous strengths as a live band, at times experimental to the point of abrasion, at others commendably intimate even in the large venues their popularity demands, Radiohead have only released one live album in a career now spanning two decades. So it makes sense that it’s drawn from their touring in support of Kid A and Amnesiac, a period many consider their peak, both in the studio and in concert. Seven of the eight songs here are from those albums and every one of them is re-approached in a way that makes them more effective in a live setting.

“The National Anthem” opens with radio transmissions and substitutes fuzzier bass and guitar clatter for the horn section on the studio version, which likely would have been impossible to recreate live. On Amnesiac, “Like Spinning Plates” is an entirely different song called “I Will” (later released in two different versions) played backward, and even sung over backward, the end result proving quite affecting, if understandably strange. Here, Thom Yorke just sits down at a piano and recreates the whole clusterfuck as a straight-ahead song; an insightful reinterpretation. On Kid A, “Idioteque” is a shiny, forward-thinking piece of electronica serving as a perfect bedding for an intense vocal workout by Yorke. Here, it’s reworked as something that Kraftwerk might have rigged up in 1974, recalling the birth of electronic music rather than trying to predict its future. All of this ends with “True Love Waits,” a solo acoustic turn from Yorke mostly noteworthy for only ever appearing on this album.

In 1972, the Memphis-based soul label Stax Records set out to do the impossible; organize an outdoor concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, basically free (tickets were a dollar), commemorating the seven-year anniversary of the Watts riots, all filmed and recorded for an accompanying movie. Going down on August 20, the concert showcased a wide range of soul, blues, gospel and R&B artists of the era ranging from obscure to famous, including Albert King, Carla Thomas, David Porter, Eddie Floyd, Ernie Hines, Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Jones, Johnnie Taylor, Kim Weston, Little Milton, Luther Ingram, Mel & Tim, Rufus Thomas, the Bar-Kays, the Dramatics, the Emotions, the Golden 13, the Rance Allen Group, the Soul Children and the Staple Singers. This amounted to, and was intended as, the black Woodstock, and it went off without a hitch; not a single incident or arrest was reported.

The two albums it spawned—Wattstax and Wattstax 2—provided a terrific summation of southern soul of the early 1970s. The movie climaxed with Jesse Jackson introducing Isaac Hayes by reverently and somewhat comically removing his hat before Hayes performed “Theme from Shaft,” much to the crowd’s delight. On the first album, this had to be substituted with Hayes performing Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” unfortunate but not tragic, as Hayes’ 18-minute reading of the song is typically expert. Wattstax 2, meanwhile, is a bit more free-form, capturing some of the more obscure artists in attendance that day and turning over a lot of running time to Richard Pryor, who figured heavily in the film; always appreciated. The Wattstax albums were widely sampled; for example, Public Enemy used Jesse Jackson exclaiming “brothers and sisters!” and Rufus Thomas saying “now here’s what I want y’all to do for me.”

Watch the full Wattstax move here.

Unless you count how the pre-Appetite EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide was quietly slipped onto the A-side of the post-Appetite stop-gap G N’ R Lies, this is the only Guns N’ Roses live album to date. Live Era was released in 1999, long after the classic line-up of GNR depicted here broke up but while the band supposedly still existed and was working on its decade-in-the-making follow up to the Use Your Illusion albums; Chinese Democracy.

It was great to have the old band back, though they sure weren’t long on specifics; the liner notes simply said this was “recorded across the universe between 1987 and 1993” (most of it comes from the ’91 to ’93 Use Your Illusion tour). Speaking about the album to Guitar World magazine, Slash said it was “not pretty and there are a lot of mistakes, but this is Guns N’ Roses, not the fucking Mahavishnu Orchestra” (indeed, this sounds nothing like Between Nothingness and Eternity).

Perceived flaws aside, the end result here is pretty sweet; you’ve got all of Appetite except “Think About You” and “Anything Goes”; G N’ R Lies standouts “Patience” and “Used To Love Her”; eight tracks from Use Your Illusion I and II that range from album cuts (“Pretty Tied Up”) to hits (of course they had to stretch “November Rain” to over 12 minutes); and a Black Sabbath cover thrown in for good measure. Who but Axl would have the balls to unearth a ballad from Technical Ecstacy written and sung by Sabbath’s drummer Bill Ward?

It seems silly now, given that The Roots back all kinds of artists on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show (and previously on Late Night), but at the time, playing MTV’s Unplugged with Jay Z apparently caused a great deal of consternation for the Roots’ bandleader Questlove. “We had a two-day summit meeting with our friends and our peers and everything,” he told Pitchfork in 2011. “It was like the riskiest move I ever did in my life: ‘Shall I take this call from Jay-Z?’ We’re dealing with a kinder, gentler Jay-Z now – but he really wasn't showing that side back in ‘99. It was a dangerous thing to do.”

As Questlove readily admits, it went well and paid off for the Roots via further collaborations with Sean Carter and a variety of other opportunities (the aforementioned talk show gigs likely among them). It also gave us something of an anomaly in the form of Jay Z’s only live album; and a live hip-hop album is a rare thing in and of itself. At the taping, Jay dispels any tension that may have surrounded the occasion by immediately joking, “Welcome to Jay Z’s poetry reading.” It’s a listening experience that requires some adjusted expectations going in; anyone expecting the familiar rush of his radio hits is likely to be disappointed. But the Roots produce lots of nice touches. For example, when Jay playfully sings “I wish I never met her at all” in “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” the band goes into Carl Thomas’ “I Wish” for a couple bars; a sly wink to those who get the reference and a little history lesson for those who don’t. Jay works the crowd in other ways; ranking its energy level on a scale from one to 10 throughout. For the record, he says he has them at six after three songs, at seven after five, at eight after 10 and at 10 after 12.

For a band with such a huge live rep, AC/DC has put out surprisingly few live albums; just three in a 40-year career. Perhaps that’s because they nailed it the first time out. Recorded on the 1978 Powerage tour and released that same year, this nicely sums up the band’s early Bon Scott years, an era many argue is superior to their work with sound-alike lead singer Brian Johnson following Scott’s death from alcohol poisoning in 1980. Drawing from their first four albums, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It captures the manic euphoria of the band’s live sets.

Sure, you don’t get to see Angus Young charging around the stage in his schoolboy outfit or Scott’s randy stage presence, but everything else is there; AC/DC’s engine of a rhythm section, Scott’s menacing wail, Young’s wild yet precise leads. The whole thing comes to a climax with the showstopper “Let There Be Rock.” The band recorded the song for their studio album of the same name but it was clearly meant for the stage; it’s a beast, an exercise in tension and release that reimagines creation as having occurred solely to create rock and roll. The band drops out entirely for a solo from Young so captivating the audience claps along, then everyone returns for a roaring finish.

Over two decades into her career as one of the most accomplished singers in jazz, Ella Fitzgerald recorded this concert in Rome in 1958 and it went unreleased until 1988, when it became one of her most celebrated recordings. Backed by pianist Lou Levy (and pianist Oscar Peterson on the final track) and a crack rhythm section, Fitzgerald interprets material by composers such as Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, approaching both ballads and uptempo numbers with equal conviction. Witness how she effortlessly glides across a vaguely discordant intro followed by a twisting set of changes on “That Old Black Magic.”

In 1981, Simon and Garfunkel drew an incredible half a million people to New York City’s Central Park by reuniting to play a benefit concert for the park itself. Ten years later, Paul Simon decided to repeat this feat alone (continuing a pattern of Simon making moves to demonstrate he could be as successful in any venture without Art Garfunkel), the result being this double-disc set drawing from Simon’s recent smash albums Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, as well as his earlier material—including some of the duo’s hits.

The emphasis on his recent albums is immediately clear as Simon begins the proceedings with his recent hit, the heavily percussive “Obvious Child.” Simon may be playing the park here without his famous partner but he’s certainly not going it alone; he’s backed by 17 musicians—even joined by Chevy Chase for “You Can Call Me Al.” The crowd is with Simon for his new songs but particularly appreciative of his old ones; they cheer in recognition at just the opening three chords of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

These days it’s probably cooler to dig for James on Polydor in the 1970s, but he was a force to be reckoned with in the previous decade, and his early live review as captured here has become a cultural touchstone, now resting in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. As such, it’s funny that this 1962 concert recording clocks in under 32 minutes.

In that dizzying half-hour, James Brown and the Famous Flames rip through 14 songs and even throw in “Please, Please, Please” twice. You’d think this would make for a rushed performance. Far from it; James and his Flames always sound relaxed and perfectly paced, breaking out the fanfare only to punctuate the beginning and end of the show and transitions in between. The audience, for its part, shrieks in appreciation at each new song the band spits out.

As anyone who’s taken even a cursory glance at his discography knows, there are two Tom Waits. For the first decade of his career, he was a singer-songwriter with jazz tendencies. Maybe it was recording an album of duets with Crystal Gayle in the early ‘80s that made him snap; or the influence of his new wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who exposed him to Captain Beefheart; or his having just signed to Island Records, frequently the home of eclectic work. Whatever the case, beginning with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, audiences were introduced to a very different Waits—one more likely to sing something resembling a sea shanty while bashing on junkyard trash than a piano ballad.

Swordfishtrombones and his next two albums, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, formed a loose trilogy that carried Waits through the ‘80s with a redefined sound and purpose. In 1987 he took this new material on the road for a tour now considered his best, and the result was his first proper live album (1975’s Nighthawks at the Diner was recorded live in the studio). Fronting a five-piece band at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, Waits shines on the album and the accompanying brilliantly weird concert film, particularly over the Middle Eastern textures of “Red Shoes” and the swinging “Telephone Call From Istanbul.” And for anyone who’s seen season two of The Wire, it’s certainly odd to hear its theme song get a live airing 16 years earlier (the other four seasons of the show featured other artists’ and band’s takes on Waits’ original composition). He’s only released one other live album since, 2009’s Glitter and Doom Live, which is superb (particularly the second disc, “Tom’s Tales,” which is just 35 minutes of Waits telling stories and jokes between songs), but not as of-a-time-and-place as Big Time.

There are too many Lou Reed and/or the Velvet Underground live albums to count, but you could delete all but this and we’d be fine. Playing a small club in Greenwich Village in 1978, at the place and time of the birth of an underground music scene he’d played a large role in bringing into being, Reed recorded this wholly unique live album by walking into it poised as he would during one of his famously hostile press interviews. From the get-go, every song is interrupted by spoken word raps mocking Barbra Streisand, the draft, journalism, everything. As Reed himself says, “Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue. Wipe my ass with it.” As for the music itself; it’s unnervingly riveting to hear VU songs like “Pale Blue Eyes,” which got such a delicate treatment on record, blown up with such a jittery, druggy sound here.

The centerpiece is the D-side’s 17-minute take on “Walk On The Wild Side.” Reed talks through the entire thing, declaring, among many other things, “I do Lou Reed better than anybody, so I thought I’d get in on it.” He takes on his critics, even positive ones: “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good.” He has a rare, kind word for Andy Warhol, telling him, “I’m very glad that you’re around,” and talks about getting punched in the stomach by Norman Mailer—all of this heady fare for a live airing of a rock star’s big hit. The highlight comes when he tells the story of quitting the Velvet Underground and becoming a typist, at which point he was approached by some theater producers, who tell him, “We think you’re a very literate rock and roll person and after Ray Davies we think you’re the person that could take Nelson Algren’s book Walk On The Wild Side and do, like, a musical thing for off-Broadway.” Reed is characteristically suspect, and, predictably, this doesn’t pan out, but the experience led him to write the song he was currently performing (sort of), which kick-started his solo career. He stuck around making music for another four decades.

Going into the early ‘70s, to guitarist Carlos Santana, popular music was, he told Mojo magazine in its February 2003 issue, “becoming a little like too much chlorine in the pool. We wanted to leave the pool where everybody’s there, and it’s got too much baby pee and too much chlorine—we wanted to go into, like, a lake. We couldn’t swim in an ocean, like Charlie Parker or Coltrane, but we could hang out in a lake.”

In a word, Santana wanted to get deeper, and did just that with his next studio album Caravanserai, which saw Santana leading a completely retooled band to a sound closer akin to jazz-rock fusion than the wild psych-salsa he aired out at Woodstock three years earlier. This deepened with Lotus, his first live album. Spread over six sides, recorded in Japan and initially released only there and in Europe, it captures this deeper period of the band’s history. If Santana was aiming to swim with giants of jazz, he accomplished it here; many of the jams on Lotus wouldn’t sound out of place dropped into one of Miles Davis’ live two-LP sets of the era. And then there’s Santana himself, who rides the wave of an insanely on band, making his guitar at times wail like a siren, at others ruminate on the meaning of it all—definitely far from wading in baby pee.

Initially, Cheap Trick were, as the phrase goes, big in Japan. Their first three albums, though sterling examples of power-pop-informed hard rock, didn’t crack the top 40 in the U.S.—while going gold in Japan. The band sought to capitalize on this by issuing its live-in-Tokyo LP Cheap Trick At Budokan only in Japan in 1978, but it began to leak into the U.S. as a successful import and was released domestically the following year. It became a surprise smash success and exposed Cheap Trick to a much wider audience.

Listening to the album, it’s easy to see why; the screaming Japanese audience elevates the excitement of Cheap Trick’s set, itself well selected from their catalog to date and beyond. You get a better version of “Surrender” than appeared on Heaven Tonight and “Need Your Love,” which would later appear on Dream Police. One of the best parts was lead vocalist Robin Zander’s pause-filled, explanatory song introductions, like, “I want you. To want me!” and “This next one. Is the first song. On our new album,” the latter of which Beastie Boys grabbed to introduce Check Your Head 14 years later.

There were better proto-punk bands from Michigan (the Stooges, Frijid Pink) but none as inflammatory as MC5. They were managed by White Panther Party founder John Sinclair, hung American flags on their amps and preached revolution. So the release of their debut album was destined to be a complete mess. Because it contained the phrase, “kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” both on the record itself and printed in the gatefold, it was yanked from stores, re-released in censored and uncensored versions and banned by the Hudson’s department store. The band responded with a full-page ad declaring, “Fuck Hudson’s,” which then banned all albums on MC5’s label, Electra, which then dropped the band to end the conflict.

All of which obscures the most unique thing about Kick Out The Jams; it was the band’s first album and a live album. And it is a monster. Recorded on Devil’s Night and Halloween 1968 at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, it captures the most important thing about the MC5; after all the rabblerousing was out of the way, they were a scrappy garage band of the first order. According to guitarist Wayne Kramer, “kick out the jams” wasn’t even intended as the revolutionary call to action it was interpreted as; it was actually a challenge to other bands to knock off the self-indulgent jamming. MC5 rarely bust out anything resembling guitar pyrotechnics, but when they do here, at the end of “Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa),” the effect is spellbinding. They also stretch out a bit on the set-closing “Starship,” though, to be fair, covering Sun Ra—itself a daring move—is probably going to require a little indulgence. Beyond that, the eight songs here are tightly wound. Witness how they shift in and out of different tempos on “Borderline” and run down a blues elegy to the 1967 Detroit riots on “Motor City is Burning.” When they returned to recording after decamping to Atlantic after the whole flap over Kick Out The Jams, it was in the studio, but this had captured what they were about.

Recorded by renowned jazz vocalist and pianist Nina Simone in 1959 and released that same year, At Town Hall succeeds largely on its intimacy. Many singers of the period would surround themselves with everything up to and including a full orchestra. Here, Simone is backed by just drums and bass. The album’s cover highlights this, showing Simone in spotlight, seated, alone at the piano. She performs a healthy mix of material from esteemed songwriters like George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin alongside two traditional numbers, two of her own compositions and even one borrowed from contemporary Billie Holiday.

As an album, it’s stirring from the get-go, with Simone introducing “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” with a grandiose, twisting pairing of melody and chords on piano before singing much of the song itself practically acapella—the audience so quiet that you can hear them coughing and shifting in their seats. Simone is particularly captivating essaying the topic of infidelity via a perspective fixed on “The Other Woman.” Her version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” meanwhile, is certainly better than Rednex.

This is one of those that rises above what a live album is supposed to be. It’s Jimi Hendrix’s first live album, the only one released while he was alive and actually the last thing he released while alive. And it has no previously released material on it.

In 1969, having broken up the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Hendrix formed an all-black power trio with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles; the former an old Army buddy and the latter a ringer with prior experience with bands like the Electric Flag (he’d later serve as lead singer of the California Raisins). Owing one record to a former manager as the resolution of a legal dispute, Hendrix decided to record this Band of Gypsies live.

The resulting album, recorded on New Year’s Eve 1969, debuted six songs that displayed a new, more socially conscious, funk-and-soul-influenced direction from Hendrix. Miles wrote and sang two songs, a privilege Hendrix rarely offered his former Experience bandmates. The centerpiece here is “Machine Gun”; a guitar work-out by Hendrix that runs over 12 minutes and served as an influence on later black psychedelia of the ‘70s like Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain.” The album’s impact was still being felt two decades later, when Digital Underground sampled its opening song, “Who Knows,” on their 1990 debut Sex Packets. It’s a testament to Hendrix’s creative power that this casually-arrived-at final creative statement planted seeds for future development by other artists.

As an album, The Song Remains the Same has a lot to work against. First of all, it’s immediately overshadowed by the film it accompanies. As great as the music is here, it’s hard for this to survive as a cultural artifact when there’s a corresponding movie involving fantasy sequences depicted the band’s members acting like gangsters, wizards and Game of Thrones-like heroes, as well as drag racing and raising livestock. Futhermore, this captures the band playing three shows at Madison Square Garden at the end of its 1973 tour. Supposedly, the band was exhausted and hammed it up for the cameras, and thus this was not among the best shows of the tour.

None of this matters. It’s folly to think that someone is supposed to listen to The Song Remains the Same and relate it to the movie’s fantasy sequences, and how well this recording stacks up against the rest of the 1973 tour really only matters to those in the enviable position of having attended other dates on that tour. The fact of the matter is this was the only documentation of Led Zeppelin live in concert—other than bootlegs—available until the band opened its vaults with How The West Was Won and their eponymous DVD 27 years later. With that responsibility on its shoulders, The Song Remains the Same delivers. An early highlight comes in “The Song Remains the Same” leading straight into “The Rain Song,” just as they proceed on Houses of the Holy, with Page demonstrating his prowess of both necks of a Gibson EDS-1275. Meanwhile, “Dazed and Confused” gets fittingly aired out for an entire side; a performance of the song dissimilar enough from other versions in circulation to stand on its own. A modern music consumer may have other options when looking to hear Led Zeppelin live, but this initial, cinematically oriented offering still holds its own.

Just one album into his solo career, which would take him to spectacular creative heights in the 1970s, Curtis Mayfield went for the power-move of a double live album. It may have seemed inadvisable at the time but looking over the track list today it makes perfect sense; over the previous decade he’d built up a wealth of material with the Impressions and he blends five of their best songs with material from his debut album that he was already ready to reinterpret, along with some songs specific to this album (the harrowingly funky “Stone Junkie” and a cover of the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun”).

Playing at a small club in Greenwich Village called The Bitter End in front of a crowd so small you can practically count the hands clapping between songs, backed by a sympathetic, stripped-down band (just guitar, bass, drums and percussion), Mayfield sounds relaxed and conversational, going into four “raps” between songs. On record, Mayfield’s “If There’s Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go,” began with Richard Pryor sounding like a revolutionary, proclaiming, “Sisters! Niggers! Whiteys! Jews! Crackers! Don’t worry! If there’s hell below! We’re all gonna go!” He then punctuates this with a scream. Here, Mayfield delivers the same introduction as more of a joke in the middle of a performance of the song that makes the listener feel like he or she is being soulfully escorted to hell rather than shoved there. Mayfield also does “The Makings of You” from his debut with a sly cool that Pete Rock repurposed for “The Joy,” a standout buried as the last track on the deluxe edition of Jay Z and Kanye West’s 2011 album Watch The Throne.

This is one of those live albums that took on new life in the CD era. The original 1982 double album captured the band live from 1977 to 1981 over 19 tracks recorded up and down the East Coast and in Japan. The 2004 CD reissue adds 14 more, changing this from a document of a great live band to a treasure trove that requires extensive digging to fully grasp. The earliest stuff here tends to shine a bit brighter, as the band is audibly wet behind the ears but still brimming with talent (the album’s cover shows them playing a house party; not the concert halls they’d later conquer). “A Clean Break (Let’s Work),” a sublime song specific to this album, captures the early Heads at their best, spilling punchy guitars over a nimble rhythm section and showcasing David Byrne’s wild, weird vocals before ramming into a dazzling set of solos.

By the dawn of the ‘80s, Talking Heads’ work had become so studio-bred that faithfully reproducing it live was a challenge, one the band rose to by morphing the songs themselves. “Drugs (Electricity),” so woozy and barely there on Fear Of Music, becomes thwacking funk here. Remain In Light opener “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” is eased into; the band playing with its opening riff at length, boosting the song’s layered assembly to greater heights.

Talking Heads released another live album two years later, Stop Making Sense, but it was hardly necessary other than as a companion to their concert film of the same name. Anyone who soldiered through all of this knew the full scope of what the Heads were capable of live, a view that grew wider when it was finally released on CD 22 years later.

As originally issued, this is pretty simple: six tracks recorded live at the University of Leeds on Valentine’s Day 1970. They rip through Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues,” “Substitute,” and covers of “Summertime Blues” and “Shakin’ All Over” on the A-side and “My Generation” and “Magic Bus” on the B-side. The only immediately discernable clue that something else is going on here is that “My Generation” goes on for over 14 minutes—they segue from the song into parts of Tommy and tease out parts of unreleased songs. With Roger Daltrey’s confident vocals, Pete Townshend’s mastery of dynamics—placing every chord, riff, and note precisely where he means to like some sort of guitar scientist—and John Entwistle and Keith Moon leading the band as much as anchoring it, they prove they’re great live, but it’s still just a small part of a larger picture.

The 2001 deluxe edition gives you the entire show. Disc one starts off by slamming right into the Entwistle live staple “Heaven And Hell,” which becomes a vehicle for one of Townshend’s best solos ever recorded. They gamely play “I Can’t Explain,” then list all the other English acts to cover “Fortune Teller” before rolling out their own take on it, which starts off slow-paced but doubles the tempo midway through before segueing into “Tattoo.” After this comes “Young Man Blues” from the proper album but it’s introduced by Townshend, which makes a big difference (he mocks a Mose Allison album cover for referring to him as a “jazz sage”). The song itself, now heard in the context of the entire concert instead of beginning the album out of nowhere, sounds properly relentless—a band warmed up.

“Substitute,” “Happy Jack,” and “I’m A Boy” follow, introduced by Townshend with, “We’d like to play three of our hit singles, the three easiest” and each title he announces comes with self-deprecating references to their chart placement in various countries. They run right into each other (whereas “Substitute” appeared by itself on the original album) and the mood and context makes all the difference. Then comes “the little set of numbers that we call Tommy’s parents,” as Townshend introduces it; “A Quick One While He’s Away.” He runs down the song’s plot, milking much humor from over-explaining it and shoving in jokes. Finally they go into the song and it’s wonderful to hear this old favorite filtered through their newly evolved presence and confidence on stage. The remainder of the disc is the same as the last four tracks of the album.

Disc two is Tommy—the Who’s 1969 rock opera, which told the story of the title character, a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who sure played a mean pinball and became a cult leader—performed almost entirely. Almost, because they don’t do “Cousin Kevin” (which really is a shame), “Underture” (though that is somewhat covered during the medley following “My Generation”), “Sensation,” or “Welcome.” Regardless, after another hammy introduction, they go right into “Overture” and straight through Tommy for 20 tracks. This really is the way to hear Tommy. The actual album was weighed down by sounding like shit and the at-times-overwhelming seriousness with which Townshend treated its subjects. This, by comparison, sounds great and extremely alive, spontaneous and urgent by virtue of it being simply three musicians and a singer gathered together onstage to tell a story—as convoluted as it is.

You could probably make a case for any of the seven live albums Miles Davis released in the ‘70s, but the best is where it all began, at Fillmore. Recorded with six other musicians playing a range of instruments over four days in June 1970, this continued Davis’ outreach to a younger audience that had begun with Bitches Brew, released just two months before. As originally issued, Davis seemed to discourage overthinking this, not even providing a proper track list; the double album’s four sides are named simply, “Wednesday Miles,” “Thursday Miles,” “Friday Miles,” and “Saturday Miles.” But you can hear what’s here, and the 1997 CD reissue broke it down into specifics; he’s drawing from Bitches Brew and its essential predecessor In A Silent Way, with some then evolving new material (“Willie Nelson”) and a jazz standard (“I Fall in Love Too Easily”) thrown in.

One of the most interesting things about At Fillmore is how repetitive it is. “It’s About That Time” is explored at length on all four sides, while the main riff to “Bitches Brew” appears on three of four, serving as a theme. Surprisingly, this does not get old; the band assembled here is such a crack team of musicians that it never plays a song the same way twice—and Davis would not have had it any other way. The listener is never left on even footing, as the band shifts in and out of crisp beats and dazzling solos interspersed with deep riffs and at times just ghostly noise. If anyone mistook Bitches Brew as a fleeting grab for this hippie market, this made it clear Miles was not fucking around.

Neil Young is known for making unconventional moves, so it stands to reason that this, his first live album, would be so odd. It was recorded on his 1973 tour following the smash success of his fourth album, Harvest; a tour that was by all accounts a complete mess. Young dismissed original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten before the tour and he died of a heroin overdose soon thereafter. Young, understandably crazy with grief over Whitten’s loss, proceeded with the dates anyway, wasted on tequila, playing an unwieldy Gibson Flying V instead of his regular Les Paul, cancelling sound checks and fighting with his backing band, the Stray Gators, who were demanding exorbitant amounts of money from Young for putting up with all this. His drummer, Kenneth Buttrey, quit and was replaced with the Turtles’ drummer John Barbata, whose style of playing sounds like someone hammering on a shed. David Crosby and Graham Nash were called in to assist, which is never a good sign. Young hated the resulting album but said, “I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while.”

No small wonder, then, that what you have here is brilliant, and the reason for this is simple. This is a rare thing; a live album of all new songs, and the eight songs here have remained unique to this album. From the outset, Young sounds angry, beginning the title track with the memorable, shouted opening line, “14 junkies too weak to work!” The material here also displays a startling amount of range; you’ve got barn burners like the aforementioned “Times Fades Away” and “Yonder Stands the Sinner,” tender ballads in “Journey thru the Past” and “Love In Mind,” and an apocalyptic vision of Los Angeles in “L.A.” And that’s just on the A-side. The B-side gets much more epic and angry, particularly “Don’t Be Denied,” which sees Young describing his parents’ divorce: “When I was a young boy. My mama said to me. ‘Your daddy’s leavin’ home today. I think he’s gone to stay.’”

It’s never been released on CD (the chaotic nature of the recording make it nearly impossible to remaster) but, unlike what its title implies, is indelible. It sharply changed the tone of Young’s discography to that time and formed a loose trilogy with his next two albums, On The Beach and Tonight’s the Night, which saw Young grappling with the death of the hippie dream—itself always doomed. The guy on the cover of Time Fades Away, flashing a peace sign from the front row of a packed, dreary-looking concert hall, pretty much said it all.

In a scene in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, during the 1968 recording of At Folsom Prison, a prison official backstage asks Cash, “Might I suggest you refrain from playing any more tunes that remind the inmates that they’re in prison?” Cash shoots back, “You think they forgot?” This is an amusing exchange, sure. It was in the preview. But a conversation one scene before reveals a lot more about the tensions that surrounded At Folsom Prison.

As the fictional Cash informs Columbia Records of his plans to record a live album in a prison, an executive protests, “Dylan’s gone electric. The Byrds are electric. The Beatles are electric. Hell, everybody’s electric. He needs a fresh sound and all he wants to do is cut a live album with the same old pickers at a maximum-security penitentiary!” There’s some further debate as to whether or not Cash singing to “a bunch of murderers and rapists, trying to cheer them up” will agree with Cash’s supposedly Christian fan base. Cash is resolute: “January 13. I’ll be at Folsom Prison with June and the boys. You listen to the tapes. You don’t like ‘em; you can toss ‘em.”

Fictionalized or not, this adds tremendous background to At Folsom Prison. In 1968, everyone was trying something new. But Cash, recovering from addiction and facing declining commercial appeal, wanted none of it—the Man in Black wasn’t going to cut a psychedelic record. So he aimed to put the narrative strengths of his outlaw-oriented material in front of the people best able to appreciate it; a literally captive audience. Cash even had a song—written, recorded and released 13 years before—perfect for the occasion; “Folsom Prison Blues.” He began the show with it. In the end, the tapes weren’t tossed; far from it. At Folsom Prison went gold, revitalized Cash’s career and has endured as one of his best albums.

Related: 15 Things You Didn't Know About Johnny Cash

In the April/May 2006 issue of Wax Poetics magazine, in the Record Rundown, Cut Chemist cites this album as essential. It comes out of nowhere, given that the rest of the DJ’s selections are obscure rap and funk and private press rarities. But as he explains: “This is as close to Beatlemania as I think my generation got.” It’s true; most Gen Xers can probably remember where they were when they first saw this air on MTV in December 1993.

For many bands of the era, Unplugged was a fun way to showcase themselves in an intimate setting. Maybe they’d throw in a couple curveballs, but for the most part it’d be their hits, perhaps in new arrangements, coupled with album tracks that worked well played acoustically. Nirvana sidestepped this with a carefully calibrated set list: one track off Bleach; just four from their breakthrough Nevermind; three from the then-recently released In Utero; and six covers. No “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and thank God because that would have sucked on acoustic instruments. The only hit here is “Come As You Are,” which worked well, as did everything else they played. Cris and Curt Kirkwood, from tour-mates Meat Puppets, backed the band on three songs from their 1984 album Meat Puppets II. Another big moment is their cover of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” which sees Kurt Cobain daring to run his acoustic guitar through a distortion pedal (gasp) played in tandem with cellist Lori Goldston to eerie effect.

The album is pretty much nothing but highlights but a big one is the show closer; Cobain’s cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” A blues cover was an odd choice for Nirvana but it fit perfectly, and when Cobain died four months after this was recorded, the anguish in his voice became even more audible.

Bob Dylan had released a half-dozen contemporary live albums before this arrived in 1998, but none as vital. These days new volumes of The Bootleg Series come out once a year (Vol. 10 came out last year and Vol. 11 is out this fall), but at the time, this was only the second release in the series and it’d been seven years since the first one (volumes one, two, and three came in one box). What it captured was Dylan’s first electric tour, backed by the then-unnamed Band.

Audiences reacted hostilely to Dylan’s decision to play electric and this English audience is no exception; someone yells “Judas!” before “Like a Rolling Stone” (Dylan responds, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!” and then instructs the Band to “play fuckin’ loud”). This reaction seems at odds with the music itself, as four of the five members of the Band (freelance drummer and later actor Mickey Jones fills in for Levon Helm quite capably) are in fine form backing Dylan, who is on fire in angry performances of material drawn from his first seven albums.

On the ’66 tour, Dylan did capitulate to audiences expecting an acoustic performance by giving them one before a second set with the Band. But he pulled off a neat trick here; playing songs from his recent electric albums solo acoustic and then rearranging songs from his solo acoustic albums as electric performances—confusing audiences. Live 1966 neatly divides these two sets into two discs. This is perfect; on disc one you get an intimate performance from Dylan, showcasing his hypnotizing harmonica solos, then on disc two you get slaughtered by Dylan and the Band firmly plugged-in.

All respect due to the Stones themselves, but much of what makes this the greatest live album of all time comes down to circumstance. The Stones started out as a great live band but—like many other bands of the British invasion—they were forced to stop playing out because of the resultant chaos surrounding every gig, and they couldn’t even hear themselves over the screaming girls anyway. Right around the time they stopped, they released their first live album, 1966’s Got Live If You Want It, but this was of poor quality and a couple of the songs on it are studio recordings with screaming girls edited in (seriously).

By the time the Stones returned to live performance for their 1969 tour, they were revitalized, with boosted lead guitar firepower provided by new member Mick Taylor; better, louder equipment; and an evolved identity as a band that allowed them to dominate any venue. Meanwhile, the American touring circuit the band would conquer had improved considerably by the end of the ‘60s, with larger halls, better public address systems, and a more mature audience that would actually listen to a band instead of screaming through entire songs. Live recording facilities had also improved. All of this coalesced into the perfect time and place for the Rolling Stones to stake their claim as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world.”

It might not have happened at all, had capitalism not forced the band’s hand (the famously mercenary Mick Jagger would never need such a reminder again). As the ’69 tour proceeded, bootlegs of its various dates began hitting the market; most famously Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be. Wanting to get in on the action themselves, the Stones recorded a pair of concerts at Madison Square Garden in November 1969 and had the album on the market by the following September. Its ten songs are perfectly selected. The four hits are edgier fare; “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Honky Tonk Women” and “Street Fighting Man”—no “Satisfaction” here.

They throw in two Chuck Berry covers, which was pretty much a given, but the most startling thing is what they do with the four album cuts from recent releases Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. “Stray Cat Blues” and “Live With Me,” already sordid on record, become so filthy they’ll make you want to take a shower. The album’s centerpiece, though, is the one-two punch of “Love In Vain” into “Midnight Rambler” at the end of the A-side. On Let It Bleed, the Stones treated “Love In Vain” as an acoustic country blues, similar to how Robert Johnson originally wrote it. On Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! this becomes something entirely different; a centerpiece for Jagger’s convincingly heartbroken vocals and Taylor’s dazzling slide leads, every note of which get permanently etched in your brain if you hear this more than once. The call-and-response between Jagger and Taylor, and the way Taylor’s guitar actually sounds like the whistle of the train described in the song, is flooring.

The picture deepens with “Midnight Rambler.” On Let It Bleed, this was a muted, moody Chicago blues; an approach to the song that has his merits. Here, the Stones thunder through the song for over nine minutes, shifting into different tempos as if they were psychically linked and, at its mid-point, stopping the song entirely for the full band to playing walloping chords as punctuation for every line as Jagger personifies the serial killer depicted in the song. This is the Stones at their scariest—and the interplay between Keith Richards and Taylor in the instrumental sections, with Jagger adding to the din on harmonica, is staggering. When the band brought Taylor back for some songs on its 2013 tour, they played this one every night. And when Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! was originally released, the famously hard-to-please critic Lester Bangs said, “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” That this was the first Stones album to get the box set treatment in 2009, even before the revered Exile On Main St., makes total sense.