What Makes A Band “Good Live”?
by Phil Maddox
Since hosting an episode of Discord And Rhyme about the Grateful Dead a couple weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about live music. The Grateful Dead are considered by a lot of people to be the greatest live band of all time. Plenty of people, however, find their music interminable (to put it mildly) and far prefer the work of bands like, say, The Who - another band I frequently see cited as the “greatest live band of all time.” Both of these bands are fantastic live acts, but they’re extremely different. That got me thinking - what exactly does it mean when people say that a band is “good live”?
I’ve never much cared for bands that simply “play the songs just like the record”. If I wanted to hear the record, I could just stay home and play the record. This approach is especially pointless when translated to live albums. Seeing a band perform material exactly the same as the studio material has at least the excitement of being there. Sitting at home and listening to an (often doctored) live album of an experience that was already tailored to resemble the existing studio albums is two or three steps beyond pointless.
Considerably more interesting are bands that are somewhat mannered in the studio, but loosen up and turn up the energy when they perform live - cranking up the distortion, cranking up the speed, etc. The Who are the definitive example of this - Live At Leeds shows them playing their earlier material with a million times the energy of their studio material. Bands that did this would also make some (limited) alterations to the arrangements - usually consisting of adding solos or extending certain parts of certain songs. Shows by bands like this are generally all excellent, but somewhat static from night to night. I have both Live At Leeds and Live At The Isle Of Wight by The Who and while there are certainly plenty of differences between the two for the enthusiast to spot, for the average listener, there’s really not much of a need to hear both of them.
To me, the best live bands are the ones that consistently change things up from night to night. This could mean everything from radical reinvention and improvisation - jam bands such as Phish, the Grateful Dead, Umphrey’s McGee - to bands like Pearl Jam that switch up the setlists to make sure that shows stay interesting. This is the kind of band that tends to reward devotion - most bands, if you listen to a single show from a tour, you’ve essentially heard everything there is to hear, while there’s value in hearing numerous shows from there bands. This approach, of course, isn’t going to please everyone. If a band plays completely different stuff every night, there’s a good chance that they won’t play the “classic” song that you really wanted to hear - I’ve heard many people grousing about not hearing a song they want at these kinds of shows - but I think that bands with this kind of approach are frequently the most engaged, since they’re not sticking to a single program night after night after night. The elasticity of their performances keeps them from hitting the mid-tour “going through the motions” phase that most bands hit. Not that it doesn’t hit these bands too - see any Grateful Dead show from the summer of 1995 for a good example of a band going through the motions - but it’s much more rare.
Of course, my opinion here is hardly gospel - I know plenty of people who go to shows because they want to hear what’s on the record with few variations, and I’m certainly not going to tell them that they’re wrong (what with taste being subjective and all that). The “ideal” live performance is going to be different to everybody - from the person who goes home happy if they heard all the hits, to the person who has spent the last 22 years trying to catch that perfect version of You Enjoy Myself. The thing that makes music “good” live is if you enjoy hearing it, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.