Rod Stewart "Live 1975-1998" 4-CD box set

sounds a bit loud !

 

Been listening to a lot of this, and it's excellent.

 

But chronological order gives us Atlantic Crossing > Night on the Town > Foot Loose and Fancy Free > Blondes Have More Fun

I mean, if you are going to pick some Rod albums to pad out, those are the ones...The first three still maintain some footing in his earlier artistry, and the latter was a huge hit that defined the direction of the much of the rest of his Warner tenure. There's nothing after Blondes that is begging to be given the white glove treatment before these...

 

i need to pick this up

 

This set reminds me of the Tom Petty "Live Anthology" from a few years ago. I loved that and this one seems great too. Just ordered.

 

I've been skipping around the first 3 discs. At first impression, it is a reminder of how good this guy was. He took the "Songbook" series way too far and frankly, I don't think he ever recovered. I doubt he has another relevant, or even interesting new project in him.

 

i loved his newest album TIME but hated the songbook stuff after the first one. the soulbook album had potential but the songs sounded like rod stewart singing over the original backing tracks. he didn't make them his own

 

I just cruised Youtube for some footage of the 1981/82 tour and the band is great. They rocked hard, I really look forward to hearing this box.

 

This sounds great. For the audiophiles out there, this was done by the same crew who did Sessions and the deluxe editions back in 2009 - Andy Zax, Brian Kehew, Dave Shultz etc - and those sounded good.

The band really rocked in the Seventies and the even across the entire set there are enough variations in the arrangements to make this interesting.
Particularly love the extended Lost in you from 1989 and Bad for you from 1984 (probably overlooked as a fine song due to appearing on Camouflage).

They did skimp a bit on the packaging to save cost and ensure a release - but a cosmetic issue like that is worth the pain if it means this stuff comes out (it is albmost four years later than orignially planned).

It has charted at 82 in the UK album chart which is miles better than the other catalogue stuff and not bad for a boxset at double the price of a normal album.

Gotta go and listen some more...

 

Yes, all they basically did was re-create the outside on the inside pages. That was a bit disappointing. But, I won't let it take away from the discs. I listened to Side 2 last night. I liked Burn Lose, I Just Wanna Make Love and She Won't Dance With Me. Actually says a medley of Twistin/Every Picture and I think EP was only about a minute if I remember correctly. That was kind of disappointing. Otherwise, so far so good.

 

I kind of like the economical 4 disc fat-boy jewel case in this instance. The presentation is still tasteful. While a more elaborate package like Sessions would certainly be welcomed, it is hard to imagine any liner notes would offer much of any substance. At some point, those bloated booklets loose their luster with their cliche and rhetorical bits of information.

 

man i checked some of it out. rod really lets loose on this stuff

 

Upon further review, all four discs are solid. I would have liked to have seen more from the 1976 tapes released because that line-up totally rocked and were locked-in, but this is a fine overview of 20+ years of solo Rod live.

 

Being too young to have seen him in the seventies, I have to say Rod and the band did really rock back then - the three guitar sound is powerful. The medly incorporating Layla is fantastic. The sound did change when he dropped to two guitarists, then added the brass trio, and latterly the backing singers - but right through this set there is quality.
More people will hear this than heard Sessions..but not as many as should hear it IMO.

 

I've mentioned several times here that I am generally not a fan of live albums, but I did play most of disc 1 of this yesterday on Spotify Premium, and I'm digging it.

 

Played side 3 last night. Is it just me, which it probably is, or does the sound quality seem a bit flat. Drums sound like thuds. No snap to it. Rod's voice seems to be fine but instrumentation just isn't there for me. No separation of instruments in a general way. On this disc, it didn't seem to clear up until Saturation for me. The rest of it was OK. I saved 1 and 4 because I like the tracks better on these two.

 

After reading your posts the last word on my mind is flat.

 

I've posted this elsewhere but the best move on Stewart's part would be a Fairport Convention/Pentangle type project.
An album of Richard Thompson covers would be great especially acoustic.

 

The notion of Stewart covering R. Thompson is indeed brilliant. Too bad that Rod thinks with his wallet first and that such a project is inconceivable.

 

I'm going to have to sample the set more, as I only heard a few samples. It's a really good deal for $29.99, but I might be interested in mostly just some of the AC and ANOTT tracks on disc one, samples of a few of which sounded very promising....

 

What I've sampled so far is excellent. I loved the remastering on the 2009 remasters to I fully expected these discs to sound great and they do (not loud at all to address an earlier post's question). The surprise for me was how much I like the underlying live material. I love the live Faces stuff, but I wasn't expecting to like the solo live stuff that much. Don't know why since I never listened to Absolutely Live back in the day and so I haven't heard much Rod solo live stuff before. The first two discs, in particular, are really good. I hope this sells well enough that it spurs them to release the rest of the deluxe remasters, which I think are all done and just sitting in the Warner vaults. Shame, particularly about Foot Loose and Fancy Free, which was the next in line when they pulled the plug.

 

Found this 2009 post by Andy Zax and Cheryl Pawelski (who produced the reissue campaign) at a Rod Steward fan site. It literally kills me that Warners is just sitting on all this great (and well-mastered) material. They say the 4 CD live set was scheduled to come out in 2010; 4 years late but maybe there's hope for the rest. Anyway, here's their post:

We’ve spent the last year going through every single Rod Stewart tape held by the Warner Music Group, as well as Rod’s manager Arnold Stiefel’s private warehouse of unexplored material, and over the next 18 months we’ll be deluging you with the results of our labors.

On June 30th, we’ll be releasing 2 CD Collectors’ Editions of Atlantic Crossing and A Night On The Town. Each of these has been carefully remastered from first-generation tapes (especially notable in the case of A Night On The Town, as we managed to find the original album master which had been missing since 1976 — the improvement in quality is massive). Each includes pertinent non-LP material from the period, as well as an entire disc of previously unreleased outtakes and alternate versions. (Collectors Editions of Foot Loose And Fancy Free and Blondes Have More Fun will follow in early 2010.)

Even before that, we’ll be rolling out expanded digital editions of Rod’s 1980-2001 albums May 19th (for the US & Canada, the rest of the world to follow shortly thereafter). These are intended for a more general, less-hardcore audience, and although they do include some things you won’t have heard before (we’re especially partial to a 1980 studio rough in which Rod and the band discover the seeds of something that would blossom into “Young Turks” the following year), we want to make sure that you know that this is just the tip of the iceberg: the bulk of the unreleased and rare material will be arriving in different ways, and it will be available on CD.

We feel pretty confident in saying that for serious Rod aficionados, the biggest event of 2009 will be the release of a brand new boxed set. We’re sworn to secrecy about the details for a little while longer, but we’re really excited about this box, and we think that you will be, too.

But wait! — as they say on TV — That’s not all! 2010 will see the arrival of a decades-spanning 4CD live retrospective. We’re also planning a series of internet-only CD releases designed with the serious Rod Stewart fan in mind. There will be volumes devoted to b-sides and remixes, an Out Of Order Collectors’ Edition, the long-delayed debut of the legendary lost album Once In A Blue Moon, and more. By the time we get finished, we hope you’ll feel like we’ve given Rod’s catalog the care and attention that it has long deserved.

We’re really looking forward to the next 18 months, and we hope that you enjoy hearing all of this music as much as we enjoyed putting it all together.
​

 

But instead, let's do another deluxe Rumours!

Sigh...

 

We almost got Body Wishes expanded, yikes.

 

We were never going to get a cd BW expanded..but between Sessions and the itunes release we kinda got one: eight alternative versions and three outtakes.
Not bad actually. The outtake "I wish you would" is well worth a listen. A "one take" runthrough that rocks.

I remember the letter from the producers..it promised so much. Apart from Sessions, the releases I was most looking forward to never made it - the deluxe editions of Blondes, Footloose and Out of order, plus the "and more" which had to include more outtakes. That said, over 100 tracks have come out so it's hard to be totally negative