The dreaded fake 'live' album....

Wasn't YCDTOSA 2 labeled "The Helsinki Concert", even though it was compiled from multiple shows?

 

1985's live after death is one of my favorite live albums ever. Any info on how much Iron Maiden bandaged this one?

 

It's one thing to overdub a crowd track and not say anything. It's quite another to overdub a crowd track and claim that the recording is live. The difference is that one is not necessarily cheesy and the other is extremely cheesy.

Example - Sgt. Pepper. That's obviously an overdubbed crowd track. The Beatles never claimed it was recorded live and I think most of us would agree that it's not cheesy. But if they had claimed it was a live recording, that would have instantly made it extremely cheesy.

 

The Seeds one sounded WAY better without the fake crowd noise. Totally different experience!

 

Yes, I believe it is from three shows over two days. The working title was "The Helsinki Tapes" which would have been more accurate.

 

Have you heard Bruce Dickinson's vocal performance on this? I think it's safe to say that there are NO bandages on it. Don't get me wrong, I love the album as well and it's also one of my favorites, but this was taped at the end of one of the longest tours ever and Bruce's vocals are pretty inaccurate and he also takes the safe way out on many of the higher notes and passages (he had to sing that stuff three nights in a row for the recording as well and likely had to conserve his voice). I think that if they were to do any "fixing" on that record they would have started there. Also...you can literally hear little cut-outs when Adrian switches to and from his lead tones to rhythm. Again...this would have been fixable I think. IMO Live After Death shows real evidence of being a warts and all recording (can't vouch for the crowd noise...just the performance). I think this adds to it's greatness.

 

That's what I always thought...

 

I've heard several albums (mostly from the early '60s and some on budget labels) that claim to be live, but the songs fade out at the end followed by crossfaded applause. Who did they think they were fooling?

 

What about the three-LP set "Jimi Hendrix At His Best"? It was only Jimi and his friends jamming (VERY sloppily) in an apartment.

The CD edition I have claims it to be Jimi's greatest hits live!!!

 

Multiple shows from Helsinki...I think he did 3 or 4 over a couple of nights that the discs were culled from. He originally was going to title vol 2 "The Helsinki Tapes" which would've been a bit more accurate.

 

I vaguely recall reading that both Pulse and Is There Anybody Out There? by PF have been assembled from multiple bits of songs. DG has said that he will
often chop up multiple guitar solos to get to the one he likes. Does that count as fake? Similarly, wasn't The Doors In Concert stitched together from multiple shows to create the "perfect Doors show"?

I'm intrigued that someone said that Alchemy by Dire Straits is fake. The CD release doesn't sound markedly different from the DVD, and the DVD doesn't look fake in any way. Indeed, the boot video I have of one of the Brothers in Arms Wembley gigs demonstrates that the big songs (Sultans..., Tunnel...) were played pretty much note perfect every night, which sounded very polished but was probably boring as hell for the band.

 

Earl Van Dyke and the Funk Brothers. The album was recorded live at Ben's Hi Chapparal club in 1970 (either in front of an audience or after hours, not certain), but a Motown engineer dubbed obnoxious applause between tracks.

 

Sometimes, albums have misleading titles implying that they're live, but when you hear them, they're obviously studio albums with no canned applause dubbed in. Examples: Odetta at the Gate of Horn is a studio album. In the "fine print" in the liner notes, it said the title was chosen because she had played at the Gate of Horn so often. Good album, but I was disappointed that it wasn't live. Jonah Jones at the Embers and The Stanley Brothers In Person are also studio albums without a trace of applause. NRBQ at Yankee Stadium was a deliberate joke because the cover photo was taken at Yankee Stadium. The fine print on the back cover says it was recorded in some studio, adding "not at Yankee Stadium". Still, I fell for the joke. I have an out-of-print triple album called The Bitter End Years on the Roxbury label. Although it isn't stated outright that it was recorded live at the Bitter End, it was packaged to make us believe that. Many of the cuts are studio recordings excerpted from the various artists' albums (Peter,Paul and Mary, the Limeliters, John Prine, Bette Midler, Phil Ochs, etc.). Some of the tracks were recorded live at the Bitter End (Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, the Isley Brothers, Curtis Mayfield, David Steinberg, George Carlin, and some of the other standup comics), but those tracks were also taken from the artists' previously released live albums. Conversely, Hoyt Axton's Greenback Dollar album on Vee-Jay says it was recorded live at the Troubadour, but there isn't a second of applause or audience noise on the album. However, it has the ambiance of a live soundboard recording. At first I thought, "If this was recorded live at the Troubadour, it must have been a night when no one was there." Later, I learned that it was an edited reissue of his first album, Balladeer, With all of the applause, monologues, and 2 songs cut out. Don't know why they did that, but I'm on a search for the unedited version.

 

I don't think this should really be a consideration- many, many, many classic (and current) live albums use cuts from different shows on the same tour. Even live albums from a single location often use cuts from different days/shows.

 

Yardbirds Live with JimmyPage - as mentioned, this was an actual live recording I think, but someone later added all kinds of canned applause, sounds of glasses tinkling together, all sorts of weirdness

Grand Funk Live - the performance is supposedly actually really live, altho possibly not recorded at the Atlanta Pop Festival as the album says, but possibly recorded in Sarasota FL. Regardless of where it was actually recorded, the crowd noise was completely canned and added in later by Terry Knight.

Kiss Alive - I just finished reading "Nothing to Lose" a pretty good book about the very early days of Kiss, right up to Kiss Alive, and Stanley admits there was a boatload of overdubs.. he claims there was no way to play or sing 100% accurately with all that jumping around. I also read that the applause for Kiss Alive was heavily augmented, and was taken directly from an audio library and it came from a John Denver concert.

Peter Frampton Comes Alive - supposedly set the record for "most guitar edits in a single album". thats strange tho, because I have an in-studio live bootleg from right around the same time, and his playing is excellent, even flawless at times.

the Zeppelin live albums - Page admits to the cut and paste but I've read interviews where he flatly denies any overdubbing. I dont know what to believe about that.

 

I wish they'd release an actual live show from the tour in which they supported this release (the 87 tour with Jethro Tull).

 

anybody know anything about Golden Earring Live from about 1977? Always enjoyed that one, some monster guitar playing... dont have a clue about the makings of it, wiki has nothing...

 

oh and then theres the weirdness of Abba "live" albums. The official Abba Live from 1986, seems to have been an extreme cut and paste episode of old tracks, done by their longtime genius engineer Michael Tretow, and none of the Abba members anywhere near the console when he cabled it all together. Worse, synth drums were overdubbed on top of the entire affair.

Some of the tracks therein came from a 1979 Wembley concert, that had appeared as a radio broadcast.. but the band overdubbed those concert tracks before it aired on the radio. So those were overdubbed previously; as were the tracks that appeared from the Abba movie, recorded in Australia, those had been overdubbed in 1978. The only conceivable "Really live" tracks (apart from the synthi drum overdub) are those from a 1981 TV special with Dick Cavett, and nobody knows if those were overdubbed or not.

recently Abba just released Wembley 1979, a complete concert from the same tour, and Benny Anderson says its not overdubbed at all, anywhere. Just the raw tracks altho I believe somewhere he admitted that they had to cut and paste a couple of things somewhere due to technical errors in the recording. Is he admitting that the entire affair may well be the dreaded cut and paste live album? Nobodys talking - but given Abbas history... who knows

 

Kiss Alive is not the only live album to include audience reaction from another concert's audience response. Apparently Murray Krugman couldn't resist inserting some of the audience track from Johnny Winter's Live album into Blue Oyster Cult's - On Your Feet Or On Your Knees [source Martin Popoff's Secrets Revealed] though the music itself is pretty much untouched.

I read an article a long time ago that one of the Johnny Cash live prison albums had an audience track from a UK concert - can anybody dig up the Mojo article that states this, I can't find it.

Lynyrd Skynyrd's - Freebird: The Movie CD has an audience track from what sounds like a US pop concert from the late 80's - it's certainly not a UK 1976 audience - and it spoils completely what would otherwise be a great live recording.

 

Were the drums totally re-recorded or did they just have the effects added? My understanding was the latter.

 

Complete songs from different nights, fine, but this is from the Wikipedia entry about The Doors In Concert: "Many of the songs were pieced together from various performances. Rothchild has said, "I couldn't get complete takes of a lot of songs, so sometimes I'd cut from Detroit to Philadelphia in midsong. There must be 2,000 edits on that album." "

With that many edits it may as well have been a studio album. At what point is it fake?

 

I have to agree, moving from one take to another in mid-song is a little much...

 

As I said, I think the Floyd live albums from Delicate Sound... onwards have been similarly polished. I have no problem listening to any of these albums; In Concert.. by The Doors sounds like the greatest Doors gig imaginable, but it's nice to hear a band warts and all. Or not so nice in the case of the Time Machine Tour release by Rush; the gig was almost canned because Geddy was struggling with his voice and it shows.

 

Actually, if you compare the new 5.1 remix and the stereo mix on the DVD, it's clear that the vocals were overdubbed on some songs. The remix uses the original vocal track and it is quite rough. And the live album was recorded during those concerts.

 

Wow that surprises me. They must be quite rough. Thanks for the info!