Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, March 8, 2025
In the old days, your
favourite artist issued a live album once or twice a decade if you were lucky. Only
when bands were in peak form did the tapes roll. Dud numbers were weeded out. Each
live album was a carefully curated work of art.
A highlight of those classic
live albums was the chat between songs. Generally this patter was far less
rehearsed than the music. But you heard it over and over, as often as you
played the record. The rhythm of those one-off quips and asides stuck in your
head as stubbornly as the songs did.
Neil Diamond’s Hot
August Night, that unavoidable live album of the 1970s, was frequently on
my parents’ stereo when I was little. Just before playing “Solitary Man,” Neil
said something that really used to freak me out. He said, “Tree people out
there, God bless you, I’m singing for you too.”
Tree people? I didn’t
like the sound of that. I pictured a sinister race of mutant Diamond fans,
half-human, half-arborous, like the terrifying tree puppets on H.R. Pufnstuf.
Only when I was old
enough to read the liner notes did I get Neil’s reference. He had recorded the
album at L.A.’s Greek Theatre – an outdoor venue ringed by pine trees. In the carefree
1970s, people would climb the trees and eavesdrop on concerts for free.
Sometimes live albums contained
mysteries the liner notes didn’t solve. On Queen’s 1979 album Live Killers,
Freddie Mercury introduced the song “Death on Two Legs” by saying, “This is
about a —” Whatever he said next was censored by three long, evenly spaced
bleeps.
What on earth had Mercury
said? To find out, you had to wait for the advent of the internet. What he said
was, “This is about a real motherfucker of a gentleman.”
Speaking of the m-f word,
the Detroit band MC5 unsuccessfully tried to use it on their 1969 album Kick
Out the Jams. Introducing the title track, the group’s frontman, Rob Tyner,
yelled to the crowd, “Now it’s time to kick out the jams, motherfuckers!”
That’s what he originally
said, anyway. The band’s record label didn’t want radio stations boycotting the
song, so it removed the expletive and spliced in some audio of Tyner yelling the
words “brothers and sisters” instead.
Thanks to the efforts of potty-mouthed
pioneers like Tyner and Mercury, swearing on live albums was commonplace by
1981, when Cold Chisel released Swingshift. During a lull in the closing
number, “Goodbye (Astrid Goodbye)”, Jimmy Barnes delivered a quintessentially
Australian piece of stage patter.
“I bet you’ve all hated Billy
on saxophone, David on harmonica … fuckin’ classic.”
Sometimes, on live
albums, the repartee was supplied by the audience rather than the performer. On
her 1974 record Miles of Aisles, Joni Mitchell paused between songs to
tune her guitar, whereupon some dude in the crowd very audibly shouted, “Joni,
you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon and Gomer Pyle combined!”
History doesn’t record
who this wag was. But every time you play the album there he is, delivering his
dated zinger yet again, prompting Joni to utter a charmingly spontaneous giggle.
There’s another famous audience
contribution on the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (1970). Right
before “Sympathy for the Devil,” a female fan can be heard vainly requesting
the song “Paint it Black.” “Paint it Black,” she plaintively cries. “Paint it
Black, you devil!”
No matter how many million
times she issued this plea, on how many million turntables, the song that came
next was always “Sympathy for the Devil.” Weirdly, the Stones re-used her interjection
on another live album two decades later, mixing it into the crowd noise on Flashpoint
(1991). This time the song that came next was “You Can’t Always Get What
You Want.”
Like old photographs, the
patter on those live records preserves obscure little moments of history that would
otherwise have slipped into oblivion. On the Grateful Dead’s 1981 album Reckoning,
while playing “Ripple”, Jerry Garcia briefly stops singing to utter the cryptic
remark, “That’s Otis”.
Why? Because the band’s guitarist
Bob Weir had a dog named Otis, who had chosen this moment to wander across the stage.
At the end of the Allman
Brothers Band’s 1971 Fillmore Concerts, Duane Allman rejects the
audience’s calls for a second encore by saying, “It’s six o’clock y’all!”
Why? Because the theatre
had been temporarily evacuated before the show, owing to a bomb threat. The
Brothers had gone on late … and had jammed until dawn.
My favourite practitioner
of stage chat is the guitarist Leo Kottke. On one of his concert videos, Kottke
outlined his philosophy of patter.
“I’ve learned that it’s necessary
by this time in the set to speak,” he says, after playing a few numbers, “because
there’s a kind of tension and then a hostility that develops if there’s just complete
silence. The hole I dig for myself by not saying anything is much deeper than the
one I’m digging right now, so I
go ahead and begin to speak, wondering at least as much as you what the hell it
is I’m gonna say.”
That’s good patter. It
isn’t just patter, it’s meta-patter. It’s patter about patter. And Kottke’s
analysis is spot on. A live show without intersong chat is like a steak without
salt.
“I’d like to say thank
you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition,”
quipped John Lennon on a London rooftop, after the Beatles’ final public performance.
Left on the end of the Let it Be album by its producer Phil Spector, Lennon’s
gag sounded like an epitaph on the Beatles’ career. If he’d known his throwaway
line would attain sonic immortality, Lennon surely would have phrased it more
grammatically.
