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Godxofxrock9
I played my record the other day and it's alot better then i remember. If you can get past the over dubs it's a pretty solid album. and the el mocambo side makes the record worth buying alone. anyways it's no get yer ya ya's out but i very much enjoyed it very underrated imho

Overdubs are why I dno't really like Love You Live OR Ya-Ya's.

[thepowergoats.com]

I've never cared for it, and since we got the official release of L.A. Friday, I like it even less.

it is nice to see the different opinions about love you live.
i always liked it, maybe because it was the 1st stones album i bought, but i still find that it's only r'n'r' from love you live is still one of the best, wild and furious rock songs i ever heard

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z
I love it better than Ya-Yas.
Yes, I gave up trying to be normal.

><

Only side three is necessary.

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Erik_Snow
Underrated and overrated are senseless words

That's hinderrated.

I was so hot for LYL, cause I'd seen great moments on the 76 tour.Of course I liked it when it came out. In those days you just liked your new Stones albums.
There were some good songs on it like IORR,Happy,Hot stuff (but I'd heard better versions on the tour)etc. I was never that enthusiastic about the Mocambo tracks. I had expected much more and better. I remember that I liked the JJFlash version. Played loud it rocked.
But as an (double)album it never came anywhere near YaYa's.Something's missing.
I think they just had too much stuff to choose from and in the end messed it up. Keith mind was on other things anyway.

I agree with 71 Tele, only side 3 is worth saving, and I've heard it recently. They were heading downhill fast with GHS, IORR and Black & Blue, followed by Love You Live. Some Girls really resurrected them. Only the 80s death spiral of Undercover and Dirty Work are worse. Anything after '89 doesn't matter.

I think it gets better with age.

I loved it when I got it for myself. Friends had it and played it a lot during the summer. I taped it and listened to it on a Walkman for one summer while I worked. Every day. It was hilarious.

Then CDs came out and I was so pleased to get it on CD...

Then they signed with Virgin and, well, it didn't come out for quite some time. Like a true dimwit, I got that reissue when Virgin finally put it out.

So, regardless of how bad it actually is, to this day I love it.

It's all relative. This is one of the first albums I ever bought and it has always occupied a special place in my heart. I love the If You Can't Rock Me/Get Off My Cloud medley.

Mark
The Rock and Roll Report
www.rockandrollreport.com
"Where Rock and Roll is still an adventure!"

ROLLING STONE reviews.


By Paul Nelson
September 23, 1977

One of the paradoxes of such a supposedly spontaneous art form as rock & roll is that it has produced no great live albums. And even very few good ones. It doesn't make sense, but it's true. For example, if you accept the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart as artists who are at least representative of this music's best, you won't find any of them definitively defined by Got LIVE If You Want It!, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, Live at Leeds, Before the Flood, Hard Rain or Coast to Coast. Overture and Beginners. Granted that I'd hate to be without many of those LPs, I really wouldn't think twice about trading in the whole lot for, say, Exile on Main Street, Rubber Soul, Who's Next, Blonde on Blonde and Every Picture Tells a Story. Somehow, studio albums almost always seem to work out better, although there's nothing duller than sitting through a series of recording sessions and nothing more exciting than experiencing a landmark concert.

Why don't we have great live LPs? Probably for the same reason that automatic writing and cinema vérité usually don't manage to provide unified, well-rounded works of art: ultimately, because of a lack of control over too many important elements. Instead, we have to settle for local color and mood, and, in return for some brilliant bits and pieces, put up with long stretches during which absolutely nothing of interest happens. Technically, it's more difficult to record a rock & roll band onstage than in a studio — that's practically a given. Onstage, the musicians must entertain as well as play, can't always bear themselves or each other and have only one shot — individually and collectively, in the heat of the moment — at getting everything right. Naturally, there aren't any overdubs for texture or finesse.

That said, Love You Live — especially sides three and four — is probably as good a live album as I've yet heard. Perhaps we can't always get what we want, but here, according to Rolling Stones Records at least, we get what we need: "Love You Live is the full measure of the Stones' power and represents the band's definitive statement for what's left of this decade. The songs circumscribe the Stones' entire career, in a none-too-random fashion, either." Well, yes and no — mostly no. More importantly, this double set provides us with what is really our first extensive opportunity to hear how relative newcomer Ron Wood is interacting with the rest of the group (except for a few rough spots, quite well) and what changes his guitar playing has wrought. Further, we now have in-concert records from all three chapters of the Rolling Stones: Brian Jones was on Got LIVE If You Want It!, Mick Taylor on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!

Basically, the guitar team of Keith Richard and Ron Wood sounds more like Richard/Jones than Richard/Taylor. On Love You Live, everything seems scaled down and speeded up. The horns are gone, and there's less grandiosity and perhaps less ambition. Side three, recorded at the 350-seat El Mocambo Tavern in Toronto, is a full-fledged return to the glories of R&B, all of it exquisitely performed. The new Stones are hot and scrappy, apparently preferring the visceral jab of rock & roll to the moody, thoughtful, slower songs. Indeed, the band's sole attempt at a large ballad, "You Can't Always Get What You Want," seems both misguided and almost disinterestedly thrown away. Jagger's vocals on the song sound more like a lesson in rarified enunciation than an emotional rendering of particularly meaningful lyrics. Wood's spectacularly wrong-headed guitar solo then lugs the corpse down a long and totally inappropriate cul-de-sac, and Jagger returns to fling its bones — now in the form of a sing-along — to the audience. Hardly the proper way to treat an anthem. (Shades of what Bob Dylan did to "Like a Rolling Stone" on the Before the Flood tour.) Surprisingly, "Tumbling Dice" doesn't fare much better. Jagger is again infected with the cutes, there's not much drama, nothing builds, and everybody simply forgets about the climax.

Although much of sides one, two and four — all recorded in a large auditorium in Paris — is fine, clearly the four songs from the El Mocambo are the heart and soul of Love You Live. Everything burns more naturally in a small club. Jagger comes alive, the band members play as if they were having the time of their lives, and the LP's best cut, the reggae-style "Crackin' Up," ignites the fire. When I talked to Keith Richard about it, he explained the difference this way: "Let's see, '63 or '64 must have been the last time we played anywhere that small. After a couple of numbers, you suddenly realized that it felt perfectly natural, probably because it sounded so natural. I guess. Felt just like a rehearsal — the difference between how it should be done and what you actually usually do. It was a real joy not to have that gap between the stage and the people. In a place like the El Mocambo, you can hear the band — and, more important, we can hear the band — as it's actually sounding. And we weren't just getting the power of the band through the monitor, you know. I could hear Charlie's bass drum through my spine."

I don't know why, but calling Love You Live a very good album sounds like an insult to the Rolling Stones. From a position of love and respect, one wants to be able to write that the new record is their best ever, even better than their certified masterpiece, Exile on Main Street. But, of course, it isn't — and one can't. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman are still the Stones' secret weapons, Ron Wood seems like a comer, Keith Richard sounds positively revitalized, and Mick Jagger certainly hasn't lost his enormous vocal clout. Listening to these guys bid adieu to Paris with a magnificent version of "Sympathy for the Devil" makes one realize that the death-knell blues for the Rolling Stones are premature at best, ghoulish at worst and completely irrelevant. Just because one's front-line superlatives have to be held somewhat in check for Love You Live is no reason to lapse into a sentimental lament for somebody's vainglorious idea of What Used to Be when what's here this minute is quite memorable in its own right.

Ahhh. So that's when ROLLING STONE started to get down on its knees for Mick.

TO HEAR IT BEST, YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO THE SHM-SACD VERSION ON A GOOD STEREO SYSTEM CAPABLE OF PLAYING SACD.

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71Tele

Only side three is necessary.

You're referring to the rim of the vinyl I suppose.

Great live album to get down with.

I don't see the Stone's career as having high and low points. More of a horizontal zigzag for me. The mid-70's were a little out there, in my opinion. But damn, do I wish I was alive then, to see them in concert.

I find all Stone's albums to be great. Sometimes I just have to be in the mood for a particular album.

Right on, MingSubu!

I was a bit disappointing back then wen they released "Love You Live" I must be spoiled after they released GYYYO

__________________________

For me, I think underradared is the appropriate term. I've been a Stones fan for over 30 years, but for some reason have never owned this album. In recent months I've thought of picking it up, even pausing to look it over in the record bins of the local shop. Someday, though, eventually....

The way some people talk about the studio touch-ups for this one, it seems like it should be called Love You Dubbed.

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Godxofxrock9
I played my record the other day and it's alot better then i remember. If you can get past the over dubs it's a pretty solid album. and the el mocambo side makes the record worth buying alone. anyways it's no get yer ya ya's out but i very much enjoyed it very underrated imho

I dont mind overdubs in theory if they make the songs BETTER. Unless theyre blatantly obvious (and theyre not) its not a big deal and unless you have access to some anorak's webpage or subscribe to a fan magazine, youre not going to know.

Why someone overdubs vocals with studio singing that's far worse than the original performance however is beyond me.

Recording dozens of shows and releasing versions of the songs with so-so vocals is one thing, Had they left the songs at that, it would have been a bad enough decision as it is to sanction their release. To go into the studio instead, utterly butcher some of them and THEN release them is a decision which you could be forgiven for thinking was a form of self-sabotage. Maybe Mick didnt think his singing was punky enough on the originals and it was some kind of bizarre artistic 'statement' in the musical climate of the time (which he seemed to be a bit obsessed with) to release a record with vocals like that.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2013-08-26 00:15 by Gazza.

I agree with most here that it was one that we could have done without. They might have been ablt to put together a SINGLE album from the tunes but even then it would have been crap compared to what we have heard in boots.

Agree with Gazza and CMH516 that Mick's singing was the real problem. Also likely that Keith was too out of it to really contribute to the mixes and song selection, he had alot going on at that time as I recall.

I'm afraid the best part of that record was the ability to clean weed on the opened double album......peace

El Mocambo side is probably the Stones at their best as a live band.

For me LYL is way to much fixed in the studio.
If you compare it with bootlegs from Paris ' 76 it almost looks like you compare two different bands. On the boots at the same concert they sound so much rougher and more dangerous than on the LYL album.
Somehow the official LP and later cd sounds for me a littel boring, instead of on the boots you can hear a very exiting band performing their songs.