Music » Live Album Classic Rock Music

When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple, they barely skipped a beat replacing him. And he barely skipped a beat forming Rainbow, a mirror image of his old band. Vocalist Ronnie James Dio, though, provided Blackmore with a clipped, howl-free voice, hardening Rainbow's sound considerably despite the presence of Mellotron, organ, and other keyboards. By the time it released On Stage, the band had developed its dominion: songs about killing kings, men on silver mountains, and women locked in towers. Subjects were grandiose and the execution heavy, even ponderous. But there's charm in the way Dio intones, "Do you waaant some love? / Well, here we are to give you love," as Blackmore strums in the background. But Dio and Blackmore turn to hard, hard rock with the sprawling "Man on the Silver Mountain" and slow, sad-sack blues with "Mistreated." For gearheads, there's a full accounting of the band's equipment on the back cover. This remastered edition boasts a warmer sound, but who needs warmth with that big guitar spilling over onto your shirt and shoes while the crowd claps along? --Andrew Bartlett

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If you were challenged to name five rock albums that epitomized the '70s, Frampton Comes Alive! should probably top the list. Former Humble Pie guitarist Peter Frampton recorded a few perfectly fine albums with his band Frampton's Camel, but it wasn't until some of those tracks were recorded at a live performance in San Francisco and released as Frampton Comes Alive! that he became a household name. Buoyant pop, sentimental ballads, arena rock--this album has it all. The double-LP package set sales records and contained three bona fide radio hits ("Baby, I Love Your Way," "Show Me the Way," and "Do You Feel Like We Do?"), one of which, shockingly enough, was over 14 minutes long. No wonder that, to many, the two-and-a-half-minute songs of the Damned and the Sex Pistols felt like a breath of fresh air a year or two later. --Lorry Fleming

Tired of the showboating image that his early live performances had saddled him with--and that his black audience viewed as demeaning and degrading to his musical talent--Hendrix dissolved his Experience in 1969 in search of a more terra-firma-grounded, blues-oriented persona. On New Year's Eve, Hendrix, his old Army buddy bassist Billy Cox, and ex-Electric Flag drummer Buddy Miles performed a loose, jam-filled set at New York's Fillmore East (completists will want the panoramic though uneven Live at the Fillmore East). Released a few months after his New Year's Eve 1970 concert, Band of Gypsys underscored Hendrix's desired return to basics--even if his basic was at a level most guitarists could never attain in a lifetime of playing. --Billy Altman

This 1972 live album is a watershed recording for the Band. Recorded the previous New Year's Eve, the two-disc concert recording presents the core quintet fortified by a five-man horn section overseen by New Orleans ace Allen Toussaint, and it is capped by a guest appearance by Bob Dylan. The brass and reed players incite the group to gut it out with more unrestrained fire than these road-hardened vets were accustomed to. The lion's share of the set selections are culled from the quintet's first four studio albums; only an ebullient cover of the Marvin Gaye hit "Don't Do It," the unremarkable original "Get Up Jake," Garth Hudson's mind-boggling organ improvisation "The Genetic Method," and an absolutely piercing version of Chuck Willis's "Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes" spice up the reliable album selections on disc one. But Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel sound like they're having so much fun singing the likes of "King Harvest," "Stage Fright," "Caledonia Mission," and "Chest Fever" that it matters not that Robbie Robertson's writing muse had already pretty much dried up. The 2001 digitally remastered reissue includes an entire second disc of previously unreleased tracks, including four with Dylan at the mic. More than four years would pass before the Robertson version of the Band would call it a day following its star-studded Last Waltz, but, as a live entity, here is where they crested. --Steven Stolder

Digitally Remastered. Includes Extensive Booklet.

You want guitar precision, listen to Jim Hall. You want perfect pitch, listen to Ella Fitzgerald. You want raw, electrifying, frightful, unruly, mesmerizing, aggressive, urgent, and occasionally brilliant gutbuckets of sound, listen to Jimi Hendrix's Monday morning Woodstock finale. Most of the masses had gone home, Jimi was nervous, his band unrehearsed, and the sound was as muddy as the grounds, but so what? In August of 1969, Hendrix's band, which he dubbed Gypsy Sun and Rainbows for this performance, was in a period of transition between the heavy psychedelic bluesy Experience and the more soulful, rhythmically dynamic Band of Gypsys. The two percussionists and a rhythm guitarist who augment Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell and Gypsy bassist Billy Cox are either mixed out by the engineer or drowned out by Hendrix's ferocious attack. Throughout the intense performance, finally restored here in sequential order and (almost, save for two Larry Lee vocals) in its entirety, Hendrix seems to touch on every musical style--from jazz to blues to funk to soul to metal, and even a few (fusion, punk) that weren't christened yet. There are crisper Hendrix shows out there, but none more explosive or more historic. --Marc Greilsamer

Expanded & remastered (HDCD) version of the band's 1969 tour de force spotlighting the band in all their onstage glory, features the single version of 'Dark Star' as a hidden bonus track. Digipak. Warner/Rhino. 2003.

No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: HUMBLE PIE
Title: ROCKIN' THE FILMORE
Street Release Date: 11/15/1988
Domestic
Genre: ROCK/POP

Release Date: 2008-01-01, Audio CD, Universal (ECM & Island)