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Singing Into the Void
Why I keep coming back to pandemic-era live performances
It honestly never occurred to me that some people don’t like live albums, but I seem to bump into them on the internet occasionally.
I’ve always loved a live album. Maybe it’s because they can transport you through time. When I was a teenager discovering U2 in the Achtung Baby era, I bought the band’s older albums. I found myself listening to Under a Blood Red Sky, which was recorded when I was 7 years old and thus quite unlikely to attend live rock concerts, much more often than the studio albums from which its songs were taken. I’d imagine being there at Red Rocks in a thunderstorm as the Edge channeled the crackling electricity in the air into his guitar. I could experience that event, at least a little bit, whenever I put on the CD.
A good live album summons a moment in time and mythologizes it. Is it an honest document of that moment in time? Maybe not, but it’s almost better that way. Well before I heard the Hold Steady live, I listened to a set of mp3 bootlegs of a concert in Madison, Wisconsin (now lost on some dead laptop’s hard drive) repeatedly. Though the recording was kind of crappy, energy shot through it.
And when Craig Finn said, at the end of an extended, concussive version of Killer Parties, that “there is so much joy…
