The Rolling Stones

Love You Live (1977)

 

Disc One
  1.Intro: Excerpt from "Fanfare for the Common Man"
  2.Honky Tonk Woman
  3.If You Can't Rock Me/Get Off My Cloud
  4.Happy
  5.Hot Stuff
  6.Star, Star
  7.Tumbling Dice
  8.Fingerprint File
  9.You Gotta Move
 10.You Can't Always Get What You Want

Disc Two
  1.Mannish Boy
  2.Crackin' Up
  3.Little Red Rooster
  4.Around and Around
  5.It's Only Rock 'N Roll (But I Like It)
  6.Brown Sugar
  7.Jumpin' Jack Flash
  8.Sympathy for the Devil

  

One cannot fault a band of the Rolling Stones’ stature for issuing a double live album at the height of their fame. What can, and perhaps should, be questioned is the execution: how it sounds, how it feels, and what it ultimately achieves. At this point in their career, the group had not yet fully saturated their catalogue with live releases—though they would soon become known for releasing one after nearly every tour (and sometimes in between). Even so, Love You Live stands as one of the weakest entries in their entire concert discography.

It is easy to forgive the primitive muddiness of 1966's Got Live If You Want It!—recording technology was limited, and expectations were tempered. But here, with all the resources of the late 1970s at their disposal, no such excuses apply.

The first issue is the track selection. With live albums, preferences are inevitably subjective, but there remains a reasonable expectation of a balance: a showcase of the band’s own material, skewed toward the hits, with a few lesser-known entries if—and only if—the band can do them justice. Here, the Stones manage about half of that. Performances of Honky Tonk Women and Sympathy for the Devil are spirited, though rough around the edges. Yet even these tracks would later be given more convincing treatments on subsequent live records.

Elsewhere, the shortcomings are harder to forgive. It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But I Like It) is limp and oddly joyless, and You Can’t Always Get What You Want is marred by a pedestrian arrangement so lifeless that one begins to wonder if the band themselves were growing tired of it.

Then comes the infamous club set—Side 3 of the original LP, or, for CD listeners, the sequence from Mannish Boy to Around and Around. In theory, a return to smaller venues to capture intimacy is admirable. In practice, it exposes the band’s limitations when playing straight blues covers. The Stones, of course, built their reputation on the fusion of blues roots with rock immediacy—reinterpreting, not merely reproducing. Here, that alchemy is conspicuously absent. Around and Around shows a flicker of life, but by then the damage is largely done.

To make matters worse, the remainder of the album is padded with second-rate material. Star Star, Hot Stuff, and You Gotta Move add little beyond length. One senses a lack of curatorial discipline—a reluctance, perhaps, to cut inferior performances in favour of brevity and impact.

In sum, Love You Live is a misstep—not catastrophic, but certainly disappointing given the band’s formidable live pedigree. It is not a case of ambition exceeding ability, but rather of ambition being replaced by obligation. One listens more out of loyalty than enjoyment.

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