Live Album Reissue (April 9, 2021)

[David]

Originally Posted by BigAl84

I've also always wondered - whats up with the tracks recorded in santa monica? If it was at the santa monica civic aud, that is a really small venue and it wasn't a tour date. I was curious what spurred them to record those songs and record them there.

I think those newish songs were from July 1980 and that it was sort of a rehearsal for the final leg of the tour. (They were previously off the road in June and the final leg didn’t start until August.) We have a couple of “Fireflies” and “Farmer’s Daughter” versions that are all very close (save a piano track here and there), but why the band ran through three new ones, I’m just not sure. Maybe they planned to try some of them in concert.

On the album proper, the songs NOT recorded on the 1979–80 tour are:

• Monday Morning
• Say You Love Me
• Dreams
• Rhiannon
• Over My Head
• Don’t Let Me Down Again
• Don’t Stop

The “Sara” vocal has always both fascinated and baffled me. It sounds nothing like her 1979–80 vocals on tour. In fact, it sounds like that barrel-chested bronchial romanticism of the 1982 tour. It must have been recorded between the end of the tour (September) and the album release (December), but there is still no logical explanation as to why it sounds the way it does, save that she was in some post-bronchitis distress and loved the sound of her singing. Sometimes, when I have partially recovered from a chest cold, I like the sound of my own singing. There’s a cavernous quality that my illness brings.

I don’t believe that the album had much in the way of instrumental doctoring, other than mixing, of course, but I think some of the vocals — like the chorus on “Go Your Own Way” — were modified in studio. But nothing truly major, the way “The Dance” was polished up. Listen to the latter and then listen to the Irvine Meadows radio simulcast (Westwood One) from the tour and you can hear what the band really sounded like playing together.

As for why that “Don’t Stop” was picked for inclusion, possibly because it was so easy to mix given that it was from a publicity video they shot a few years before and were already using for marketing. (You saw it on TV to advertise Rumours in 1977.) But I love the way it peters out and Christine comments on the broken string — it’s so loose and impromptu, so indicative of the frame of mind the band were in during the Tusk years.

Incidentally, several of those inner-sleeve photos are from the final two shows at the Hollywood Bowl, including the shot of Stevie in her velour riding jacket with her leg up on the kick drum. She took that pose for a solid minute or two during the raging finale of “Go Your Own Way.”

Ahhh . . . where are the snows of yesteryear? Aye, where are they? Nostalgia infects my soul, and memories, yellowing with antiquity, infuse my spirit with a mellowing contentment.