Love You Live? Sure Do!

Rip It Up, Issue 6, 1 November 1977, Page 10

Love You Live? Sure Do!

Ken Williams

The Rolling Stones Love You Live Rolling Stones Records

This on-again off-again live album finally delivers the promise of years. The Rolling Stones at their live best, giving full force to that greatest rock and roll band in the world" reputation. Four sides is usually a bit much to take in at one time with any artist. With this album I just wanted to press on. Anyone who has seen the Stones, and/or heard bootlegs of their concerts, knows only too well that they have off nights. They can be sloppy and out of tune; and. in some ways, that is the Stones. But when they're on they can be sloppy and out of tune and great. And that's what this album is all about.

Sometimes the rhythm section is stumbling behind (they're all over the place in Tumbling Dice"), and most of the time the sound is the sort of blur concerts used to be before all that PA.

In some ways the whole album is a bit like those early ones, The Rolling Stones, 12x5, Out of Our Heads; it has that twotrack R&B distortion that Kpith Richard actively campaigns for. It's an affirmation of those rhythm n' blues roots. The frenetic cacophony of Around and Around shows that maybe the Crawdaddy Club is not so distant a memory for the Stones. Three sides of the album are from Paris concerts, the fourth the celebrated Toronto club recording, the El Mocambo side."

The concert material is the Stones at their hottest, from Honky Tonk Woman" through to the encore of Sympathy for the Devil", The material has all been recorded before, but the arrangements are, in most cases, new. The addition of Ron Wood gives the group added punch, a sort of shadow Keith Richard.

But it's the club recordings that bear repeated listening. The intimate situation provides the basis for the more electric music. Two numbers here haven t been recorded before by the Stones. Muddy Waters Mannish Boy and Bo Diddley s reggaed Crackin Up , The others are Little Red Rooster (two slide guitars going here) and Chuck Berry s Around and Around . To me, the club material has the overwhelming excitement of the first time I heard Route 66 . opening song on that first album. The whole record jumps in a way that their previous "official" live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, seldom achieved. It's no step forward, rather it's a statement of what they are and where they're from. Solid rocking. And maybe the rest of those Toronto tapes will find their way on to vinyl . . .