So I'm sitting here at work and while trying to figure out what to put on my WMP for the day, I open my playlist of the Dream Theater NYC 3/4/93 official bootleg, and it got me thinking about how in an alternate reality, if DT were bigger, their first live album should have been this show. It's a monster set list of songs from their first two albums (with all of IAW peppered throughout), featuring one of the first four performances of "A Change Of Seasons", as well as a performance of "Eve"! It would rank up there with classic prog live albums like Yessongs, Seconds Out, and Exit...Stage Left for me. I mean, it still kind of does, but can you imagine if DT themselves had officially released this show after the IAW Tour?
And thinking about my other favorite band, Rush, I went through a whole process of crafting a whole series of complete live shows from all of their tours, creating a CD binder with all of them, and of all the tours they had, the Hemispheres Tour deserved an officially released, complete live show. The set list on that tour is insane, with full performances of "Hemispheres" and a good chunk of "2112", as well as many more tunes from their then most recent albums. I'm hoping that if they continue the trend of offering deluxe 40th Anniversary editions of their albums that we get a Hemispheres show in that set, because I love the AFTK show we got, FINALLY in full.
So what other bands' tours or shows do you wish had official releases? They can be from more recent bands and tours, or even things from the past, like a complete live "Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" from Genesis that wasn't riddled with modern overdubs, or a whole "Tales From Topographic Oceans" show from Yes? Even if things like these exist in the bootleg world, official or otherwise, you can still list them if you WISH they had been official, because at least then there'd be better mixing and mastering, and the package would be nice (presumably).
-Marc.