Respectfully Letter M, Sides 1, 3 and 4 of ESL were taken from a single performance in Montreal on the MP tour, while Side 2 was culled from a 2-night stand in Glasgow on the PeW tour. So it’s not as mish-mash as some claim (other than the order of songs is completely rearranged). But it is 75% from a single performance with a few extras.
The problem is that not only does it sound horrible, but it appears to be a mish-mash because of all the silly (and completely unnecessary) fade ins and fade outs and rearranging of the tracks. Had they made it sound like one complete performance and had it not been so doctored up in post-production to suck all the life out of it, I'm sure I would have loved it much more. After all, even AtWaS is compiled from their 3-night stand at Massey Hall, and that is one of my favorite live Rush albums. And the first 2 CDs from Different Stages are from all over, although you wouldn't really know it unless you looked at the credits. My only bone to pick with DS is that I am not a fan of mixing tracks from multiple tours.
In that way, it’s not terribly different from Live After Death (hailed by many as one of the greatest live albums ever) which was taken from a 4-night stand at Long Beach and Side 4 taken from a show in Hammersmith.
Sure, but LAD is comparable to AtWaS - it comes off as sounding like it's one performance.
It's definitely how a lot of prog live albums were done back then, like Yessongs, Seconds Out, Two For The Show etc. Nowadays they all tend to be from single shows, and I'm not sure if that's better or worse when it comes to needing/wanting to do overdubs in post to make the concert a marketable live album.
I like what Rush did for (I believe) both ASoH and DS: if they felt the need to fix a part, they flew in that instrument from another performance at another live show, thereby still keeping it live, just like what Glasser has suggested in one of his posts.
while the latter is from the last night of their Vapor Traila tour, and the album captures the whole show as a representation of that tour, warts and all. I don't think RIR has (m)any overdubs, and it's infamous for keeping as much crowd noise and audience participation as possible, sometimes almost as equal to the band's levels!
I gotta say that the audience "singing" YYZ might have been my favorite moment from any live album/DVD in the last 30 years.
Amen! That is definitely an example where keeping the audience noise higher works in favor of the live album.
While I'm guessing I'm in the minority, I will always have a soft spot for Grace Under Pressure Live. The audience noise is higher in the mix, but that all performance to me feels sooooo alive. Part of it may be because it was the first time I ever saw my (then) favorite band on TV before I ever started seeing concerts.