Top 5 70's live prog albums

[GuitarGeek]

Explain how Zappa came out of the blocks with a double album.... sure Verve was a larger label.. I for one only had access to the live version of Suppers Ready via very expensive bootlegs in the '80's.. The band could have done what lot's of folks have done.. 4th side could have included singles up to that point.. sort of what ended up coming out on the release from Charisma (collection of songs from other bands on the label) which also included a different version of Watchers of the Sky as well as Happy the Man / Twilight Alehouse.. I believe all of this was a part of the Archive boxset.. if they wanted to pull out the aforementioned live cuts of Fountain/ Can Utility.. all the better.. as it was the single album that was released was great.. spent lots of time on my turntable in the 70's.. and I can think of more than one party where I saw this album and I'd ask.. "got any more Genesis?" to which I'd get a blank stare and "didn't know they had any other albums".. so maybe there's something to the fact that Live made it's mark in the USA which of course led up to the Selling England tour which broke them into the college circuit.. etc..

Who knows what Frank had to do to get MGM to let him release a double LP as The Mothers' debut. They probably had to take a reduction of their advance and/or future royalties. I'm sure this was another example of TANSTAFL ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"). But I'm sure it wasn't as simple as Frank saying "We have enough material for a double LP", and the record company henchmen saying "double LP it is!". Especially given the false pretenses under which the band were signed (ie Tom Wilson mistaking them for "the ugliest blues band in LA", and Frank apparently not telling him otherwise until they were already in the studio), there had to be some kind of trade off there.

As for putting an entire side of singles on the theoretical double LP version of Genesis Live, did the band have that many singles? They surely wouldn't have been able to use anything they did for Jonathan King, for contractual reasons, and they didn't do very many singles for Charisma, did they? I know there's Happy The Man, that alternate recording of Watcher Of The Skies and Twilight Alehouse (wasn't that recorded during the Foxtrot sessions).

Of course, they could have knocked out a couple quickies, or they could have used some of the stuff they were working on at the time. Given how long Selling England By The Pound is (something like 52 minutes, I think), they could have easily taken one or two songs that they might have already had in the can and stuck those into such a package, without making it necessary for them to have to come up with something to replace it. The only problem with that idea is, I think part of the appeal of Selling England... is the array of material. Take one of the short songs (ie I Know What I Like or More Fool Me) out, and you sort of shift the personality of the record, as it were. Take out one of the longer pieces, and you're either relegating a bonafide classic to "filler" status, or you're again messing with the flow of the record (ie separating Battle Of Epping Forest from After The Ordeal, or messing with the segue between The Cineam Show and Aisle Of Plenty, which have to close the album together so as to bring it full circle from Dancing With The Moonlit Knight).

So I don't see many solutions to the problem. At any rate, I just think the band and Charisma weren't ready for the financial gamble of putting out a double LP at the time of Genesis Live, especially since they probably just saw the album as a cheap way of keeping the band in the public eye while they worked on Selling England... And would therefore be ironic that it ended up being the record that drew attention to the band in whichever quarters in a way it's predecessors hadn't.