POLLing the Fool: best of the sprawling double/triple LP live albums from prog's golden era

I get why it's not listed here, but Santana's Lotus absolutely belongs - a triple live LP composed of like 80% instrumental music. In its absence, I'm voting for Yessongs, which was my introduction to Yes and rules.

i think you got the important ones! i'm surprised to find that there were apparently no italian prog/RPI double live records released in the 70s - a shame because damn do i love live '70s RPI. i think out of these i will go for "playing the fool", a great selection of songs from their entire career, many of them substantially rearranged for live performance. hhai/live is also a fantastic gateway magma album, however, christian vander is an actual fascist and so magma is dead to me.

browsing rym for '70s live prog albums turned up these, which are all arguably also worth consideration, though not necessarily as high up as the ones you listed:

grobschnitt - solar music live
wishbone ash - live dates
henry cow - concerts
van der graaf - vital: live
steve hillage - live herald
mike oldfield - exposed
eloy - live

of the ones not listed i'd pick "exposed". the non-improvised LP of "concerts" is fantastic. i don't come back to the improvised half much.

ahhh damn! I missed Vital - Live, that one is totally killer

I was a little surprised when my own musical outlook collided with the broad historical sentiment that ELP were the #1 bloated, ridiculous "why punk happened" prog act since I always thought they were so sharp and thrilling, putting all that virtuosity to some actual good use, but once streaming came around I slowly put together that this might've been because my primary ELP exposure for all those years was my dad's Welcome Back My Friends CD copy that I'd ripped to my iPod & maybe all of those shenanigans just translated way better when forced outside of the studio. Like compare this version of "Aquatarkus" to what they did on record:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njbx8wJ78Qg

oh wait solar music live is only one LP lol, strike that one

ahhh damn! I missed Vital - Live, that one is totally killer

― frogbs, Friday, May 15, 2026 12:36 PM (one minute ago)

it's a rough, weird one... the version of "pioneers over c" is a fucking all-timer, though, one for the ages

that is how you perform the absolute hell out of a prog epic, thats for sure

guhhhh, y'all, seeing eloy on the rym list made me try that live one and my answer is still "no". i'm ok with the obvious floyd derivation (though camel does it better), but i just don't like it when bands feel the need to sing badly in english when they could just sing well in their native language (a problem I have with the English-language versions of those PFM records as well). i tried the wishbone ash as well, and their style (kinda thin-lizzy-ish?) is just not my thing; i don't care how well ted turner plays guitar.

Seconds Out introduced me to Genesis and prog and was life-changing.

But the Renaissance live album is the Renaissance album for me and an all-time favourite too. Voting Ren.

I wrote about ELP in 2008, when their catalog was reissued, and started with this:

Sorry, Nuge. Sorry, Frampton. Double-live albums are for pussies. The ’70s were the era of the triple-live album. Santana’s Lotus. Yes’s Yessongs. Wings’ Wings Over America. Shit, you can throw Chicago’s four-disc Chicago at Carnegie Hall on the list—just don’t throw it on the stereo. And, of course, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends, the album that proves the trio considered the 20-minute studio version of “Tarkus” restrained: Live, it balloons to a mind-crushing 27:24. And let’s not even discuss the 35-minute version of the “Karn Evil 9” suite that ends the show. Emerson, Lake & Palmer were some bloat-tastic motherfuckers.

that album got clowned on so much but I think it's only fair to point out that Yessongs was 20 minutes longer.

to be honest, I love it, warts and all (surely this can't be the best recording of the tour they got?) but by the end of Karn Evil 9 the band sounds so gassed

Wishbone Ash were more of a UK take on the Allmans, mixed in with Brit blues and folk I guess. Thin Lizzy improved on the best parts of their sound that's for sure.

I did own most of these records as a hugely uncool 80s teenager, PLUS "Barclay James Harvest Live" which I played the hell out of. Live Herald, Yessongs, Eloy Live, Bursting Out and Two for the Show were particular favourites, I said I was uncool. But I have to go with the Magma, even though well yes CV has a thing for Goebbels which somehow I'm able to put to one side when I listen to them. Must have been quite a sight to behold in the 70s.

all of these words, "excess", "pomp", "pretentious" - well, it's very strange really, because it's all so much short-hand! ultimately i think it's unnecessary because i feel like ELP's music _hasn't_ held up like the music of yes has. for all the influence that ELP had on '90s video game music, when "to be continued..." pops up it's not "karn evil 9" that drops. emerson had showmanship and genuine talent and maybe emo in leather pants domming a hammond organ with knifeplay _should_ be an iconic prog image, but it isn't, not the way peter gabriel's furry cosplay (in front of a much smaller audience) is. magma are certainly _far_ more excessive than elp. back in the '90s i got an archival live CD set of magma - 3 cds, 2 3/4 hours. five songs. one of which is a drum solo. one of which _cuts_ after _42 minutes_ just after the conclusion of one of the sickest bass solos i have ever heard, at least for seven minutes - the first three minutes kinda suck.

i want to like elp. they're "cooler", even, than gentle giant, who are pretty much the polar opposite of cool - theater kids but, they will assure you, not in, like, the _gay_ way. elp, well... i can't imagine nobuo uematsu's epic five-part boss theme for kefka, "dancing mad", existing without ELP. "dancing mad" is also, actually, _better_ than anything elp did. musically, pretty much everything elp did has been done better. many, many times. by many, many people. that's _not_ something i can say about yes or genesis or gentle giant or rush or gong or...

I did own most of these records as a hugely uncool 80s teenager, PLUS "Barclay James Harvest Live" which I played the hell out of. Live Herald, Yessongs, Eloy Live, Bursting Out and Two for the Show were particular favourites, I said I was uncool. But I have to go with the Magma, even though well yes CV has a thing for Goebbels which somehow I'm able to put to one side when I listen to them. Must have been quite a sight to behold in the 70s.

― change a word make a third (Matt #2), Friday, May 15, 2026 3:49 PM (twelve minutes ago)

i'll give magma this - vander's fascism, to this day, is not something i can imagine being a credible threat to democracy. i know that's a dangerous statement, given that the current state of american fascism is just absurdly stupid. just... the man wrote three three-album concept cycles in made-up gibberish (kobaian is not actually an actual conlang) apparently at least in part so he could put in some made-up gibberish that sounds kind of like "fuer mein fuhrer, adolf hitler" in one bit on side B of one of the albums. and then he called the album "mekanik destruktiw kommandoh". also his version of fascism involves literally everybody fucking dying, which is all fascism can ever accomplish but most fascists aren't so fucking _nihilist_ about it. i'm not really a fan of mass suicide, but as an overt fascist goal, i'll take it over mass murder, particularly if i'm on the list of people to be murdered.

for my part i grew up listening to frank zappa, so it's not like i can judge anyone else for being cringe... well, honestly, "roxy and elsewhere" probably does deserve a place on this poll! it's a good album. frank zappa is still cringe as hell, tho.

Why no live dates? That would get my vote.

Some more:

Argent, "Encore"
Hawkwind, "Space Ritual"
Renaissance, "Live at Carnegie Hall"

Do

Not sure Hawkwind belong here though.

ya Hawkwind aren't really symphonic prog like the others. The Renaissance one *is* one there though!!

also not to derail this thread but idk how seriously to take the whole "Christian Vander is a Nazi" thing, as far as I've heard that's all come from one ex-band mate with a bone to pick (not surprised, Vander doesn't seem like the easiest guy to work with). the idea of there being coded messages in their lyrics and album sleeves feels kinda farfetched to me, ya I know that's how fascists operate but Vander doesnt really strike me as some kind of shitposter. also idk how many Nazis out there are really into Coltrane the way he is. on the other hand there are definitely parts of the Magma catalogue that sound like getting you're yelled at by Hitler and I am sure Vander is highly aware of that.

Some more! Pushing the boundaries of prog in a few instances I guess.

Tangerine Dream - Encore
Omega - Live At The Kisstadion
Colosseum - Live
Gong - Live etc
Nektar - Live In New York
Ange - Tome VI

Vander is a lunatic and best ignored outside of his playing/composition is the answer.

I don't think the Tangerine Dream one really qualifies since none of those compositions are on other albums, the whole point is you could argue these albums are everything you actually need from the band. The Nektar one looks good though, honestly I had no idea that even existed. Gong is on there though!

Oh yeah sorry, you're probably right about TD too as lots of their albums seemed to be collages of live/studio recordings including Encore.

I was obsessed with Eloy Live when I was about 14. Definitely a case of style over substance. I loved that there was a 20 minute track called Atlantis' Agony At June 5th - 8498, 13 P.M. Gregorian Earthtime. Also the drummer wore a headband and spent a lot of his time rolling around the rototoms or intoning nonsense in a heavy German accent for the spoken-word sections. These things matter.

that sounds pretty cool actually. maybe I'll look for a copy :)

Gonna try the Gentle Giant record!

Bursting Out is a bit of an oddball here, I imagine, being part of Tull's Folk Trilogy era? They missed out on joining the pantheon, as they would've done if they'd put out one of their '73 shows where they played A Passion Play followed by Thick as a Brick.

I haven't heard Steven Wilson's mix of Bursting Out yet, good chance to remedy that.

A sort of modern-day equivalent to these (note that I am not arguing for its inclusion in this poll): Radical Action To Unseat The Hold Of Monkey Mind, a 3CD/1Blu-Ray set by the revived King Crimson. It's a live set recorded in 2015, mostly at one show in Japan but with a few tracks from other places (and no, they don't tell you which ones are from where) and/but Fripp removed all the crowd noise. Anyway, the set list is a fantastic overview of KC but this was the seven-member, three-drummer lineup, so the songs are all radically re-arranged and often sound very different from the original versions. It's my favorite document of the 2010s incarnation of KC (which I saw in 2017, when they were an eight-piece).

I'm just about to issue a triple-album post...

I'm a prog fan that is indifferent to most of this stuff. To me, the songs are the sound of the songs, on record, and you're not going to capture that in an echoey hockey arena. Or else you sterilize the live sound so much that it's basically the studio album with cheers. Also I don't really give a damn for extended jerk-off solos. Like the guy in the suit on the front cover of Hemispheres, I'm an Apollonian - the studio recording is the ideal, and, unless the music has been re-conceived or reworked onstage, my usual reaction to live albums is "that was OK, they can play".
Of the six poll options I know, I don't hear Yessongs or Bursting Out "loosening" the arrangements in any interesting way. If anything, the songs sound more fussy when you hear five or six people trying to build these arcane structures in real time. To me the essence of "Roundabout" is the combination and alternation of acoustic and electric guitars, among a multiplicity of textures, which obviously can't be duplicated with one Howe.
This isn't a complete dismissal of live prog - I like "Gates of Delirium" from Yesshows and even "The Revealing Science of God" from Keys of Ascension - and none of these caveats apply to watching these performances on film or video, which is quite illuminating - even ELP doing "Pictures at an Exhibition", which as a record I have very little time for.
I would vote for Gentle Giant here, since they do interesting rearrangements of the material, except for two big flaws - Derek Shulman performs all the lead vocals, which really flattens the emotional topography of the songs, and it sounds like the only keyboard they brought on the road was a very cheap-sounding clavinet. Instead I'll vote for other, probably either the Henry Cow or Mike Oldfield albums mentioned.

there were apparently no italian prog/RPI double live records released in the 70s

Le Orme In Concerto is a single album, for those who found the ELP set too cleanly recorded.

you can throw Chicago’s four-disc Chicago at Carnegie Hall on the list—just don’t throw it on the stereo

Prog fans should really check out "Mother" from this album, I'm sure Robert Lamm had been listening to Soft Machine Third:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bUEVsaXGY4

Oddly, though I haven't heard their live record, the only one of these bands I've seen in the flesh is Magma! I was expecting to see D**** G******, the drummer of a band I was in, at the show...and he ended up being thanked from the stage by the promoter for helping bring the band to Toronto for the first time.

'Space Ritual' conspicuously absent.

Not wanting to descend into the age-old "what is prog" discussion, but if Hawkwind are prog then so are the Grateful Dead. First rule of prog is that the musicians can play, in which Hawkwind were pretty much deficient on all fronts. I mean they were great! But I don't think they qualify.

Yeah, Hawkwind were a biker-friendly garage rock band with synths and a light show and a naked dancer; they were pretty much the opposite of prog ("regressive rock"?), which is why they rule.

also not to derail this thread but idk how seriously to take the whole "Christian Vander is a Nazi" thing, as far as I've heard that's all come from one ex-band mate with a bone to pick (not surprised, Vander doesn't seem like the easiest guy to work with). the idea of there being coded messages in their lyrics and album sleeves feels kinda farfetched to me, ya I know that's how fascists operate but Vander doesnt really strike me as some kind of shitposter. also idk how many Nazis out there are really into Coltrane the way he is. on the other hand there are definitely parts of the Magma catalogue that sound like getting you're yelled at by Hitler and I am sure Vander is highly aware of that.

― frogbs, Friday, May 15, 2026 5:04 PM (yesterday)

of course it doesn't make _sense_ for vander to be a nazi - which he isn't, to be clear, he's not as far as i know a "nazi", just a fascist. fascism isn't a logical or coherent ideology. so he idolizes coltrane and, like, otis redding, he's worked with a lot of jewish musicians for long periods of time, etc, etc. there are lots of people in america who support fascism who i look at and am like "what the fuck, dude (non-gendered)?" that was kind of the thing with me, i was pretty naive and innocent and i thought magma were one of those bands like laibach, who _are_ parodying fascism. i was like "why would a french person be a fascist?" why would _anyone_ be a fascist, though?

in 2012 or 2013 or whatever... this came from a friend of mine named marc, another magma superfan. and i do think for him there was... i mean he belongs to a demographic group historically targeted by fascists. it's hard not to take that sort of thing personal. when borghi said what he did... i think it was borghi, if i remember... a lot of people didn't take it seriously, and marc did the research. vander doesn't, as far as i know, really speak english, so a lot of what he's said isn't available. but he did do, for instance, do an interview with a fascist magazine where he made statements talking about things like "european culture". i've had francophone friends tell me that the french lyrics to "zess" are "nazi garbage" ("nazi" in this context being shorthand for "fascist").

the reason i ride so hard on this is because one of the reasons america is fascist, i think, is because a lot of us, particularly those of us who are white, didn't take fascism _seriously_. i mean i'm not gonna blame anyone for not seeing christian vander as a credible fascist threat. i don't think marine le pen sees him as a key part of her party. my recollection... this is more than a decade ago, to be clear... is that he has spoken in complimentary terms about le pen. what horrified me in 2011 is that people didn't take my friend marc _seriously_. magma couldn't be fascists, i think, in large part because they _liked_ magma. magma were _cool_. fascists can't be "cool", can they?

and yeah actually they can. i mean there was... there was, maybe is, a strasserite running a niche indie record label out of portland for a long time. are strasserites ever going to be a credible fascist threat? i seriously doubt it. and a lot of people i knew were willing to give this guy a free pass for being, in this case, a nazi, because it's like... "oh yeah, he's a strasserite, you've probably never heard of them", lol. fascism is a populist ideology and magma are, like, kind of the opposite of a populist band. seeing people i knew deny the _actual evidence_ marc was presenting to them about vander's fascism, though, because they didn't _want_ to believe it... that horrified me. the thing that's always been important to me is to _believe the evidence_. marc had the evidence (which, no, i can't link you to myself, this all having gone down on facebook), and a lot of his friends, people who knew him personally, chose to trust the musician they loved over marc. to me, that's some fuckin' "love and monsters" shit.

i guess i'm less upset, in 2026, than i used to be about vander being, at the very least, someone with strong fascist sympathies. i don't have the same sense of personal betrayal. my being a magma fan was a huge part of my identity, of my life, back then. things are a lot different now. fascism is a routine, ordinary part of my life, and i don't see any reason to single out vander as being exceptionally evil. i'm not a _fan_ of anyone or anything the way i was a fan of magma, back then.

tl;dr - yes, christian vander is a fascist.

he's worked with a lot of jewish musicians for long periods of time

He was married to one!

Yeah, Hawkwind were a biker-friendly garage rock band with synths and a light show and a naked dancer; they were pretty much the opposite of prog ("regressive rock"?), which is why they rule.

― wipes chooser (unperson), Saturday, May 16, 2026 7:56 AM (fourteen minutes ago)

the thing is that genres don't always have clear boundaries. hawkwind were space-rock - long, science-fiction-inflected songs with synthesizers and shit. so i can see the argument. i mean there are bands like "litmus", who are pretty openly hawkwind worship, that i _would_ classify as prog. i do think, though, that they're a little out of place in this poll. i think the interesting question would be whether pink floyd would qualify if they had a double live album in the 70s. i'd probably put them on - if you're gonna put bands like kansas and rush on there, floyd qualifies. (back in my '90s proghead days there _were_ plenty of purists who dismissed most "american" prog as being AOR and not "real" prog... not that they didn't acknowledge american prog, but it was seen as being more along the lines of these very obscure bands like Yezda Urfa.)

i don't think _most_ of zappa's stuff is prog. "just another band from LA", i wouldn't call that "prog", even though it had the side-long track "billy the mountain". "fillmore east june 1971", i wouldn't call that prog. "live in new york"... i think you could argue for sides two and four of the original LP version being prog, but "titties and beer" and "the illinois enema bandit"? ummmm, no.

anyway i think the list as is is _perfectly fine_. it's fun to argue about all kinds of edge cases but really, picking any album that _isn't_ on the list is gonna be a niche exercise.

i mean there are bands like "litmus", who are pretty openly hawkwind worship, that i _would_ classify as prog

lol I used to play in this band, they (or most of them) would have hated being called prog

he's worked with a lot of jewish musicians for long periods of time

He was married to one!

― Tom D, focussed with getting on with the job (Tom D.), Saturday, May 16, 2026 8:14 AM (ten minutes ago)

lol, she's still in the band, isn't she? (i haven't kept up... i mean i do view the borghi era as the peak period of the band, and the kohntarkosz trilogy is the stuff i dig most from them).

speaking of kohntarkosz, i do think live/hhai is very interesting because vander hadn't actually finished writing kohntarkosz when magma recorded the studio album - it doesn't have an ending, just a fade. part of my magma supernerd shit is spending a lot of time listening to bootlegs and understanding how vander developed his compositions in concert. "kohntarkosz" on record actually developed over a period of two years from the material released in 2004 as "k.a.". in some sense "k.a." is kind of a "smile"-style patchwork of material not ever really recorded the way it's presented on the album... you can hear a lot of it on the "inedits" album. a good chunk of k.a. came from a set of early 1973 studio rehearsals - if my memory serves "gamma anteria" on inedits comes from those rehearsals. anyway there's a 33-minute live performance from early 1973 (maybe march, maybe may, i'm not sure the precise date) of _most_, but not all of the material on k.a.

the studio rehearsals don't present a complete, finished work - they consist of unordered chunks between 30 seconds and 10 minutes in length. in addition, i _think_ there's maybe material on the early '73 live performance that aren't in the rehearsals? anyway, all of the material for k.a. was composed by mid-1973. unlike _smile_, vander _could_ have turned it into a complete composition that sounded like the released k.a. at or near the time of composition. i can tell you this by looking at another magma composition, "theusz hamtaahk".

like "kohntarkosz", "theusz hamtaahk" emerged over a period of time out of another recorded composition, in this case wurdah itah. my recollection is that wurdah itah started life much like k.a. - as a series of rough rehearsals. in this case, however, a director named yvan lagrange got a hold of these tapes and decided they'd make the perfect soundtrack for his adaptation of "tristan & yseult", though i'm not sure i see the point myself. (sorry, terrible pun.) as far as i know the circulating tape of the "wurdah itah" demos comes from the soundtrack of the film, and isn't a complete, coherent work. in this case, though, when vander heard that his work was used in this way he said "ok, you're paying for me to make a soundtrack album". which is why the original release of "wurdah itah" isn't credited to magma and is credited as the tristan et yseult soundtrack by a skeleton quartet, and this is how the piece has generally been performed since the '90s reformation. wurdah itah is unusual because it didn't _really_ get a full-band arrangement. on the same tape with the early live "k.a." there's a partial full-band live performance of wurdah itah - the only one i know of - but it's already in the process of turning into "theusz hamtaahk", a process that would be complete by... if not fall '75, by winter of '76, when the "hhai" band revived the piece in complete form.

anyway, throughout the '73-'74 era there's this process whereby you can hear "wurdah itah" turning into "theusz hamtaahk" and "k.a." turning into "kohntarkosz". this is why "theusz hamtaahk" shares a certain amount of material with "wurdah itah". if you listen to their officially archivally released BBC performance from early 1974, you can hear both pieces in mid-transformation. "kohntarkosz" still contains the material known as "om zanka" on inedits, which was spun off into its own piece in '75 but ultimately wound up back in "k.a."

e-re is a different matter... the germ of it comes from the piece released on "hhai/live" as "hhai", but doesn't _quite_ represent a composition from that era. it was really only about a 20 minute piece or so, with what i'll call "hhai (version integrale)" - hhai as on hhai/live with a fuller ending - being the version most often performed. part one consists of the intro, as released on the official seventh records cd version of live, but then goes into "rind-e" from the attahk album, which i don't think "rind-e" was originally part of e-re at _all_, honestly.

the first 15 minutes of e-re part ii is what was released as "extrait no. deux" from the seventh-records "udu wudu" bonus tracks before going into "version integrale" of hhai. apart from "rind-e" all of these pieces _were_ seen as part of "e-re" in the 70s, but only "hhai" was released in the 70s, and even then in an unfinished early form. after the 15 minute mark the band go into a piece that was released on udu wudu as "zombies", which was a completely different piece from e-re. this is where it gets really interesting, because from here it goes into a piece known by fans as the "great zombie", known from only two recordings by a transitional 1977 lineup of the band. the 1977 recording is a pretty impressive work ... i'd compare it to something like _sowiloi_ from the inedits album, which is a great piece that never really got its due. the best recordings imo of sowiloi are from mid-1973, where it stretched out as far as 35 minutes, including the jannick top piece appended to it on "inedits". fantastic stuff.

the thing about part iii is that it's _greatly_ improved, imo, over the "great zombie"... like a lot of early recordings of magma live material, the "great zombie" isn't really a finished work, going into a drum solo, which, uh, isn't something i get very enthusiastic about. anyway, e-re part iii is this roiling, churning apocalyptic thing that imo goes beyond anything _any_ '70s version of the band could ever have done. then there are a couple short codas which i _think_ are new? i don't remember. anyway it's part iii that really grabs me.

yeah ok sorry that's a _huge_ tangent but i get like this when i've had my coffee.

lol I used to play in this band, they (or most of them) would have hated being called prog

― the prog judge has spoken (Matt #2), Saturday, May 16, 2026 8:49 AM (thirty minutes ago)

lol blame the guy who used to be in the band who ran the planet mellotron site haha

Who happens to be my brother! He wasn't one of the main guys anyway

Bursting Out is a bit of an oddball here, I imagine, being part of Tull's Folk Trilogy era? They missed out on joining the pantheon, as they would've done if they'd put out one of their '73 shows where they played A Passion Play followed by Thick as a Brick.

I haven't heard Steven Wilson's mix of Bursting Out yet, good chance to remedy that.

― TheNuNuNu, Friday, May 15, 2026 5:22 PM (yesterday)

funnily enough the folk trilogy era is my favorite era of the band. not just because because of dee palmer's influence, but certainly her contributions to the sound particularly during this era helped!

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A sort of modern-day equivalent to these (note that I am not arguing for its inclusion in this poll): Radical Action To Unseat The Hold Of Monkey Mind, a 3CD/1Blu-Ray set by the revived King Crimson. It's a live set recorded in 2015, mostly at one show in Japan but with a few tracks from other places (and no, they don't tell you which ones are from where) and/but Fripp removed all the crowd noise. Anyway, the set list is a fantastic overview of KC but this was the seven-member, three-drummer lineup, so the songs are all radically re-arranged and often sound very different from the original versions. It's my favorite document of the 2010s incarnation of KC (which I saw in 2017, when they were an eight-piece).

― wipes chooser (unperson), Friday, May 15, 2026 5:27 PM (yesterday)

the eight-piece was kind of a weird situation, as rieflin wasn't really able to play the drums by that point, so jeremy stacey was brought on board as third drummer. incidentally i _love_ the thumbnail photos of the king crimson members on that page... a lot of them are so tremendously unflattering, particularly the picture of belew...

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I'm a prog fan that is indifferent to most of this stuff. To me, the songs are the sound of the songs, on record, and you're not going to capture that in an echoey hockey arena. Or else you sterilize the live sound so much that it's basically the studio album with cheers. Also I don't really give a damn for extended jerk-off solos. Like the guy in the suit on the front cover of Hemispheres, I'm an Apollonian - the studio recording is the ideal, and, unless the music has been re-conceived or reworked onstage, my usual reaction to live albums is "that was OK, they can play".

― Halfway there but for you, Saturday, May 16, 2026 6:28 AM (two hours ago)

i'm definitely on the dionysian side - i love hearing the music when it's janked up and messy and has all kinds of unwanted noises. the version of "perpetual change" on "yessongs" for instance... i love the _grit_ of it. one doesn't necessarily think of yes as a gritty band, haha, all these angelic overdubbed jon anderson choirs or whatever.

there's this guy on youtube who posts genesis bootlegs and one of the things he does is compile "ultimate live versions" of songs, patchworks of his favorite live performances of different parts of the song. he had his account killed so the only one up now is "ripples". and to some extent it's a gratuitous exercise, he basically acknowledges that the may 6, 1980 version of the song is definitive. what i like is that in some sense his version could be seen as "detracting" by focusing on performance rather than fidelity - he's replacing bits of a continuous coherent performance in high fidelity with fragments that are arguably superior in performance but are, at the very least, jarring as a result of the sound quality change. honestly, to me the really interesting songs are performances from the "lamb" tour, where gabriel blew out his voice really early and was _extremely_ inconsistent throughout the tour, even as the rest of the band got better and better as a performing unit.

anyway, bootlegs kind of represent to me the way john peel famously described the fall - "always the same, always different".

Who happens to be my brother! He wasn't one of the main guys anyway

― the prog judge has spoken (Matt #2), Saturday, May 16, 2026 9:42 AM (two minutes ago)

yeah honestly i'm one of those prog nerds who gets way too into the mellotron, so i first heard of them through the planet mellotron site :) found a lot of neat records through his reviews!

funnily enough the folk trilogy era is my favorite era of the band. not just because because of dee palmer's influence, but certainly her contributions to the sound particularly during this era helped!

I totally get loving the Folk Trilogy best, I'm a massive Stormwatch + A fanatic myself. I didn't mean to throw a shade on this era of Tull, just noting its divergence from frogbs's comment about how in this chapter of prog history, the bands tended to showcase "all their longest and most difficult material" on these double live releases. Tull *could've* done that back when they were playing only two songs a show, but... missed the boat!

Not 'golden era' obv but King Crimson's Absent Lovers is - but for Show of Hands Live at the Royal Albert Hall - my favourite live album of all. And the two live single LPs they noncommittally put together in the 70s are superb too in different ways.

I clicked on this list assuming I'd have heard a lot of them but actually no I haven't. I think Seconds Out wants my vote anyway, but..

It's notable that Bill Bruford makes cameos on two of these albums (Seconds Out and Yessongs) but that's it. If KC had released say an abbreviated version of what became The Great Deceiver box it would have been the greatest 70s sprawling prog release of all.

xxp - yea Bursting Out is def an outlier in that sense - though surely it came at their peak as a live act? I haven't actually heard any mid 70s recordings of them though.

appreciate the long post detailing the history of some of those Magma pieces, rusho - the lineage of some of those is seriously confusing. now do the same for Popol Vuh :)

I do wonder what, if anything, was Vander's overarching plan for some of these studio releases. surely the plan wasn't to release everything out of order with very different lineups, not to mention in 1976 the band's focus flipped and suddenly you had Jannick Top writing sidelongs while the band turned to gonzo funk. plus it's strange that none of their 70s albums really sound all that good, whereas both Hhai/Live and Retrospecktiw sound amazing - I'm guessing he just saw Magma as a live act first and foremost, while the studio albums paid the bills??

"Playing The Fool" is prob my fave Gentle Giant album, gotta be a basic progger and vote for GG

appreciate the long post detailing the history of some of those Magma pieces, rusho - the lineage of some of those is seriously confusing. now do the same for Popol Vuh :)

lol there aren't hundreds of hours of live tapes of popol vuh from the '70s circulating afaik :)

I do wonder what, if anything, was Vander's overarching plan for some of these studio releases. surely the plan wasn't to release everything out of order with very different lineups, not to mention in 1976 the band's focus flipped and suddenly you had Jannick Top writing sidelongs while the band turned to gonzo funk. plus it's strange that none of their 70s albums really sound all that good, whereas both Hhai/Live and Retrospecktiw sound amazing - I'm guessing he just saw Magma as a live act first and foremost, while the studio albums paid the bills??

― frogbs, Saturday, May 16, 2026 4:00 PM (forty minutes ago)

i think it's very easy to buy into some overarching "master plan" mythos - matt's suggestion that vander is "a lunatic" probably has some degree of truth to it! magma always seemed to be falling apart or on the verge of falling apart. i'm not sure this was helped by their association with giorgio gomelsky, to be honest. at the chateauvallon jazz festival in august 1972, vander premiered a version of "mekanik destruktiw kommandoh" that was, structurally, pretty much what the final version turned out to be - earlier versions were more along the lines of "mekanik kommandoh" from the brussels 1971 live recording. at this point the jazz members of the group quit, having taken offense at some disrespectful comments gomelsky had made towards jazz musicians they respected in his introduction. magma made an attempt at recording "MDK" with a choir at Manor Studios in january 1973... unfortunately the bass was out of tune for the whole thing, and to top it off vander subsequently accused mike oldfield of plagiarizing one of his songs for "tubular bells" (a claim which is categorically false, for the record). magma in the '70s... i once read an anecdote by nico's son talking about how she toured with them for a while and got them all addicted to cough syrup until they crashed their tour bus, at which point nico scarpered and pretended she'd had nothing to do with any of it. that's the magma i hear on the bootleg tapes. hell, there's even a tape from '77 of the group playing a set of improvised jazz, a la spinal tap, because vander didn't turn up that night!

nah, one of the things i like about magma's live output is that it's pretty clear that they _didn't_ have a "master plan", that you can hear the songs develop and change over time. even if they'd had the financial resources, i don't see Magma recording some Great Work consisting of three trilogies. my problem was that i took magma, at one time, _way_ too seriously... sure magma probably wouldn't have been able to do what they did if vander wasn't at least a little bit of a visionary megalomaniac, but i don't think there's any benefit to taking him seriously in the same way that he seems to take himself seriously.

i don't think "live" sounding good was necessarily indicative of any plan by Vander. certainly there are officially released magma live recordings on seventh records that sound just as bad as any of their studio recordings - not to mention pretty much every single recording on "inedits"! as far as retrospektiw, its status as a "live" album is questionable... i've got tapes of all three of the concerts at which the retrospektiw albums were claimed to have been recorded, and frankly the releases don't really _sound_ like any of them. i mean it could just be heavily overdubbed, idk!

oh, the other thing i'll note re: "live" is that didier lockwood was arguably the second-most renowned french jazz violinist of the 1970s (which maybe might count as faint praise if the first wasn't fucking JEAN-LUC PONTY), and if you listen to "hhai/live" you can _definitely_ hear why. my impression is that having him in the live band did a lot for magma's profile as a band.

yessongs. howe goes off on the intro to "yours is no disgrace". i didn't like the studio version of "close to the edge" till i heard it live

Lockwood was only 19 when that was recorded, crazy

and yea sound quality aside it feels like those live albums are more worked over than the studio recordings...I guess Hhai feels live enough but I agree the Retrospectiw albums are live in the same way Scooter albums are live