LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL is really just for completist and band scholars (such as myself) and not an essential recording. I’ve listened to it all the way through three times and frankly can’t imagine putting it on again. The album is a bubble of amber perfectly preserving a fly (or Beatle) for all time. Overall, LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL is a fantastic musical artifact. One of the Beatles (I think it’s Lennon if I recall correctly) even asks the crowd at one point, “Can you hear us?” Ironically, those who’ve listened to LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL have probably heard the concert better than those who attended the show. I chalk this up to an expert remastering. T hough it never goes away, the audience never really gets in the way, either. It almost feels like a parody there’s so much crowd noise on the recording. Famously one of the reasons the band quit touring, the girls are screaming on LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL. What there is plenty of, however, is screaming girls. It’s a shame that there isn’t more of this sort of stuff on the album because it’s something the studio albums don’t have. The few times Lennon announces the next song with a goofy voice is a real treat. What LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL is missing is between-the-songs banter. Thus, The Beatles are just performing their songs as best as they can like they appear on the albums. Sadly, LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL was recorded before the 1970’s, arguably the heyday of the live album. Guitar heroics/wankery can also take a live recording to the next level. A decent song can become sublime when stretched out into an intense extended jam. These live embellishments separate the hacks from the great artists. The only way a live recording can move beyond the good and into the essential is when they capture the intensity of their performance and bring something new to the table. Many songs recorded live differ from their studio versions, either because of technical limitations (no string section? no problem!) or because playing the same song over and over gets boring for bands and they do something a little different. I may be a bit biased, as live albums really aren’t my thing. It’s not that the band is terrible live, it’s just that the songs are so damn good on the studio recordings. It’s been argued that George Martin is the so-called fifth Beatle, these recordings help make that argument in my opinion. That said, the performances are solid but ultimately pale comparisons of their studio counterparts. I would say that this album is 100% absolutely the best live recordings of The Beatles I’ve ever heard. I was pleasantly surprised at how good these recordings sound. Released originally in 1977, LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL has been remastered and remixed. LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL documents several concerts from August of 1965, near the very end of the groups touring life. It’s not that the band was bad in concert, it’s just that live recordings from the era in which the Beatles performed live are spotty at best. So when it was announced that LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL would be coming out in conjunction with Ron Howard’s Beatle documentary THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK, I bookmarked the release date but didn’t hurry to get around to listening to it until recently. I remember getting my hands on that set way back in my early Beatle-years and promptly tossing it aside. Over the years I’ve heard a handful of live Beatle recordings, mostly from the LIVE AT THE BBC double-album. But for the most part, it’s because The Beatles so famously turned their back on touring and became the quintessential studio band. That’s partly because the group was long disbanded by the time I was born in the early 1980’s (thus no chance of me ever seeing them live). I can’t think of a band I associate less with live performance than The Beatles.
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