LIVE BAND, the Band (there is no label as such, except for the notation LS-1 on side one, and LS-2 on side two, so for purposes of classification, let's call it LS/Bootleg)

The best live recordings of all are the ones that are so badly recorded as to be all but unlistenable. There are many ways of getting there. A grotesque mix, with the rhythm guitar, say, way out front, is a winning device. A second-rate microphone, hooked into a fourth-rate machine, recording at 2 ips, makes a big difference. Absolute failure to capture any of the sound produced by one or more of the performers can be another powerful ingredient.

Add all these ingredients together with a hissing, crackling record surface noise, and you've got an LP that will—if it reaches you—reach you in an entirely different way than a power, slick, dynamic, electro-intensified studio recording ever could. This scratchy, wobbly sound never recedes into the background, never allows you to divert your attention. It demands a commitment from its every listener: if you don't work with the record, letting your imagination add the parts that are missing, actively translating the muddy muffles into what they must have sounded like that night in 1946 or 1948 or 1969—if you're not willing to do that, then this record isn't for you, Brother.

Consider the Bird On 52nd Street album, one of the best examples, along with the new Live Band, that I know about. This is Charlie Parker recorded on a cheap Pentron by a cat who only wanted the ensembles—the hell with the other cats, I only got so much tape. It is also Bird as he never (to my knowledge) sounded in the studio, a totally different side of be-bop's towering genius than ever appeared on records during his lifetime. He died in 1955, and the great numbers of live Bird recordings—if not all of them—came later, in the wake.

During the late Forties and early Fifties, jazz recordings were released as singles in great numbers. There were LPs, but the thinking was still geared toward three-minute cuts suitable for airplay and mass consumption at $1. Bird always had strong bands and always gave them solo space on record, which meant that typically Charlie Parker had something less than a minute to say his piece. Which didn't exactly encourage stretching out. On his studio dates Bird was almost always jampacking every chorus with as many magical flashes as the tempo, the changes and the rhythm section would allow. His lightning wit and pure inventiveness—there has been no richer musical mind in this century—were never at a loss. Each of Bird's new creations on the 1945-50 Dial and Savoy 78s stirred legions of less brilliant players (alto saxophone or whatever ax) toward new horizons.

But there's a whole different side of Bird on the live recordings, and especially on Bird On 52nd Street. This is Charlie Parker relaxed and mellow, telling his story over a dozen or more choruses, displaying a sense of humor broader than the (generally) more cerebral and cosmic humor that came out of the strict studio environment. On this record, at the weirdest moments—all of a sudden—Bird goes looney, soaring and wailing as hard as only he could—but laying down the wildest mixes of screams and quotes of Thirties crooner tunes and honks and, especially, a kind of cosmic laughter. Often the laughter seems to build within him until Bird releases it in one titanic, mounting, quicksilver run.

On "Night In Tunisia," he concentrates on cooking, building to an explosive climax right at the very start, with a three or four second break where he appears to play two thousand notes at once, real or implied, all of them making perfect sense, and all of them on fire.

Now: a word about the sound of the remarkable recording and how it was edited. Many of the takes were incomplete, meaning that as many as three different performances are spliced into one track, the transitions hardly noticeable, and the whole thing joined to make sense as a solo. On the cover (with a marvelous picture of Bird on 52nd Street, with marquees announcing Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Teagarden and Billy Eckstine), appear the words "high fidelity." A ridiculous joke, made funnier by the note on the back:

THIS IS NOT A HIGH FIDELITY ALBUM. Due to a printing error the words "High Fidelity" appear on the cover. This album is being released because of its inarguable historical validity.

Have some cake. Eat it too. What matters about the record is that it's got a horrible recorded sound, as if Bird were playing just around the corner in the next room and the bass is coming over a cheap speaker just over the huge vat just in front of you, where french fries are hissing and popping and cooking and bubbling, with the steam rising to obscure the view. You can hear Bird and you can hear the bass, and—when he's really cooking—you can hear brilliant intimations of Max Roach matching Bird stroke for stroke. Miles Davis (who would have been about 20 at the time these nightclub performances were recorded) and the pianist are occasionally felt but rarely actually heard.

I always approach this LP as if some invisible host is telling me: "Look, I got this recording of Bird, live at St. Nick's back in 1948, done on a shitty little second-hand Pentron, lousy sound, really awful—but, oh man, what Bird is playing. You've got to get into what Bird's blowing. Forget the sound. Close it off. It takes a couple of minutes but it's worth it. Wait till you hear Bird!"

The other most favorite of my live Bird LPs (and a lot better recorded) is the Jazz at Massey Hall with Dizzy (!) and Max (!) and Bud Powell (!) and Charlie Mingus (!), but I'll not back myself into any corners by picking The Great Bird Record. They're all great. I do not know of a single Bird track where a spirit of cosmic love does not dwell, even when he was in wretched physical condition. Buy them all, in any combination.

When rock and roll bootleg albums came along, I felt right at home. Listening to great performances through a dense gauze of noise and primitive technology has always proved a worthwhile yoga for this listener. All you can make out is the essence, but, on the other hand, it's the essence of essential music.

This state of mind can be artificially induced by mistreating a record over the course of the years, scratching it so badly, gouging it, letting it get beer spilled on it, the grooves dug so deep from thousands of playings that the vinyl takes on a white patina. The LP then achieves a constant sizzle, which, coupled with skipping, casts a lovely mist of nostalgia over the music. This record and you have gone through plenty together; both of you have aged perceptibly, there are a few scars, sure, but you're both worth another couple of thousand plays yet, at least.

Another special old friend of mine—a ten-inch LP—is Jazz at the Philharmonic Volume 6, which documents the first meeting onstage (in L.A.) between Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, the two great tenor saxophone players of the day. The year is 1946. I think. It's a magnificent exchange—there are a lot of other players on the jam session, but what you listen for is the younger Pres (Young's nickname) challenging Hawk, the tenor king of the Thirties. Hawk is dramatic, proud, florid, impassioned, at the top of his game, snapping and growling. But Lester wins. You hear him, on "JATP Blues," entering his solo with an upward flourish, like a man swimming to the surface, unreeling inside-out, slow-motion locutions in his moaning, singing, honking, totally unique tone.

They say Lester could talk with his band via his horn (blowing a blues or whatever) and later they could repeat what he'd played at them almost to the word. Lester Young wins because Lester is the definition of far-out, quite likely the hippest dude that ever lived. So far as I am concerned. All the more so through the mists of my beautiful scratched-up little LP, wearing its years so noisily. The ten-inch LP is long out of print, but I'd guess that you can find it in 12-inch somewhere, and with a good five years of wear and tear, create an experience of your own.

So much for preliminaries. The matter now at hand is the Band's first live LP, the bootleg Live Band. A beautiful record, with perhaps the worst sound I have ever eaten for prolonged periods of time. It's painful, it's so badly recorded. Nearly all the byplay between Richard Manuel's piano and Garth Hudson's organ are lost in the swarm and garble. Rick Danko's bass is a watery reflection of itself. Levon Helms' drums are audible, but muffled. The voices sound like there's no bodies behind them. The overall sound is pinched and strident. It's like looking through fire, the image wavering and flickering.

Never mind. It's the Band's best record so far. The only way you can know that is by thorough acquaintance their first two commercial (overground, un-bootleg) LPs, because there's so much that doesn't come through on Live Band: but what a performance!

There's no telling where it took place, because there's only the title on the cover, nothing but white paper on the liner, and nothing but the label name and the song titles on the record label. Interestingly, "Rockin' Chair" is called "Rocket Chair" on the label, indicating—to the extent that we can draw any conclusions—that the bootleggers aren't really into the Band, and that this likely was a strictly commercial venture for them.

It may indicate that. Or nothing. These small mysteries are part of the intrigue of all the bootlegs, of course. You can fantasize a lot better when you know you'll never get the real story.

Anyway, the record. This is a band that loves to play rock and roll, a powerhouse band with the best drummer in rock and roll doing the driving, and, son of a bitch, do these cats sing. Yes, Danko is an amazing gospel balladeer. Yes, yes, Levon Helm shouts high funky country rock and roll. And the combination, the merge, of all their voices—especially in front of this friendly audience—is a glowing, ecstatic force at an entirely different level from the two studio LPs.

You make your Statement in the studio. When you play for the people, you play for the people. If I were to produce rock and roll records, they would all be done live, in front of a loving audience, after the band had been playing the material for a couple of months at the very least. So they'd be into it, not just discovering the songs and the arrangements at the point they were recorded. (This is not a plea for an end to studios. But it's the cumulative musicians/audience energy, and the performance it creates, that fascinates me and moves me most.)

Notes on the tracks: "Jemima Surrender" has got some explosive singing out of Levon Helm, where he bellows out that thing about letting his "river flow-wo-wo-wo!" like a steer in season. "Slippin' & Slidin'" has got knockout wailing piano over Helm's thundering drums, capped by a searing Robbie Roberston guitar passage that seems (uncharacteristically) almost out of control, lending a will-he-or-won't-he suspense. "Wheel's On Fire" is notable for the group momentum, the surge, Levon's high shouting and more of Robbie's flaming guitar. "Baby Don't Do It" starts on a down and funky drum intro, leading to a great frontier/soul duet; oh, man, what swinging American music!

By this point, one's ears tend to tire, and it may be necessary to give the audio-cerebral mechanisms within your head some rest before plunging ahead to: "I Shall Be Released," which, in spirit and dynamics, has the reverence of something transpiring in an intimate chapel. "King Harvest" is a stomper from the opening shot, with the lead singer (Danko? it's hard to tell, the way the recording makes them sound so similar) dwelling on each syllable, each phrase, stretching them out luxuriantly, "carnival on the e-e-ea-a-a–edge of town...." "Don't Tell Henry" radiates out of Danko's whirling bass, wrapping itself around Robertson's dazzling guitar, chugging to a scrambling jam at the end! Damn! "Chest Fever" has got at least five minutes' worth of Garth Hudson's sliding, smearing, electric doomsday/cartoon-show/jazz/rock-and-roll/Central Park solo organ, blasting loose a towering full-volume sonata compound of trumpet chorale sounds, boogaloos, down home gospel, big city gospel, Cecil Taylor, and a dozen other items, complete to a grooving, unstinting jam on top of the rhythm section.

This is the most astounding part of a most astounding recording, and if words fail me, in the attempt to describe the sweep and solidity of the man's miraculous keyboard playing, then words fail me. Sorry. The audience (what you can hear of them) loved it. (RS 62)

JOHN BURKS