The Rolling Stones

El Mocambo 1977 UNIVERSAL Licked Live In NYC MERCURY STUDIOS

Ya-yas out for the lads.

Considering the live adventures of the Rolling Stones got off to such a great start with 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out album (assuming we discount the laughable Got Live If You Want It from the scream-drenched 60s), their subsequent live albums have mostly failed to do the band justice, mostly because recordings were doctored to sound like what the band thought people wanted to hear. No wonder the bootleggers did such good business, chucking out unadulterated mixing-desk tapes. For years the most collectable Stones album was Brussels Affair from their 1973 tour, which highlighted the telepathic peak between Keith Richards and Mick Taylor. The Stones eventually took it in-house in 2011.

Things have got better since the penny dropped. Four tracks from the El Mocambo Club in Toronto in March 1977 were originally plastered on to the lacklustre Love You Live in an attempt to kick some life into the album. It didn’t, and the gig became better known for Richards’s heroin bust when he arrived in Canada.

The two-CD set of the complete show (8/10) has been remixed by Bob Clearmountain, who has ditched the overdubs (overdubs on a club gig? What were they thinking?) and some ‘unwoke’ Jagger jokes, although he has kept an exchange between Jagger and Ronnie Wood as they wonder which song Richards is going to play next – “I dunno, he keeps changing guitars”. The sound is ragged at times (they hadn’t played in seven months), but it’s real. That’s Keith in the right speaker and Ron in the left. And while you can quibble about the number of songs from Black And Blue (their then latest album), when they show their roots on Route 66, Mannish Boy, Crackin’ Up, Around And Around, Worried Life Blues and

Little Red Rooster you can’t argue.

Licked Live In NYC (8/10) is from a restored 2003 TV special from Madison Square Garden that features the Rolling Stones Big Band – two keyboard players, a four-piece horn section and three backing singers. So the sound is big but not glossy. Jagger is playing for the TV as much as for the audience in front of him. “It’s great to see you here looking beautiful tonight, all dressed up,” he tells them after a spirited If You Can’t Rock Me. “You think you’re on TV or something?” Amid the cavalcade of hits there are some special treats such as Don’t Stop (recently recorded for a 40th-anniversary compilation), Monkey Man (resurrected from Let It Bleed) and Sheryl Crow as the

Honky Tonk Woman.