These came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got ’em. Here’s what I said about them back then (with some minor editing):
For a bunch of ’60s and ’70s rock dinosaurs, The Who and Jimmy Page are not only a long way from extinct — in fact, they seem to be evolving.
No, Pete Townshend hasn’t decided to get knuckle tattoos, pierce his eyebrow and start playing rap-core. Nor has Page shaved half his head and traded in his Les Paul for a pair of Technics 1200s and a sampler. Fans can rest assured these guitar heroes are still mining the same muscular blues-rock vein they’ve been tapping since back in the day when Woodstock was a counter-culture event.
The difference is, now they’re doing it in cyberspace. Both The Who and Page recently became the biggest musical heavyweights (sorry, Public Enemy) to leap headlong into the Internet waters and release music exclusively on the World Wide Web. If you want to get your hands on either performer’s new live album, you’ll have to visit online retailer Musicmaker, place your order and wait a week or so for the disc to land in your mailbox. But if that’s the bad news, here’s the good: For about $20 US plus shipping, you can get an entire double album — or for roughly $1 per track, you can pick and choose tracks for your own custom-made CD, which gets mailed to you the next day complete with jewel case, booklet and liner notes. Before you order, you can download and sample tracks free. And unlike Napster, it’s all 100% legit.
How do the discs stack up against what you find on the racks? On the musical front, pretty darn good. Page’s 19-track offering in particular is a must-have for Led Zeppelin fans. Recorded last fall in L.A., Live At The Greek is arguably a better Zeppelin live album than Zeppelin ever issued. Page’s playing is leaner, cleaner and meaner than it ever was in his drug-addled glory days. Likewise the performance of backing band The Black Crowes, who tackle hammer-of-the-gods classics like Heartbreaker, Custard Pie, Lemon Song and What Is and What Should Never Be with a perfect combination of reverence and reinterpretation. And for a guy who has endured countless comparisons to Rod Stewart, singer Chris Robinson sure gives Robert Plant a run for his money here. Yes, sometimes they sound like a Led Zep cover band — but they’re the best damn Led Zep cover band you ever heard.
The Who, on the other hand, remain the real deal. The 20-song Blues To The Bush — taped last winter at Chicago’s House of Blues and in Shepherds Bush (hence the title) — finds the recently reunited trio of guitarist Townshend, vocalist Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle in truly fine form, recreating a career’s worth of tracks with a passion, grandeur and sheer sonic wallop they haven’t had since Keith Moon was in the drummer’s chair (credit should go to Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey, who does a tremendous job of filling Moon’s mighty shoes). Along with the expected hits — I Can’t Explain, Substitute, Magic Bus, Baba O’Reilly, Pinball Wizard, Won’t Get Fooled Again — the lads augment their set list with some nifty chestnuts like Entwistle’s Boris the Spider, My Wife, You Better You Bet and Pure & Easy. Best of all: They can still pull off My Generation without making you wince over that ‘Hope I die before I get old’ line. Tickets for these shows reportedly went for up to $300; as Townshend once wrote, I’d call that a bargain. Ditto the price of this disc — even if it the cover art does kinda resemble a bootleg.
Which brings me to the only area where Musicmaker can’t compete with major-label product: packaging. The cover art of The Who disc is uninspired, and the layout inside is amateurish (but I guess even that beats the Page disc; it came without a booklet). The bigger problem, though, is that because the CDs are custom-made, there’s no track list with the liner notes, which were mass-printed. Another problem with the custom-CD format: Each track fades out during the applause, breaking the flow of the show.
But in the end, that’s just nitpicking. Cosmetic quibbles aside, these discs are more or less as good as anything you’d get at your local big-box outlet. And you can buy ’em in your underwear. If that isn’t a step up the evolutionary ladder, I don’t know what is.
