Bill Callahan - Rough Travel for a Rare Thing

You couldn't walk far without tripping over a live album in the 70s and 80s. They were quickly made and usually ugly, usually featuring an immodest photo of the performers on the front and a tracklist and very little else - sometimes not even the venue or date - on the back. Many were unceremoniously transferred to CD in the 80s and can be found for $5 in bargain bins; the original vinyls are even cheaper. The fact that hardly any of them ever sold in great numbers didn't seem to matter, but now that anyone can make a bootleg and soundboard recordings aren't hard to come by, they're finally becoming less common. Some live albums are actually very good, and Rough Travel for a Rare Thing is one of them. If we gain nothing else from the fact that there is now an official Bill Callahan/Smog live album, it's that the excellent show it documents, from a small club in Melbourne, is now beknownst to more than just a few hundred Bit Torrenters who may have already downloaded it.

So what makes a great live album? An excellent performance? Check. But of course any band capable of delivering such a performance should be able to do so on a regular basis, and presumably there are many shows that could have stood in for this one. Well chosen set? Check. Five of the eleven songs here are from the classic A River Ain't Too Much to Love, the final album released under the Smog name - it's therefore not a well balanced set, but the inclusion of any songs from that album is always a very very good thing. The set also features the great earlier songs "Bathysphere" and "Held". Creative re-arrangment of the material? Check. The instrumentation is all acoustic, yet "Bathysphere" still rocks and a clever string arrangement stands in place of the electric riff in "Held". Breaking down the divide between the performer and the listener? Check...er, wait. How does one do that in a way that a studio album doesn't, despite occupying the same medium and being just as "live" in your lounge room? Amiable banter between songs? There's hardly any of that here, but neither is there in Nirvana's Live at Reading, and both that and this are, in my opinion, two of the best official live albums ever released. No, the trick is that the divide between the best artists and their listeners doesn't exist. That was always the point with Callahan, but here you know the songs were recorded in the kind of venue you probably frequent yourself whether there's a band playing or not, and if you close your eyes, you can pretend you're there.

Related:
Bill Callahan - Dream River
Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
My 200 Favourite Albums of All Time