Got Live If You Want It! (album)

The Rolling Stones in 1966

In 1966, the Rolling Stones' popularity increased dramatically with the success of their Aftermath LP and the singles "Paint It, Black" and "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?". Coupled with the music's commercial impact, the band's high-energy concerts during their North American tour in June and July proved highly successful with young people while alienating local police, who were tasked with controlling the often rebellious and physically exhausting crowds. According to the Stones historians Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, the band's notoriety "among the authorities and the establishment seems to have been inversely proportional to their popularity among young people".[1]

The Stones' American record distributor, London Records, wanted to capitalise on the Stones' growing popularity by marketing a new album, but were several months behind the scheduled release of their next original album, Between the Buttons (1967). A live album release was then planned for the end of 1966.[1]

The original plan for the recording was to capture the Stones live on 23 September 1966 at the Royal Albert Hall – their first concert in the United Kingdom in a year.[1] Several minutes into the show, however, the band's lead singer Mick Jagger was swarmed onstage by screaming girls from the audience, temporarily stopping the performance – the event was captured on video and featured in a documentary film. As a consequence, popular music acts were subsequently banned from performing at the Hall. According to the music journalist Fred Bronson, "the concert drove home the Stones' unpopularity with members of the ruling class."[3]

The Stones' producer and manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, abandoned the original idea in response to this "collective hysteria generated by the group, especially among teenagers, which threatened to degenerate into rioting", as Margotin and Guesdon describe. Instead, he decided to select concert recordings from other sources and two older studio tracks, later overdubbed with crowd noise, to pass for an entirely live album that would still credit the Royal Albert Hall as the recorded venue.[1]

Colston Hall in Bristol (in 2011), where the Stones were recorded on 7 October 1966 for the album

The recordings of "Under My Thumb", "Get Off of My Cloud", "The Last Time" and "19th Nervous Breakdown" were taken from the Stones' 1 October 1966 live performance at City Hall in Newcastle. Sequenced as the LP's opening track, "Under My Thumb" featured a passionate introduction of the group by Long John Baldry, who had sung in Alexis Korner's London-based band Blues Incorporated alongside three members of the Stones in 1962 – Jagger, rhythm guitarist Brian Jones and drummer Charlie Watts. The Stones' concert at Colston Hall in Bristol on 7 October 1966 produced the recordings of "Lady Jane", "Not Fade Away", "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". According to Margotin and Guesdon, "Time Is on My Side" and "I'm Alright" were performed on 5 March and 7 March 1965 at either Regal Theatre in London, the Palace Theatre in Manchester or the Empire Theatre in Liverpool.[1]

For the live recordings, the engineer Glyn Johns used the IBC Mobile Unit, the technical function of which Margotin and Guesdon say was "not yet really suited to rock concerts". Johns captured each show by suspending microphones from the venue's balcony.[1] Keith Richards, the Stones' lead guitarist, remarked at the time on the difference in being recorded live, "We all knew that the sound that we were getting live and in the studio was not what we were getting on record – the difference was light years apart."[4]

The first of the album's two studio recordings, "I've Been Loving You Too Long", was cut between 11 May and 12 May 1965 at RCA Studios in Hollywood. The second, "Fortune Teller", was taken from a 9 July 1963 session at Decca Studios in West Hampstead. According to the band's bassist Bill Wyman, both studio tracks had "crowd atmosphere added", while even the live recordings of "Lady Jane", "I'm Alright", "Have You Seen Your Mother", and "Satisfaction" "all benefited from various amounts of overdubs at Olympic Studios in mid-October".[1]

The Rolling Stones conceived Got Live If You Want It!'s name from the song "I've Got Love If You Want It", recorded in 1957 by Slim Harpo, one of the band's favourite blues musicians.[4] The name was first used for a live EP of five songs, released on 11 June 1965 in the UK by the group's British label Decca Records[1] and marketed as capturing "the unadulterated in-person excitement of a Stones stage show".[4]

The album's front cover arrays several photos of the group performing live, shot by the photographer Gered Mankowitz, who had accompanied the band for two 1965 North American tours at their request.[1] The original LP was issued with liner notes saying it had been recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during the Stones' Autumn 1966 tour of the UK with the Yardbirds and Ike and Tina Turner.[4]

London Records released Got Live If You Want It! on 3 December 1966 in the US[4] on both mono and stereo LPs. In a 17 December issue, Billboard predicted the album would be a "blockbuster" and "much in demand", highlighting its inclusion of recent hit singles and a "powerhouse" performance of "Under My Thumb".[5] It peaked at number six on the Billboard albums chart,[4] and on 19 January 1967, it was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipments of at least 500,000 copies to retailers.[6] According to the music historian Richard Havers, the album "stayed on the best-seller list for close to a year".[4]

Got Live If You Want It! was meant to be released only for the North American market – Margotin and Guesdon suggest this is because Decca had already released an EP of the same name in the UK,[1] while Bronson connects it to the aftermath of the Royal Albert Hall debacle.[3] However, Decca still pressed copies of the LP for European countries outside of the UK, including a limited shipment of copies sold in Germany and Scandinavia. According to Margotin and Guesdon, "because of the modest volume of sales", the LP became among the most coveted of the Stones' records for collectors.[1] The band, however, disapproved of Got Live If You Want It!'s release and have since disowned it publicly, referring to Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert (1970) instead as their first live album.[4]

In 1986, ABKCO Records remastered the Stones' catalog on CD under the supervision of Allen Klein, the label's founder and the Stones' former manager. Got Live If You Want It!'s reissue was delayed at first when Klein had trouble locating original multi-track tapes.[7] In August 2002, it was rereleased again by ABKCO, this time as a new remastered CD and SACD digipak.[8] On this edition, "Under My Thumb" appears with a different introduction and take than the original LP.[4]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[9]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[10]
Entertainment Weekly	B–[8]
MusicHound Rock	1/5[11]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[12]
Tom Hull	B+[13]

Reviewing for Crawdaddy! in February 1967, Sandy Pearlman believed the Stones' had mastered their relationship with a live audience, rendering the crowd screams a conceptual element and "an added instrumental dimension – an integral part of the music". Overall, he found the performances "sloppy" but full of force and tension, translating well with the sounds of a wild concert atmosphere.[14] According to the rock scholar Deena Weinstein, Pearlman's review is notable for employing one of the earliest uses of the term "metal" in rock criticism, albeit as a descriptor of the album's sound rather than as a genre.[15] "On this album the Stones go metal", Pearlman claimed. "Technology is in the saddle – as an ideal and as a method. A mechanically hysterical audience is matched to a mechanically hysterical sound."[14] He highlighted the LP's "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" as an exemplar of this aesthetic:

It's a mechanical conception and realization (like all metal songs) – with the instruments and Mick's voice densely organised into hard, sharp-edged planes of sound: a construction of aural surfaces and regular surfaced planes, a planar conception, the product of a mechanistic discipline, with an emphasis upon the geometrical organization of percussive sounds.[14]

Writing in HiFi that same year, Peter Reilly was indifferent to the merits of the music and merely found the audio quality fair but "echo-y". The majority of his review focused instead on the moral implications of the Stones performing sleazily, as he described, for an audience presumed to be mostly adolescent and preadolescent girls, leading him to condemn the band on "puritanical" grounds. "I can imagine how unpleasant a thing it would be to watch; hearing it is only slightly less so", he concluded.[16]

David Dalton, in his 1972 biography on the band, considers Got Live If You Want It! in a series of Stones albums – including December's Children (1965), Aftermath and Between the Buttons – to follow their American experiences and feature "an acceleration of R&B and rock". He calls this recording in particular "incredibly speeded up" and "so out of time and out of tune but so filled with Stoned energy that it just transcended criticism".[17] However, according to Stereo Review's Steve Simels in 1977, the LP "had the distinction of being the most poorly recorded live album in history", until Jamaican musician Jimmy Cliff's 1976 In Concert, also produced by Oldham.[18] In regards to the 1986 ABKCO CD, Mark Moses of High Fidelity observes that "considerable cleanup" had been done to what "has always been an embarrassment" in the Stones' reputation as a live act, although this is not necessarily a good thing, as Jagger is further revealed to be "annoyingly out-of-tune with the rest of the band" on several cuts.[19]

The production of Andrew Loog Oldham (pictured in 2010) is a major point of criticism for the album.

Later reappraisals are also mixed. Reviewing for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger approves of the album's concept but finds the resulting release to be disappointing for reasons that may or may not have been the fault of the production team – he cites the poor sound quality and the dubbing of artificial crowd noise onto a few studio recordings as filler. Unterberger concedes, however, that "the album has its virtues as a historical document, with some extremely important caveats for anyone not old enough to recognise the inherent limitations in a live album of this vintage."[9] Havers echoes his observation of "the limitations" as well as the "fascinating glimpse" offered into hearing the Stones live at the time.[4] In Entertainment Weekly, David Browne writes of the 2002 ABCKO CD, "We fight to hear the band amid a barrage of crowd screams – yes, the Stones as teen idols – but the band still manages a biting 'Under My Thumb.'"[8] Margotin and Guesdon, in The Rolling Stones All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track (2016), acknowledge "the screaming that blocked out the music", but still consider the album "a terrific document of the times, of the extraordinary, adrenaline-fueled, and often erotically charged relationship between the Stones and their fans".[1] Critic Tom Hull says of the record, "All but their change-of-pace hit 'Lady Jane' are hard and sharp, including a couple of my favorites from the day. Lots of audience noise to remind you how popular they were."[13] Greg Kot is more critical in MusicHound Rock (1999), feeling none of the Stones' live albums are worth hearing because they offer no improvements over the original studio recordings.[11]

Got Live If You Want It! is included in All Music Guide Required Listening: Classic Rock (2007), as part of the book's list of key live albums from the classic rock era.[20] In a 2017 list for Vulture ranking the Stones' best songs, David Marchese includes three from this album – "Fortune Teller" at number 339, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" at 271 and "I'm Alright" at 148 – and says of the latter, "The rowdy garage-rock energy that the Stones generate on this Bo Diddley cover, from 1965, can still jurgle your nurgles."[21]

All tracks are written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, except where noted.

Credits are adapted from contributions listed in Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon's book All the Songs.[1]

The Rolling Stones

• Mick Jagger – vocals, tambourine
• Keith Richards – lead guitars, acoustic guitar, rhythm guitar, backing vocals
• Brian Jones – rhythm guitar
• Bill Wyman – bass
• Charlie Watts – drums

Additional musicians

• Ian Stewart – organ
• Jack Nitzche – piano

Technical team

• Andrew Loog Oldham – production
• Dave Hassinger – sound engineering
• Glyn Johns – sound engineering
• Michael Barclay – sound engineering

• Elliott, Claudia (23 April 2017). "23 September 1966: Rolling Stones concert provokes mini riot". Royal Albert Hall.

• Got Live If You Want It! at Discogs (list of releases)