Wikipedia defines blues rock as follows:
“Blues rock is a musical genre combining bluesy improvisations, commonly over the twelve-bar blues, with rock styles. The core of the blues rock sound is usually created by the electric guitar, piano, bass guitar and drum kit, with the electric guitar often amplified…The style began to develop in the mid-1960s in Britain and the United States. British bands, such as John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals and American bands such as the Butterfield Blues Band and the Siegel–Schwall Band, experimented with music from older African-American bluesmen…”
Out of John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers came Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor while the Yardbirds helped to develop Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.
Live Albums Recorded By Blues Rock Artists And Bands In The 1960s
This was the decade of Jimi Hendrix and the psychedelic bands, many who congregated in San Francisco to play blues based improvised music. It’s also the decade where British artists sold the blues back to America through the Rolling Stones and early Led Zeppelin as some blues rock was getting heavier and forming hard rock and heavy metal.
Chuck Berry Live At The Fillmore Auditorium 1967
Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper 1968
Big Brother and the Holding Company Live in San Francisco 1966
Big Brother and the Holding Company Cheap Thrills 1968
The Blues Project Live At The Cafe Au Go Go 1965
The Blues Project Live At Town Hall 1967
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band East West Live 1966 1967
Captain Beefheart Live 1966-67
Colosseum Live At The Boston Tea Party August 1969
Cream Wheels Of Fire 1968
Cream Live Cream 1968
Cream Live Cream Volume 2 1968
Cream Goodbye 1968
Fleetwood Mac Shrine 69
Jimi Hendrix Live At Monterey 1967
Jimi Hendrix Radio One 1967
Jimi Hendrix Live In Paris & Ottawa 1968
Jimi Hendrix Live At Winterland 1968
Jimi Hendrix Live At The Royal Albert Hall 1969
Jimi Hendrix Live At Woodstock 1969
Jimi Hendrix In The West 1969 1970
Janis Joplin Live At The Carousel Ballroom 1968
Janis Joplin Live at Winterland ’68
Janis Joplin In Concert 1968 & 1970
Janis Joplin The Woodstock Experience 1969
Led Zeppelin Live In Paris 1969
Led Zeppelin BBC Sessions 1969 & 1971
The Pretty Things Live At The BBC 1964 to 1975
Quicksilver Messenger Service Happy Trails 1968
The Rolling Stones Got Live If You Want It 1966
The Rolling Stones Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out 1969
Spencer Davis Group Live Anthology 1965 – 1968
Spencer Davis Group Mojo Rhythms & Midnight Blues The Live Album Vol 1 Sessions 1965-1968
Ten Years After Undead 1968
Johnny Winter The Woodstock Experience 1969
The Yardbirds Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page 1968
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The All Time Best Live Blues Rock Albums
I don’t have an album poll to find the best blues rock albums for the decade but I do have an all-time best blues rock live albums poll that will guide you to the best choices for your music collection.
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Blues Rock By Decade – 1960s – 1970s – 1980s – 1990s – 2000s – 2010s
Live at Winterland ’68 is a live album by Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company.
As the album title suggests, it was recorded at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco on April 12, 1968, and April 13, 1968 but not released until 1998.
Joplin left Big Brother in after concerts in December 1968 and performing with the Kozmic Blues Band and the Full Tilt Boogie Band, she died on October 4, 1970. She was just 27 years old.
Got Live If You Want It is the first live album by The Rolling Stones although the Stones themselves weren’t happy with the release.
Fortune Teller and I’ve Been Loving You Too Long are unreleased studio recordings with audience noise overdubbed.
Continue reading The Rolling Stones Got Live If You Want It 1966
Live At Winterland is a live album by Jimi Hendrix recorded over three nights in October 1968 at Winterland, San Francisco.
The first time Live At Winterland was issued, there were eleven tracks plus a prologue and epilogue. In the 1992 edition, three more songs were added.
In 2011 a much larger Winterland box set was issued which will be reviewed separately.
Goodbye is a part studio / part live album by Cream. The concert songs were recorded i October 1968 in Los Angeles.
Cream are testing me on my definition of a live album. I’ve included this for completeness because I’ve recommended that you need to compile your own Cream Live by pulling songs from Wheels Of Fire, Live Cream volumes 1 & 2 and Goodbye.
After the success of Live Cream, the recording vaults from 1968 were raided again to create another live album by super group Cream.
Wheels of Fire is a double album by Cream with one LP recorded in the studio and the other capturing the live Cream experience in March 1968 in California.
Cream were a very different band live compared to the studio as it gave the great instrumentalists – Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker – a chance to stretch out and show off their talents.
Live Cream is live compilation album from blues rock group Cream that includes one short studio track.
Like Wheels Of Fire, it features songs from the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco in March 1968.
Led Zeppelin BBC Sessions includes an in concert performance of the band from April 1971 as well as live in the studio recordings and songs from gigs in 1969.
It’s often overlooked as a Led Zeppelin live album with much more attention given to:
How The West Was Won – 1972
The Song Remains The Same – 1973
The 2012 release of the reunion concert, Celebration Day has also drawn attention away from the BBC Sessions album. After all how many live Led Zeppelin albums do most fans need?
I think that’s a shame.
What we get on this album are:
Live At Woodstock is the most comprehensive recording of Jimi Hendrix performance at the Woodstock festival on August 18, 1969.
A previous album, simply called Woodstock was released five years earlier with fewer of the songs. Radical editing means that three of the musicians in the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows group were mixed out on the Live At Woodstock version.
Live At Monterey is a reworking of the Jimi Plays Monterey recording of Jimi Hendrix live at the Monterey festival in June 1967 with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
It’s the same set but with different mixing.
This concert is famous for the time during the last track – Wild Thing – Hendrix sets his guitar on fire and then smashes it. That explains the album covers.
My Rating – 28 out of 30 (9 + 10 +9)
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