Best Live Albums Unearthed Years After The Concerts

Next to going to a concert, collecting all your favorite bands' live albums might be the most fun thing about a rock 'n' roll tour. If you've ever been lucky enough to go to a show that's been put on vinyl or CD — or even if you haven't — you know there's no better feeling than getting to experience those shows over and over again.

For a variety of reasons, from wacky record label decisions to missing tapes, some great live records haven't been heard until decades after they were recorded. You could wish they came out earlier, but the music that moves you most has no deadline — and with some of these five acts either retired from the road or sadly no longer with us, the fact they even exist at all is nothing short of a miracle.

By the time the Rolling Stones embarked on a European tour in support of 1973's "Goats Head Soup," they'd already endured a drug bust and were a band synonymous with controversial concert appearances, especially after the tragedy at their Altamont Concert. All that aside, this particular tour was a lightning rod for contention. Guitarist Keith Richards, who faced more than two dozen drug charges in England the previous year, wasn't even allowed into France due to a possession charge there. 

When the group booked two shows in Brussels, Belgium as an alternative, you'd be forgiven for wondering how the band would handle the performances. Luckily, with a radio station running tape, it was easy to find out — and the results even shocked the band. "Toward the end of it, I wondered what the rest of the band were on, because things were starting to rock at a ferocious pace," Richards admitted in a 2011 interview (via Rolling Stone). "I've rarely heard the Stones that early on playing live that well-recorded."

Officially unreleased until 2011, the "Brussels Affair" has been championed by the Stones multiple times. It was first given a digital release through Google Music before it became part of a very expensive box set in 2013. In 2020, fans who wanted to own it physically could pay slightly less when it was added to a deluxe edition of "Goats Head Soup."

Pink Floyd's status as the band behind albums like "The Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall" was multiplied considerably by their live shows. Today, decades after the band's acrimonious split, fans must dip into the archives to get a sense of what they were like in concert. And even archival works that might not seem ideal candidates for release are up for consideration.

In 1975, Pink Floyd put on a set at the Los Angeles Sports Arena that plotted out the group's recent past and future. It featured material from two forthcoming albums — that year's "Wish You Were Here" and 1977's "Animals" — and closed with a full performance of "The Dark Side of the Moon," about as epic as any Pink Floyd show could get. Fans got to hear it on a 50th anniversary edition of "Wish You Were Here," but there was a catch. This recording wasn't a careful selection from the vault: it was captured by legendary bootlegger Mike "The Mic" Millard, whose homemade recordings are the stuff of legend. Even if it's not from the soundboard, the "you-are-there" energy makes for an incredible time capsule.

Since the '70s, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have had a tremendous reputation as one of the most dynamic live bands performing some nearly perfect songs. When the Boss finally released a box set of their live recordings in 1986, fans literally lined up at record stores to add it to their collection. But a full, vintage E Street Band show wouldn't be released until 2006, when the group's first European concert made its CD debut. And even then, fans were clamoring for one set above all: the E Street Band's 1978 appearance at the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio.

Clocking in at nearly three hours, the performance — hosted by local radio station WMMS-FM and featuring a live audience of just 1,200 lucky fans  — attained mythic status from E Streeters, year after year. "Watching that show, it was just like one high after another," station director John Gorman later wrote in Cleveland Magazine. "It just kept building and building," he said. "Max Weinberg, the [E Street Band] drummer, said it was the best concert they'd ever done in their life."

Originally broadcast live for radio, Springsteen's team found a high-quality copy while assembling an exhibit for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2014, Springsteen began an archival series of full concert releases — and "The Agora, Cleveland 1978" was the second show they released.

You'd be a fool to exclude Linda Ronstadt from your list of rock 'n' roll greats. Her beautifully expressive voice and ability to interpret the finest classic rock and soul songs ever written made her a crucial component of the musical framework of the '70s and '80s. Only after she stopped gracing the stage did the majority of her fan base get to experience what she sounded like in concert.

In 1980, Ronstadt recorded a special set before a live audience at Los Angeles' Television Center studio. Broadcast on a relatively unknown pay cable station called HBO, "Live in Hollywood" featured tracks from her then-new blockbuster "Mad Love" (including the hits "How Do I Make You" and "Hurt So Bad") plus favorite covers like Buddy Holly's "It's So Easy," Roy Orbison's "Blue Bayou," and the Eagles' "Desperado."

Nearly 40 years later, and almost a decade after health conditions provoked Ronstadt to retire from singing, a chance tape vault search yielded the "Live in Hollywood" recordings. It was released on CD and vinyl in 2019, and later digitally expanded to offer the full concert in 2024. Like the best live albums, it's so good, you'll wish you had been there.

There simply will never be another musician like Prince; he was one of the most dynamic performers to ever grace a stage. So it's patently bizarre how few live records he released while he was alive. The box set "One Nite Alone... Live!" covered a tour in 2002, and 2008's "Indigo Nights" was a CD of live performances from a British residency the year before that came with a coffee table book of photos from the same period. Only after his tragic death in 2016 did his estate consider opening his storied vault and give fans more classic examples of his live prowess.

"Prince and the Revolution: Live" had been hiding in plain sight for years. Recorded at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York in 1985 — toward the end of a tour in support of his blockbuster album and film "Purple Rain" — it had been released on video at the time and ported over to a bonus DVD with an expanded edition of Prince's signature album in 2017. In 2020, the audio finally got a digital release, but two years later, after the estate had located the original unedited footage and multi-track music recordings, the album was dramatically remastered and remixed, finally giving fans the ultimate document of Prince at one of his creative peaks.