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Top 5 Concert Videos of all Time?
Written by Jimmy
We took a long flight to/from Alaska this week. That can only mean one thing: we bought a ton of magazines for airplane reading. Of course, I bought Entertainment Weekly to catch up ‘The Hobbit’ and if you have questions don’t hesitate to ask. The issue also included EW’s summary of top 10 concert movies of all time … Seemed okay, so I thought we’d benefit by picking the best song from a couple of this. I’ll focus on my top 5:
5. Nirvana, Unplugged in New York (EW listed Nirvana Live at the Paramount, but way too loud for me): And within that, I loved Jesus Doesn’t Want me for a Sunbeam. This was a Vaselines’ parody of the children hymn: Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam:
Here’s the song that they rightfully chose to parody:
4. Ziggy Stardust and the spiders of Mars, 1973. DA Pennebaker produced this one. We agree with EW on this one – they refer to Suffragette City as ‘blistering’, but why are there less than 3,000 hits on this video?????
3. Gimme Shelter, 1970, Sympathy for the Devil. The film was in 1970, but this song was recorded live at Altamant where the Stones’ Security (the Hell’s Angels), knifed a fan directly in front of the stage… a bit of a fall from the heights of Flower Power at Woodstock:
2. The Last Waltz (1978), The Night they Drove All Dixie Down.
1. Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads, Slippery People (1984): This is the classic J. Demme film, that starts with David Byrne and his jukebox playing Psycho Killer and adds one musician per song until we have a stage filled with the Heads, the Tom Tom Club and Weather Report playing Slippery People:
Now, you can rightfully ask, ‘Surely great concert films have been made since 1984?”. And the answer is, of course, yes. We’ll name two in last two years just to show we’re not complete dinosaurs but neither would make our top 5 list. Here you go:
6. Under Great White Northern Lights, White Stripes, 2010: Seven Nation Army. Good video, just not great performances which kept it out of top 5. Meg certainly comes alive!
9. Aldele Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 2011, Someone Like You and Rolling in the Deep: The test of time will be is whether we’re stilling adding this performance into top 10 lists 25 years from now. the others have passed that test. A bit too sing-songy for my taste.