If you actively dislike Creedence Clearwater Revival, then I can never respect anything you have to say about anything.

Bryan Ferry, when I saw him a couple years ago, knows how to do it imo. After a lengthy set of Roxy and solo hits and deep cuts:

ENCORE 1:
Let’s Stick Together (Wilbert Harrison cover)
What Goes On (Velvet Underground cover)
Jealous Guy (John Lennon cover)

ENCORE 2:
Editions of You

lol @ complaining about the interactive theater of live performances

xps

The only legitimate encores I remember — that is, where the band actually seemed to be done and weren’t just going through the encore motions — were Neil Young & Crazy Horse in 1991, where he did his second encore after the house lights came up; and Otis Rush in 1987, who was opening for Los Lobos, and remains the only opener I’ve ever seen who got an encore.

My only contribution:

Shows should start at 4:30, end by 5:30-5:45, just in time for dinner and drinks.

All shows should be in escape rooms, and each song is a clue.

xp: Sometimes you just got to take a piss or get a quick bite/drink.

xxpost Who's complaining? I love that shit.

Best/worst encore I (almost) saw was Prince. The last time I saw him play a big place, when he barely played guitar and had the useless 13-piece horn section, was pretty underwhelming. Show ends and people keep clapping. Maybe ten minutes pass, lights go up and people start leaving. It's been maybe 15 minutes, and I say, fuck it, I'm seeming him later at like 3 in the morning, I want to go home and rest. Which I do. And then learn after maybe 25 minutes with the house lights up and the place emptying, Prince and is band supposedly came out to a 90% empty arena and played another 20 minutes or so.

I saw Sleater-Kinney last month. It was on Corn's birthday, so they'd been bantering a little more than normal (Corin said at one point it was the most she'd talked about her birthday on her birthday ever), so when they reached the end of the first encore, Carrie told the audience, "Normally we'd be walking off again for a few minutes, but, y'know, life is short and we're having fun, so let's just stay out here..." and then she took an audience poll about did we want "a slow one and a fast one", or "two fast ones" for the rest of the set (we ended up with a slow one AND two fast ones BTW).

Sometimes I see acts who make such a mockery of the encore process that I think (and this is probably true) that a lot of them are contractually bound to perform an "encore," which means the pantomime of walking off the stage and coming back, even if they don't want to or feel the need to.

The best approach to the perfunctory encore I ever saw was at a Metric show several years back. They just put a timer up on a screen that counted down the five minutes until they came back out. That struck me as perfect, because it was completely transparent about it being a pre-arranged break rather than something spontaneous, didn't obligate the audience to carry on clapping and cheering for some indefinite amount of time, and allowed the excitement for the "encore" portion of the show to build and peak at just the right time.

I accompanied a friend to a 2004 Decemberists show at some tiny venue; there were five members and enough instruments on stage that the band couldn't leave the stage without removing it all, so just told us to pretend they left, and chatted with each other for a few minutes before doing the encore.

Doesn't all of this depend on the act? Unless they were laying down a couple of hour-long choogles in there al la Rallizes or Endless Boogie or whatever I can't imagine wanting to sit through three live hours of CCR...there's just not enough variety in what they did to pull that off.

Comparing CCR to Zep in this regard is kinda dumb

I can't think of any band I would want to hear perform for three hours, Zep definitely included. Maybe P-Funk, but there was a fair amount of widdling between the gems in their shows too.

I've only ever seen two bands play for more than two hours - the Mars Volta in 2005 (no opening act and I feel like they were up there for about 3 hours) and King Sunny Ade (played from 8 PM to 4 AM). In both cases there was definitely a "it's all one song" feeling, and I wouldn't want to listen back to recordings of either show but I had a blast while I was there. I agree with Hadrian that Creedence, or any band playing one discrete song after another for three hours, would be intolerable for me after 90 minutes or so.

Heh, I was curious, so did the math, and the sum total of the first five CCR album runs just under three hours.

Every time I've seen Springsteen he's gone on for around 3 hours, and it's never seemed too long ... or too short. I'm trying to think who else I've seen who goes three hours. Even Rush I think stopped around 2.5.

Fwiw, btw, those epic Zeppelin sets were like half drum/guitar/organ solos. Basically "Dazed and Confused" and "Moby Dick" and "No Quarter."

Fwiw, btw, those epic Zeppelin sets were like half drum/guitar/organ solos. Basically "Dazed and Confused" and "Moby Dick" and "No Quarter."

I've always wondered about this. I've read books about Led Zeppelin where they describe concerts and it's like "and then John Paul Jones took a 40-minute organ solo before 'No Quarter'" and I think, who the fuck would even stick around for that? But at the same time, I'd kinda like to hear even one bootleg just to see how unendurable it really is.

"Man, I ain’t believing that shit about Bonham’s one hour drum solo, man. I mean one hour of drums, you couldn’t handle that shit on strong acid, man."

vampire weekend went 2 hrs 45 when i saw them at msg earlier this year lol

All I know is that, as a huge Zeppelin fan, I've never felt compelled to listen to any of their bootlegs for that very reason (plus others). But Springsteen, otoh, I can easily listen to a 3.5 hour show by him. Once I picked up a friend when I was listening to a Bruce show (during a Sirius promo), took him to a real concert, and the Bruce show was still on for the ride home.

How The West Was Won is a great live document and you don't have to try to track down weird bootlegs

The '69 live show on the expanded Zep I is great too--They were absolute hungry beasts onstage then.

Some of those 77 Presence tour Zep shows are insane: guitar player all strung out, sounding like a shreds vid part of the time & part of the time like the greatest guitar player ever, singer seemingly bemused/befuddled by the whole thing, No Quarter devolving in a boogie-woogie piano scales exercise, all going on for 3 fucking hours, sometimes brilliant, sometimes stupid, always 100% Led Zep.

All bands should play 20 minutes MAXIMUM

My uncle ditched my sister's 3rd birthday party to go see Zep in 77 in Chicago. She thinks he made the right choice.

i feel like i saw the allman bros approach the 3 hour mark in the late 90s(?) but it's very possible i'm misremembering

xpost Yeah, the official futzed with live Zeppelin document is pretty awesome, especially the DVD version. But that seems kind of an outlier. whereas there are probably 5-10 Springsteen bootlegs I listen to as often as the albums themselves.

CCR!!!

I saw Public Enemy go at least 3.5 hours... in Columbia, Mo.... on a weeknight.

Even being 19, I had to throw in the towel around 2 a.m.

And before anyone asks, no, there was no 40-minute Terminator X scratch solo.

One of the best shows I've ever seen was a four hour Prince show in 2011. Somewhere in encore 4, we realized that we were already at the afterparty and we jumped down to the floor of the Forum to dance along with the remaining audience who stayed behind. You don't leave until Prince leaves.

One other thing CCR had going on that I want to say a lot of rock acts had abandoned was an allegiance to the country side of early rock and roll, not just soul or the blues but rockabilly. Did many other bands dip into rockabilly between CCR's end until the late '70s/early '80s revival?

Flamin' Groovies.

Same city!

Only bands I saw do more than two hours were the Who, whose set was around 3 hours in 1989; and George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars a few weeks later, who played a solid 4-hour show that did not let up AT ALL. I didn’t even know much of their material at the time, and was transfixed.

To bring it back to CCR and encores, at one of those ‘89 Who shows, they played “Born On The Bayou,” introduced by Daltrey as “the only thing I remember about Woodstock.”

Nice to see some love for P-Funk’s marathon sets, none of which involved 40-minute drum solos

One other thing CCR had going on that I want to say a lot of rock acts had abandoned was an allegiance to the country side of early rock and roll, not just soul or the blues but rockabilly. Did many other bands dip into rockabilly between CCR's end until the late '70s/early '80s revival?

In the UK at least glam def reached back to early r’n’r/rockabilly

To bring it back to CCR and encores, at one of those ‘89 Who shows, they played “Born On The Bayou,” introduced by Daltrey as “the only thing I remember about Woodstock.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrIb1WdOVg

One of the best shows I've ever seen was a four hour Prince show in 2011. Somewhere in encore 4, we realized that we were already at the afterparty and we jumped down to the floor of the Forum to dance along with the remaining audience who stayed behind. You don't leave until Prince leaves.

― Elvis Telecom

Oh yeah I've got a bootleg of that one. Definitely one of the hottest shows I've heard Prince do, which is, uh, a significant compliment.

There are some pretty excruciating Zep shows from '75 and '77. There's one from Seattle '75 (there's a video of this I'm told) where Jimmy stretches out "Dazed and Confused" for _45 minutes_. It's absolutely unbearable, total torture (and I'll rep hard for the 26 minute Dazed and Confused from Offenburg two years earlier!) Then by '77 there's the infamous Tempe gig.. the "Achilles Last Stand" from that gig is one of the biggest trainwrecks I've ever heard, probably still terrible even if you find a tape running at the right speed (which most of them don't). Of course the flip side is that Page could play that completely terrible and nobody would fucking care. 100% arena ennui. A lot of it is, I think, down to the sound systems of the time... they probably sounded terrible for similar reasons to those that made the Beatles sound terrible - it wasn't the fans per se, it was the technology wasn't there to allow them to sound good!

I saw Public Enemy go at least 3.5 hours... in Columbia, Mo.... on a weeknight..

I dunno, PAs had come a very long way by ‘77, and a number of bands designed, developed, and lugged around their own PAs as a means of avoiding being stuck with inadequate house systems. It seems weird that Zep either a) didn’t use their own system, or b) that they designed and used a crappy one.

But apart from maybe ‘68-‘69, Zep just wasn’t a great live act. They’d have great moments, but then ruin everything with 90 minutes of “LOOK AT THIS VIOLIN BOW.” It’s telling that How The West Was Won is compiled from multiple shows, sometimes within a single song (“Stairway” alone has bits from three shows). They couldn’t find one Zep show that was decent from beginning to end?

xp

this discussion sent me to the extras on the 2009 reissues of Bayou Country through Cosmo's, but also to the songs I was not familiar with from Pendulum: and man, "Sailor's Lament," "Chameleon," "Hideaway," and "It's Just a Thought" are really really bad. JF really ran outta gas at the same time that he wanted to expand the sound of the band, although I admire the chutzpah of "Rude Awakening" which is so bizarre and ill conceived that I'm glad he put it on the record. "Born to Move" and "Molina" are okay, but no patch on "Hey Tonight" or "have you ever"; that last one still the least of his hot streak.

Hard disagree about those Pendulum tracks

I call Pendulum the Organ Album. Fogerty took to it hard. Sometimes the songs exist as excuses for organ grooves ("Sailor's Lament"). But "It's Just a Thought" is a better bit of rumination than "Have You Ever..." -- my least favorite of CCR's singles, I'll agree.

Something's gotta be last, right?

Hard disagree about those Pendulum tracks

Hard agree with your hard disagreement. "Hideaway" and "It's Just a Thought" are great!

I really love "Rude Awakening #2" as well, their most overtly psychedelic track

"Pagan Baby" also such a killer riff, underrated non-single.

picked up a copy of Chronicle Volume 2 on CD at the used bookstore this weekend, thanks to this thread

That second volume led to my appreciation of CCR.