Top Ten Live Albums Of The 2000's.

1) Talking Heads: The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads (2004)




2) The Byrds: Live At Royal Albert Hall 1971 (2008)




3) Roxy Music: Live (2003)




4) The Beach Boys: Good Timin':Live At Knebworth, England, 1980 (2003)




5) The Police: Certifiable (2008)




6) The Clash: Live At Shea Stadium (2008)




7) The Raspberries: Live On Sunset Strip (2007)




8) Morrissey: Live At Earl's Court (2005)




9) Brian Wilson: Pet Sounds Live (2002)



10) Too Much Joy: Live At Least (2001)

The Cars (1978 Elektra) A Perfect Debut.

Boston, MA's The Cars contained ex-members of The Modern Lovers (which also featured Jonathan Richman and Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison), the folky and very un-New Wave Milkwood and members of comedian Martin Mull's backing band. They were an American Pub-Rock band that adapted a hybrid of Rock And Roll while carefully merging a New Wave sensibility as well. Needless to say, they were quite successful at this. The Cars may be one of the most successful debuts of the initial 1977-1983 New Wave era. The Cars contained sleek songs with sleek arrangements which is in direct contrast to the booming background vocals treated by Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker. They could be seen as the missing link between The Beach Boys and Weezer.

Rhythm guitarist and vocalist Ric Ocasek was basically an awkward New Wave Buddy Holly with songs to match while bassist and vocalist Benjamin Orr had more conventional pop idol looks and sang the more pop material. The hit singles - "My Best Friend's Girl", "Good Times Roll" and "Just What I Needed" still get lots of airplay on AOR and alternative stations. "Don't Cha Stop", "You're All I've Got Tonight" and "Bye Bye Love" were also FM hits and still get a decent amount of airplay as well. I've personally heard all-nine songs from the album on the radio at various times. And the meandering "Moving In Stereo" is pretty well known for it's appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

The album was given an upgraded deluxe two-disc treatment by those do-gooders at Rhino in the late 90's and contains studio demos of the tracks and such would-have-been-classics as "They Won't See You" and "Wake Me Up" which is easily the one to get.

The Cars - Greatest Hits ( 1985 Elektra )

Although the band joked about calling their 1978 debut album as "The Cars Greatest Hits", this 1985 stop-gap release is a pretty okay one-stop for admirers of The Cars more popular singles. In actuality, bands like The Police, The Cars and Talking Heads had as many "turntable hits" - songs that AOR or alternative radio played as much as the label-picked singles - as they did chart hits (I personally used to hear "Got a Lot on My Head", "Running to You" and "Bye Bye Love" on local station WLIR-FM as a kid all the time). So a collection like this might leave some out in the cold. That didn't stop it from over selling six-million or so copies.

What does it have? The three formal hit-singles from their sterling debut ("My Best Friend's Girl", "Good Times Roll" and uber-hit "Just What I Needed"), only one of the three singles from their even-more-exciting sophomore album Candy-O ("Let's Go"), again only one of the three singles from the difficult/challenging third album Panorama ("Touch and Go"), a re-recorded version of "I'm Not the One" and two of the three hit singles from their 1981 Shake It Up album ("Since You're Gone" and the title track), four of the six singles from the stupidly-successful Heartbeat City album and a fine, if generic, new single , which also became a huge hit (the double-entendre of "Tonight She Comes").

Recommended? Personally I'm not a fan of best-of's/greatest hits collections but there are exceptions - when the releases have virtual lives and identities all their own (i.e. The Beatles' 1962-1966 (The Red Album) and 1967-1970 (The Blue Album) and The Beach Boys' Endless Summer). There aren't too many from the 80's - however this might might very well be one of them. For a full retrospective get the double-disc mid 90's collection Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology.