With a name like Live at Home, one might presume this to be a bunch of guys in their jammies - recording an album in their living room. With the smell of cigarettes and beer cans strewn all over the place. But alas, "Home" means Jane's home, as in Hannover, Germany. Specifically one Friday the 13th as luck would have it. August, 1976. About 30% of the concert features loyal renditions of studio versions, while the rest is new material (at least on album). And even within that 30% there are certainly enough variations and improvisations to appreciate.
Here are the tracks previously released in the studio: 'Daytime'; 'Hangman' (from Together); 'Out in the Rain' (from Here We Are); and the title tracks to both Lady and Fire, Water, Earth & Air. Jane III is strangely missing, though that album is more hard rock in nature than this version of the group, which had leaned more towards Pink Floyd as noted below.
The new-to-album tracks are: 'All My Friends', 'Rest of My Life', 'Expectation', 'River', 'Another Way', 'Hightime for Crusaders', and 'Windows'. The latter a full side improvisation along the lines of mid 70s Pink Floyd (or perhaps more to the point - Pulsar at the time of Pollen) and foreshadows their upcoming Between Heaven and Hell release. Without doing a side by side listen, I believe all the above tracks are unique to this release and haven't been renamed ('Expectation' did show up on a Brain live comp from Essen a year later). 'Rest of My Life' is copyrighted 1973, but it's not on Here We Are, nor does it appear to be a single. All the others are quoted to be from 1976.
For many, this is the best Jane album, capturing the band in full improvisational mode. It certainly is in the discussion.
Ownership: LP: 1976 Brain. 2xLP gatefold. Online acquisition (2015) and it was my introduction to the album. I find the cover odd. I've been to Germany plenty of times, but never to Hannover. All the same, I'm fairly confident it doesn't look like Arizona...
2/8/15; 9/16/22 (new entry)
From the SPV/Revisited reissue liner notes: "...which [i.e. Windows] had been hidden in a drawer of Hess' desk for years: "I'd been asked at the beginning of the Seventies to contribute a song for an 'Animal Farm' musical. But I never quite got round to completing this number, so it wasn't much more than a basic idea." When bassist Martin Hesse joined Jane in 1975, he and Hess started to work on the number again, completing the arrangement."
ReplyDeleteExcellent - thanks for that detail!
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