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PRIEST...LIVE!
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"Our
upcoming live album
will be a double album, and it will hopefully be released in May of next
year. We are recording gigs everywhere right now, with a few more to be
added in Europe and Japan. It'll basically be a live album, but it will also
include songs, Judas Priest songs, the audience have never heard before,
because we felt we wanted to give the kids something else, something they
haven't already bought. There will be at least two, three or maybe even four
tracks they've never heard before - tracks from the TURBO album, but on the
U.S. tour, we threw a new song into the set almost every night. Of course,
you can't do too many new songs every night as they've never heard it..." |
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Management: Bill Curbishley, Trinifold Management |
Produced by Tom Allom
Certification: RIAA Gold October 29, 2001 |
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Album package design by Icon, London
Art director Richard Evans has been credited with art direction, graphic design and booklet design for albums by The Who, Al Dimeola, Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys and UFO, among others. For PRIEST...LIVE!, all the elements that went into a good Priest album cover were stripped away. Instead of a live picture of the band, or even a fantasy creature, Evans sketched the hands of fans pointing in adoration towards the stage and used a decidedly non-metal looking brown as the primary color of choice, while the famous logo that first appeared on STAINED CLASS was reduced to mere initials. Fans referred to the design as "cheesy" at best - it was too simple, uninspired, and a complete sabotage of all things Priest, leaving the fans feeling betrayed yet once again. |
Director: Wayne Isham |
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A few short months after K.K. made that statement, the double album Priest...Live! was released, but the package did not follow K.K.'s plans. In fact, just as the Scorpions had done, Priest had mixed a couple of well-performed and well-recorded shows from their world tour, but there were no new studio recordings or even rare unreleased tracks. It seems CBS Records once again had a different vision than Priest, but the label did put out a companion video to sweeten the pot. The start of 1987 had been rather uneventful, as the band members took time off to re-gather their own bit of "fuel for life", but by May, Priest members reconvened to sort through live recordings made at the Dallas and Atlanta shows and mix a new live album of Priest favorites while the memories were still fresh. It was Priest's second official live album (one that manager Bill Curbishley had promised they could make as a follow-up to their 10th studio album), coming a full 5 studio albums after their first live album, the highly acclaimed Unleashed In The East. By now, Tom Allom was the constant man at the production helm and he worked with the band to sift through the material and mix it down at Miami's Criteria Studios. Tom had indeed become quite a fun fixture in the band: During the mixing sessions, a "well-oiled" Tom Allom sat at the piano and played "Freewheel Burning" while making faces and singing "Freewheel Gurning" (the art of making faces)! But where the fun ended, the work began, and the first task was to select the proper tracks to mix from the two shows. As this was going to be Priest's second official live album (one that manager Bill Curbishley had promised they could make as a follow-up to their 10th studio album), coming a full 5 studio albums after their first live album, the highly acclaimed Unleashed In The East, it was decided that to avoid giving the fans repeat songs, the album version would only include their post-1979 material. Besides, Priest...Live! was the live representation of a new and evolving era of Judas Priest in the digital '80s and the MTV/video age. But one such early number did make a cameo appearance: Glenn's intro feedback guitar and Rob's revved-up Harley from "Hell Bent For Leather" were mixed in as the intro to "Freewheel Burning"... The live setting actually lended a stronger quality to the Turbo tracks performed, but unfortunately, it was the band's commercial image and approach to heavy metal that kept the hard-core faithful from fully supporting Priest...Live! The release of Turbo had brought with it platinum sales and a new crop of fans to the tour (a large number of whom were female, as K.K. was proud to observe!) and the media, radio and network outlets were hyping up this new wave of accessible metal across the board. Yet in spite of the highly successful and popular Fuel For Life tour in '86, by the following year, the "new" crop of fans - jock-rockers and fem-fatales looking for a good song to party and make out to - would soon discover that the sounds of Bon Jovi (who opened for Priest on the Canadian leg of the tour) and the like were a better fit to become this crowd's "fuel for life". Once those "fans" abandoned ship, only a few converts remained, and the die-hard defenders of the faith had felt betrayed; to them, Priest had become a hair-metal glam sell out, and only bands like Metallica were left to deliver the goods and rescue metal from the corporate mis-direction it had taken. Priest...Live! charted the worst of any Priest album in the UK and it held one of the lowest chart positions for a Priest record in the US as well. It was also the first album to not certify platinum since 1981's Point Of Entry. But low charting and poor sales were not uncommon for a double-live album anyway, and in spite of the backlash from the hard core fans, Priest...Live! remains a strong album for many others and one of the best live albums to be made in the '80s. |
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RIAA certified Gold February 17, 1988 From 1985 to 1994 Curt Marvis served as CEO of The Company, an award winning and highly successful privately held production company in Los Angeles. During this time, he and his partner, Director Wayne Isham, produced many of the most popular and critically acclaimed videos in the history of MTV. Curt was awarded in 1991 with MTV's Video Vanguard Award honoring lifetime achievement in his work. Marvis is a graduate with honors of UCLA with a BFA in Motion Picture and Television Production and is currently the CEO of CinemaNow. The Priest...Live! film was the second official live concert home video release from Judas Priest, and the first offered as a companion to an album. And although the album's sales had suffered, the video did quite well, nearly certifying platinum. The show's intro is considered one of the most dynamic for Priest, and is captured well on video: As the familiar intro to "Out In The Cold" begins and the guitarists burst out on stage, something becomes immediately obvious - Rob Halford is nowhere to be seen! The crowd cheers louder as Rob's voice comes over the P.A. when the first verse begins, but there's still no sight of the Metal God. On the video, we see something the fans could not - Rob is ascending the back-stage stairs while singing the verse. An even louder cheer goes up (and so do the arm hairs and goose bumps) as Rob appears from behind the stage and the emotion and adrenaline come into full swing! The concert experience is captured well on video and the band seems larger-than-life as planned. Indeed, seeing is believing! The video has been an out-of-print legend that outshines the album, but is now reissued on DVD in 5.1 surround audio for the first time in over a decade as part of Sony Entertainment's ELECTRIC EYE DVD:
Throughout the video, K.K. Downing wears a pair of shades and it has sparked many speculations as to why, but the answer does not live up to the infamous false rumors of hiding his eyes due to drug and alcohol abuse:
The outfits are glitzy, the Harley has been "Frankenstein-ed" into an apocalyptic ROAD WARRIOR-like machine out of the Turbo videos and a giant hydraulic robot interacts with the band from behind. All-in-all, it was Priest's most elaborate production to date and made for a great show at a time when over-the-top was the rule of the MTV day!
The show featured prominently from the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas, but as one fan shares, the cameras were also rolling a few nights earlier in San Antonio:
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Out in the Cold:
Lead: split -
Glenn/KK Lead breaks are taken from the Priest...Live! Re-Master liner notes |
© 2002-2003
Steel & Leather Productions, U.S.A.
