VMP Magazine

Last month, a week before the vinyl record industry celebrated the troublingly overgrown Record Store Day, the BBC published a dubious report claiming that “48 percent of people who bought vinyl [in the previous] month [admitted] they [had] yet to play it.” The article never qualified the poll, conducted by British marketing firm ICM Unlimited, and left a handful of important questions unanswered: how many people were questioned? How old are they? Where do they live? And yet the main takeaway — that nearly half of people currently buying records aren’t listening to them — remains an entirely believable possibility. For plenty of consumers in the current market, records are things you hold as much as things you listen to, trophies for fanship as much as a means of consumption.

The 50 Best Record Stores In America is an essay series where we attempt to find the best record store in every state. These aren’t necessarily the record stores with the best prices or the deepest selection; you can use Yelp for that. Each record store featured has a story that goes beyond what’s on its shelves; these stores have history, foster a sense of community and mean something to the people who frequent them.

Beginning in the 1940s and throughout the ‘60s, listening to American music in Soviet Russia was a defiant act of consumerism. The music itself—popular recordings from Lionel Richie, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and more—was banned, written off as subversive to the state, and the method of consumption was correspondingly sketchy. Stephen Coates, a British author and composer, grappled with the peculiarly fascinating black market for bootleg records in his 2010 hardcover book X-Ray Audio. Russian bootleggers pressed songs onto used x-ray film, a material with the unique properties required of a vinyl alternative: soft enough for grooves to be carved, firm enough for grooves to hold their shape.

The forbidden songs were pressed onto leftover images of bones—a hand here, a section of a tibia there—like incidental picture discs borne out of necessity. It’s a dramatic, alluring story about the hunger for music. And while it’s an extreme case, the story of Russian “bone records” offers up a weighty microcosm: people go to great lengths to listen to music they’re not supposed to.

As performers, musicians are forced to open up in a different way onstage than they might during a studio recording. Onstage, things go wrong and must move on; in the studio an artist can double back. As fans we want something both familiar and unique in a concert, an occasion to momentarily reside in living versions of the songs we love. We can scrutinize and study a recording, but a concert can’t be paused. Live albums are perilous hit-or-miss endeavors for this reason, but at their best they don’t just capture the essence of an original studio recording, they catapult the familiar into new territory.

With all of that in mind, we’ve rounded up a list of ten essential live albums to own on vinyl.