The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert (2002) Hi-Res

The Rolling Stones' go-to-by-default big live album gets a remastering job, but also an odd multi-disc treatment.

If the Rolling Stones really were the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band for the better part of the 1960s and 70s, then surely somewhere along the line they must've released one of the great live albums of all time too, right? This rationale is the only way I can account for the fact that the Stones' best-regarded live release, 1970's definitely pleasurable but less-than-transcendent Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, routinely places highly on lists of the best concert documents in rock history. It feels like the kind of perfunctory acknowledgment that virtually all of the other typically high-ranking sets (for instance, Neil Young's Live Rust, the Who's Live at Leeds, and the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East) don't need, seeing as how they're genuinely awesome.

Live performance never seemed as intrinsic to the Rolling Stones' essence as it did for most of 60s and 70s rock's other heavy hitters. Sure, as soon as playing basketball arenas became a viable rock-star option the always-avaricious Stones rushed to embrace the financial potentialities, but the group's music never cultivated the kind of epic, transformative breadth that best fills an enormous space like Madison Square Garden, where Ya-Ya's was recorded. Big venues demand that everything else be larger than life as well, but outsized song lengths (think the Grateful Dead, Allmans, Led Zep), outsized emotions (the Who, U2), and outsized spectacle (KISS, David Bowie) have never been indispensable components of the Stones' music. It's not for nothing that some of the band's most cherished officially sanctioned live work happens to be the El Mocambo club stuff from 1977's Love You Live as well as 1995's intimate Stripped.

Nonetheless, Ya-Ya's persists as the Stones' go-to concert recording, so it's hardly a surprise to see the band now putting out a deluxe, reissue of the two-night event. Disc One is the original album itself, remastered.