The Very Best Live Oklahoma

The Very Best Live

Alan Parsons

RCA Victor, 1995

REVIEW BY: Duke Egbert

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 08/19/2004

Military intelligence. Jumbo shrimp. Alan Parsons live.

When I was a freshman in college, we did a mock promo for thecampus radio station (which was a carrier wave signal that no onecould pick up) for an Alan Parsons Project concert. The tagline was"The band you've never seen, by the station you can't hear."Needless to say, our station advisor (who had very little sense ofhumor anyway) didn't find it funny.

Irrelevant? Perhaps. But when a band who didn't tour througheleven years of recording as "The Alan Parsons Project" decides tostart touring and release a live album, it's kinda weird. Iremember my jaw hitting the floor when I found The Very Best Live in the record store, and I thoughtsomeone was playing a joke. (That, or it was sixty minutes ofsilence in Dolby Surround-Sound.)

Turned out to be neither; instead, it was a live album recordedduring a 1994 tour of Europe by three of the four key members ofthe Project (Alan, guitarist Ian Bairnson, and drummer StuartElliot) along with a few other folks who had come along for theride. It also turned out to be pretty darn fine stuff.