They were of course a huge concert attraction in 1980 (and had the box office receipts to prove it), but people did occasionally walk out that year because of how freakish they played. I remember the couple who walked out at the Bowl because the studio band didn’t sound like the studio band. Those people wanted the studio sound. To make a safer live album, the band would have had to gather a single album’s worth of top hits from the less nutty touring days, 1975 to 1977. Somebody opted to go a little conky with this album, from the song choice to the 1980 jamming to the fainting-spell cover photo and the typewriter font.

Stop it!

As the tour progressed, “Tusk” got longer and longer. The performance on the LIVE deluxe, for example, is about eight minutes of that riff played over and over. The performance to grab for a live album should have been the Forum concerts with the USC Trojans. Having the horns around kept the jamming under radio-friendly control.

Having said all this. I do love the Deluxe version of this album. It's fantastic, in my opinion.