15 of the Greatest Live Performances of All-Time

Before I begin listing these 15 of my all-time favorite live performances, first allow me to pre-empt any of the predictable confusion or grievance that follows such a list by establishing a few ground rules:

1) While these performances are numbered and catalogued in the format of a countdown, they are not in any particular order. I cannot stress this enough, so please do refrain from hitting me with comments like "Why is x only at 13, while y is at 4?" Each and every one of these performances is, in my opinion, exceptional nearly to the point of utter perfection. So please do not get hung up on which number precedes each artist's name.

2) This list is quite a mixed bag. I have a variety of tastes, and it certainly shows here.

In my experience, there are two types of people who, when asked what kind of music they listen to, will proclaim the following: "I listen to everything." They are either:

a) People who actually do listen to everything, or at least nearly everything.

b) People who listen to nothing -- folks who are just not really "music people". They listen to the radio or whatever is on, and more or less just declare, "I listen to everything," as a way of saying, "You're not getting much music conversation from me. So please leave me alone."

I am firmly entrenched in the former camp, and kinda can't stand that weird reflexive truth-bending of the latter group.

3) This is not by any means an exhaustive list. There are reams of amazing live performances since the dawn of recording that are readily available on the internet. These are just 15 live performances that I find myself continually revisiting, blown away by each and every listen.

4) Some of these entries are not live in the traditional sense, as in "with an audience present". I interpreted "live" loosely to mean "artists performing (either solo or together) without the use of studio overdubs".

For example, we have my first entry, which was recorded in 1937, before the age of multi-tracking and punch-ins (so technically all recordings of this era were live). Hence, Django Reinhardt's "Minor Swing" tops off my list of greatest live performances.

15. Django Reinhardt - Minor Swing

For the uninitiated, allow me to introduce you to the utter miracle that was Django Reinhardt.

In my opinion, there has lived no greater guitar player in the history of the world. That may sound hyperbolic, but I assure you he lives up to every word of such extravagant praise.

In November of 1928, at the age of 17, Reinhardt was severely injured in a wagon accident. As he began to fall asleep in the back of the wagon he was sharing with his wife, Reinhardt accidentally knocked over a candle, which ignited the the celluloid that his wife used to make artificial flowers. In a matter of moments, the wagon was ablaze. The couple escaped with their lives, but Reinhardt was badly burned over half of his body.

Perhaps the most devastating of his injuries was a severe burn to the fourth and fifth fingers of his left (fretting) hand. As someone who has suffered significant injury to his fretting fingers, I can tell you from my personal recovery experience that for many string players, this is an absolute career-ender. However, unlike Reinhardt, I did recover the use of my fingers. He was not so fortunate.

But somehow, Django persevered. And not only did he continue playing, re-designing his entire approach by using his index and middle fingers for the majority of of his single note runs, and utilizing his two injured fingers for chords (as essentially one fused-together entity).

And not only did he simply play again, he was able to do things with only two fully-functioning fingers that most guitarists can't do with all four fretting digits intact. Even in his semi-crippled state, Django Reinhardt was still not just one of the most tasteful, interesting, and self-controlled guitarists in the world, he was the very best guitar player in the world. (One can only imagine what he might've been able to accomplish with all four fingers, but it almost doesn't matter, because he nonetheless achieved the pinnacle of greatness with only two good fingers.)

"Minor Swing" is his best known piece, and for good reason. Though not as flashy a showcase of Reinhardt's virtuosity as some of his other compositions, "Minor Swing" is incredibly energetic, playful, and illustrates perfectly the ease with which Django could just simply play whatever he wished at any given moment.

14. Nina Simone: Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)

Recorded live at the Westbury Music Fair, just three days after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., this piece is an almost perfect snapshot of a moment in time that so few of us could ever possibly know: what it must have been like to be an African-American in the immediate aftermath of the murder of this great man, who represented so much to so many.

This one song captures almost too many conflicting emotions to even process: the despair, the bitterness at those responsible for his murder, the fury at the the injustice of it all, the utter confusion ("what will happen now that he is dead?"). But perhaps most importantly, the song offers glimmers of peace and hope ("He had seen the mountaintop/And he knew he could not stop/Folks, you better stop and think, and feel again...") that so adeptly captured the spirit of the great man.

It would have been so trivially easy (and completely understandable) for Simone to simply come out and perform a piece so wrathful it could put to shame the most ambitious purveyors of angry and dark music. But instead, she not only validated those feelings of hurt and betrayal that so many were feeling, but she also offered direction in a time of chaos. A way forward.

So much, captured in a single performance of a single song.

13. Fiona Apple - Parting Gift

Fiona Apple is one of my favorite artists of all-time, and performances like this one are a major part of what crystallized this notion for me.

The song itself is one of a number of savage breakup tunes penned by Apple, and is as brutal in its anger and dismissiveness of its bloodied-to-a-pulp subject as any of the best performances by the heaviest of metal bands. ("Oh, you silly stupid pastime of mine/You were always good for a rhyme")

I've always found the second verse to be particularly powerful:

I took off my glasses while you were yelling at me once, more than once

So as not to see you see me react

Should've put 'em, should've put 'em on again

So I could see you see me sincerely yelling back

12. Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

"Strange Fruit" is a gut punch of a song. Originally a fervent anti-racism/anti-lynching poem written in 1937 by schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, which he then set to music, it quickly became a staple of Holiday's repertoire as early as 1939.

The only surviving video performance of the song was from the British cabaret television show, Chelsea At Nine, recorded February 25th, 1959, only months before Holiday's untimely death due to cirrhosis, brought on by years of heavy drug use.

Holiday was only 44 years old, but both appeared and sounded much older. Years of heroin addiction had ravaged her body and rendered her voice what I like to call perfectly imperfect - just frail enough to offer hints of wisdom, and just strong enough to embody the vibrancy of youth.

Add to that the fact that she gave a performance so painfully beautiful, it both brings to mind the unimaginable hurt she was experiencing personally, and how that pain lent itself so well to shine a light on the truly unfathomable pain of the African-American experience during the era of Jim Crow.

11. Tom Waits - Chocolate Jesus

Whereas the vast majority of artists in the world experience a downward trajectory in overall quality over the course of a career, Tom Waits is one of those rare-beyond-words performers who somehow just improves with age.

Waits released his Mule Variations album in 1999, at 50 years old. In my opinion, it was his finest work yet -- that is, until it was eclipsed by his 2011 record Bad As Me (released at age 62). How many artists can you name who are releasing their best, most consistent work in their later years? (At this very moment, I can literally conjure up a grand total of zero names. I'm sure a few will come to mind eventually, but at the time of this writing, I can think of no one else for whom this is true.)

Waits' 1999 performance of "Chocolate Jesus" on the Late Show with David Letterman was arguably the man at his very best as a live performer. He grittily growls this song about chocolate Christian candy ("an immaculate confection") into a megaphone, simultaneously resembling a demented carnival barker and a maniacal televangelist. During a lengthy instrumental break (which can be notoriously difficult onstage moments for singers), Waits takes turns showering the tiny stage with glitter, and strutting like a peacock with full plumage on display,

Tom Waits is living proof that the second, and perhaps even third, acts in the life of an artist can be just as fruitful as the first -- if not more so.

10. XTC - Blue Beret

For the life of me, I will never understand why XTC never recorded an official album version of "Blue Beret". It's chordally, melodically, and lyrically brilliant (and this was a band with no shortage of brilliance in the above categories).

One of the only extant reminders of the song's very existence was from this live MTV acoustic session from 1989, shot only months before MTV began production of its hit series MTV Unplugged. (Personally, I've always wondered if this performance was among the sparks of inspiration that wound up leading the network to produce the Unplugged series.)

Penned by XTC's famously reclusive vocalist Andy Partridge, the song is playfully psychedelic, yet at moments melancholically poignant. Most of the song's lyrics are just a series of puns and verbal playfulness (Me, I like to roam/Wasn't built in a day). Even lines that don't necessarily read so cleverly are obvious subversions of expectation when heard in the context of the song itself, such as Well, me I like to think/While you other fish swim -- Partridge leaves a pause before the word swim, clearly leaving the listener expecting the word "sink" to follow, only to be tickled when "swim" is the next lyric. Even the song's very title, "Blue Beret", seems an obvious pun on the word "blueberry".

But it's the song's chorus that reveals its "mission statement", so to speak:

Some people are dying for the right to say

Some people just want the right to say

Some people are dying 'cause the other people busy blowing them away

Some people are merely blown away

Well, we're all dying so we gotta have a ton of fun along the way

I say hats off, take your hats off, get your hats off, get your hats off

To the blue beret

Blue beret, blue beret

It's both a terribly depressing and truthful commentary on the pervasive subjugation of people's right to free speech, and the violence that is almost universally employed to enforce that submission. But at the same time, the chorus leaves us with that the fact the we're all dying (also true), so essentially, fuck it -- let's just have some fun and play with words and enjoy ourselves as much as possible while we're still here.

The actual performance of the song is, again, what I'd call perfectly imperfect. The background vocals are a bit wonky at times, but given that this song was never recorded (and considering that the band hadn't toured in years at that point), it was ostensibly not a heavily practiced number. But the few flubbed background vocal notes are more than made up for by the sheer brilliance of the background melody lines themselves, which so perfectly complement the main vocals that the song would feel totally incomplete without them.

Also, any minor mishaps are offset by Partridge's usual wit and charm and musical salesmanship, if you will, that was such a staple of the band's persona.

9. Faith No More - Midlife Crisis

This Faith No More performance, live in Chile at the Monsters of Rock festival in 1995 is one of the most beautiful displays of repulsion I have ever witnessed.

The band was performing "Midlife Crisis" from their 1992 all-too-overlooked work of genius, Angel Dust. (In fact, while I'm at it, their entire discography is criminally overlooked. As well-known as this band may be, it seems that very few music listeners have given them the credit they've deserved. This has been changing, albeit slowly, for decades now. It seems that serious listeners and critics have finally come to understand that this band was genre-bending and musically fluid since its inception. They had no allegiances to any one scene -- from the "proto-rap-rock" that garnered them their one and only hit with "Epic", to the metal world from which they often borrowed, to the 90s "alternative" universe, into which they were all too often lumped. This was a band without a country, so to speak. And from a business perspective, this no doubt hurt them in the eyes of their record industry caretakers. But from the perspective of all listeners with open ears and and open minds, Faith No More were legendary because they were on their own.)

This performance has everything a Faith No More fan could hope for: the band sounding tight, singer Mike Patton at his most energetic, and the unpredictability and near-danger that is apparent after the first moments of the video, when members of the audience begin spitting furiously at the band.

It's still unclear to me exactly why the crowd began hocking miles of loogies at Faith No More. Most of the video cutaways show an audience that appears to be enjoying the show immensely. Were certain members of the crowd showing their disapproval of an "alternative" band that "had no business" sharing a stage with other more accepted metal acts, such as Ozzy Osbourne and Megadeth? Was this a strange carryover from the 70s/80s punk scene that had found its way to Chile in the mid-90s, and this crowd was just hocking its affection all over Faith No More? Or was it something else entirely? I have no idea.

But what makes this video so fun to watch is how Mike Patton, completely unfazed by the spitting, begins to egg on the crowd, inviting them not only to spit at him more, but even at one point offering his outstretched tongue as the target toward which they should aim.

No matter what the reason was for the spitting, Patton's reaction made this one of the coolest live performances on earth. He was either communicating to a cross-section of the crowd that he was not impressed with their attempts to bully his band offstage; or he was gleefully joining in on a punk rock tradition that most bands outside of the punk scene (or even inside the punk scene, for that matter) want no part of. (Or, as I said before, maybe it was something else entirely. For all I know, he could've instructed the crowd earlier in the evening to shower him in loogie love. Patton is a fairly enigmatic character, after all.)

8. Mad Season - Long Gone Day

Mad Season is another terribly underappreciated band, and unlike with Faith No More, it seems audiences have been much slower to recognize the brilliance that radiates from the band's one and only full-length studio release, Above.

Technically, Mad Season can be considered a "supergroup", a term that is often synonymous with lameness and financial opportunism. But while Mad Season certainly featured members of successful bands of the day -- Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, and Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees -- it didn't feel like a supergroup. It felt much more like a bunch of friends simply gathering together to do little more than jam and see what would happen next.

The band did wind up with a few minor hits, "River of Deceit" and "I Don't Know Anything", but it nonetheless seemed, and still seems, that few people have paid this band the respect that they rightfully earned.

Somewhat like Faith No More, Mad Season were a bit of a genre-bending group. While they certainly played their share of obvious crowd-pleasers that would fit fairly neatly under the rubric of "grunge" or "alternative", they also took quite a few chances on bluesy numbers and songs like the jazz-infused "Long Gone Day".

This performance (one of only four performances the band had ever played) is utterly transcendent. Let's start with the obvious -- "Long Gone Day" features two of the greatest singers of all-time, Mark Lanegan and Layne Staley, crooning a duet. That alone is a recipe for success. But combine that with an upright bassline that sets a drug-addled beatnik vibe a la Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", a glockenspiel part that adds just the right flavor to this dark and subtle tune, and even a nearly-unhinged saxophone solo that brings to mind jazz at its more free-wheeling, and you have a recipe for sheer magic. (Just as an aside, outside of jazz music and the occasional Bruce Springsteen tune, how often do saxophone solos do anything other than date a song to the 1980s or just spew pure cheese-wiz all over a tune? The sole fact that this song has a saxophone solo that actually enhances the tune puts "Long Gone Day" in a relatively elite category.)

7. Townes Van Zandt - Waitin' Around to Die

I just realized that there has been a theme developing in the last few entries in this blog post, and will continue to develop in the next few entries: The Criminally Overlooked.

Country legend Steve Earle once proclaimed, "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."

Van Zandt, in typical fashion, made light of the compliment, joking, “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

Whatever one believes about Earle's statement, this much is clear: from the perspective of any songwriter worth his salt, Townes Van Zandt deserves, at the very least, to be mentioned in the same breath as Bob Dylan. (Personally, his music touches me on a level that Dylan's never has.)

Van Zandt's rendition of "Waitin' Around to Die" (the first song he ever wrote, according to the man himself) in the outlaw country documentary Heartworn Highways is about as emotionally powerful as live performance can be.

In the video clip of Van Zandt's performance, we see him in the kitchen area of his trailer home in Austin, Texas with his friend and neighbor "Uncle" Seymour Washington, an older African-American retired Texas blacksmith. Along with the pair is Van Zandt's then-girlfriend, Kathy Tennell.

Van Zandt was an almost impossibly self-destructive character. He had such severe addiction issues that, according to his long-time friend and manager Kevin Eggers, Van Zandt offered Eggers the publishing rights to all of the music from his first four albums for $20. Eggers angrily rejected the offer. Van Zandt was such a needle addict that he not only shot up heroin, but also cocaine, and even alcoholic drinks like vodka, and rum and Coke.

Eventually, his addiction issues were responsible for his death -- it's not really clear to me whether he died of alcohol withdrawal or the effects of alcohol in conjunction with over-the-counter sleep medication, but this much was clear: at the relatively young age of 52, Van Zandt was gone.

I mention all these sordid details of his life because they played such a role in much of his music. Once, he was asked in an interview, "How come most of your songs are sad songs?" He replied, "I don't think they're all that sad. I have a few that aren't sad, they're like... hopeless."

"Waitin' Around to Die" is one such song. It's a faux- (or perhaps semi-) autobiographical tune that tracks the miserable life of an outlaw, who left home after being left to live alone with an abusive father who "beat [his mother] with a belt once 'cause she cried", met a girl at a bar who "cleaned him out and hid it on the sly", became an alcoholic, pulled a robbery with a friend, which landed him in prison for "two long years". The last verse begins with a glimmer of hope -- Now I'm out of prison/I got me a friend at last/He don't drink or steal or cheat or lie, only to quickly dash that hope with a formal introduction to his new friend - His name's Codeine/He's the nicest thing I've seen/Together we're gonna wait around and die.

These words being sung in that kitchen left Uncle Seymour visibly in tears, nearly outright weeping. Let me just reiterate -- Uncle Seymour was an African-American blacksmith from the deep south who grew up during the Jim Crow years. I'd bet the farm that this man had an incredibly difficult life, and while described by his friends as a peaceful soul, must have been a very tough man in his own right. And yet he was driven to tears on film by Van Zandt's rendition of "Waitin' Around to Die".

If that's not a testament to the power of a great live performance, I'm not sure what is.

6. Nicole Atkins - The Way It Is

There will forever be a special place in my musical heart for Nicole Atkins. Discovering her music was one of the strangest and most serendipitous experiences of my life.

It was October 2007. I was at a musical crossroads in my life, as my band had recently imploded and I was searching for something new -- not just a new project, but a new sound entirely. Something about what I had been doing artistically over the previous few years just wasn't sitting well with me. I was in a fairly ever-present state of malaise and irritability, frustrated beyond words at the string of bad luck that I had just experienced.

Then one morning, my then-girlfriend and I were sitting around my squalid apartment in Passaic, NJ, hungover from the night before, when an American Express commercial came on the television featuring Nicole Atkins and her band. The commercial, decidedly corny and badly scripted, for some reason triggered my wrath (clearly a testament to the hair-trigger upon which my temper had been set at the time). "Who the hell is Nicole Atkins?" I demanded to no one in particular. "I've never even so much as heard of this person, yet she is apparently well-known enough to be featured in a credit card commercial, staying in posh hotels? I'll bet this isn't even a real artist. She has the looks of an actress anyway. How cynical has marketing gotten that we're now being sold fake musicians to idolize?"

I happened to be sitting at my computer as this (now comically ill-advised and ironic) rant came roaring from my lips. So I decided to fact check the American Express commercial. (Yes, this was the level of my intensity at that moment. I wasn't just going to let it go. I was going to fact check a credit card commercial.)

I googled "Nicole Atkins", and the first result was a Myspace page (yes, this was 2007). I clicked on the link, now already feeling a little silly that much of my caveman rant had already been proven wrong. There was, in fact, a singer named Nicole Atkins. "But is she any good?" I rhetorically spewed in the general direction of my girlfriend, who was no longer listening, and had gotten out of bed to make herself some breakfast.

I would love to have access to a scan of my brain as the next few moments unfolded. I clicked the first of four tracks on Atkins' Myspace music player. It was really impressive -- solid from start to finish. Then I clicked track number two -- it was astonishing. Now the third -- "Ok, I'll bet this is where it's all going to start to fall apart". But it didn't. The level of quality remained at top notch. By the time I clicked on the fourth track, "Party's Over", which was the song used in the American Express commercial, I had already called my girlfriend back into the room, and excitedly declared, "Not only is there a real Nicole Atkins, but everything I've heard so far is fucking awesome! She's also playing Maxwell's in Hoboken this Thursday. Do you want to go?"

So we set out to Maxwell's only a few nights later (Thursday, October 11, 2007, to be exact) to check out this "actress" from the American Express commercial. As excited as I was, I was still skeptical. Would the rest of her set be anywhere near as interesting as the four featured songs on her Myspace page?

I would, again, love to see a scan of my brain over the course of the ensuing hour, as I was pummeled by song after gorgeous, powerful song. Just after a rendition of "Love Surreal" -- a show-stopping live number that is as dancy as disco, but hits as hard as metal, my mind was made up. This was something special. This was something almost once-in-a-lifetime special.

She then announced that her major label debut album, Neptune City, was set to be released at the end of the month.

This was the first (and only) time I ever felt like I had just seen a legend perform just prior to their mainstream success. I felt like I had been on the ground floor of something so beautiful, the experience was utterly ineffable.

On October 30th, the same day her album was released, Atkins played the Late Show with David Letterman, and brought that very same magic to the masses. (I vividly recall my girlfriend and I worrying aloud about Atkins falling in her high heels as she kicked her feet and occasionally shuffled wildly to the music. "Oh my god, don't trip! Don't fall!" I remember my girlfriend repeatedly saying, occasionally burying her head squeamishly in her hands.)

Letterman himself was visibly impressed, just barely audibly joking with Atkins, "Wanna go get a steak?" while holding her hand for a comically uncomfortable period of time after her performance.

Within the next few days, I bought the album and was yet again blown away. It wasn't just good. It was perfect. From start to finish, it was a perfect record. The soulful crooning, the moodiness, the subtle but unquestionably effective psychedelic layering, the lush strings, and of course most importantly, the songs themselves. Nothing felt contrived. The uptempo numbers felt just as natural as the slow, eerie dirges.

It all affected me so profoundly, I realized that this album was precisely the inspiration I was so desperately searching for. It was a vital element that led me toward the sound that I finally felt suited me as an artist. Without having seen that credit card commercial, without attending that show at Maxwell's, and without hearing that Neptune City record, I can say with certitude that I would be a very different artist today.

What started as a moment of judgment and nastiness and bitterness wound up, in hindsight, being one of the most important moments of my life. Inspiration has a funny way of sneaking up on you.

Over the course of the next year, my girlfriend and I had gone to see Nicole Atkins somewhere near a dozen times. And each time, we were just as blown away as the last.

Unfortunately, after we broke up in 2009, I could no longer bring myself to see Atkins play. Too many ghosts of a shattered long-term relationship haunted the very thought of seeing Atkins live again.

But that breakup was ten years ago, and both my ex and I have been moved on for years now, so I do believe that at this point I'm only doing myself a great disservice by continuing to deprive myself of seeing this brilliant entertainer. A Nicole Atkins show in my future seems long overdue.

5. Alain Johannes - Let It Gnaw

Continuing with our Criminally Overlooked Artist section of this blog post, Alain Johannes is a living legend who doesn't nearly get the kudos he deserves. I'm so afraid of happening to Johannes what has happened to far too many music legends -- he will become a name readily available on the tongues of every single musician in the world, but only after he is gone. (I'm thinking of people like Elliott Smith and Pantera's Dimebag Darrell right now -- two very disparate figures who were exceptionally well-known in their respective circles during their lifetimes, but who became legends that we all know only after they passed away.) This is why I try to do my best to bring awareness to Johannes's music whenever I can, whether it's a passing reference to an acquaintance, or a blog entry such as this.

Don't misunderstand me -- Johannes, much like Elliott Smith and Dimebag Darrell, is quite well-known in his circle. And he has musical bona fides for miles -- as a teenager, he fronted a band that featured Hillel Slovek, Jack Irons, and Flea, who would all go on to form The Red Hot Chili Peppers; throughout the 90s, he and his late wife Natasha Shneider played together in the moderately successful "alternative-yet-genre-defying" band Eleven; in 1999 he and Shneider would greatly contribute in terms of writing, arranging, tracking instrumentation, production, engineering and even mixing to Chris Cornell's first solo effort, Euphoria Morning; in 2002, he began co-writing, recording, and performing with Queens of the Stone Age, as well as the Queens of the Stone Age side effort, The Desert Sessions; and in 2014, he once again joined Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, this time alongside Dave Grohl and former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, for the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. He has been the subject of an utterly mesmerizing documentary called Plans Make Gods Laugh, in which he summarizes the story of his life over hypnotizing footage of him meandering through a desert.

In other words, we're not exactly talking about some kind of totally obscure figure here. However, it still bugs me that most people outside of the Queens/Cornell/90s "alternative"/Them Crooked Vultures circles don't readily know the man's name when I bring him up.

In 2014, Johannes released his second solo effort, Fragments and Wholes Vol. 1. Among my favorites from the album is a song called "Let It Gnaw". It's just such a weird tune. Much like the rest of Johannes's output, it's not quite like anything you've ever heard. It has the down-tuned rawness of a stoner/doom metal band like Electric Wizard, with the fine calibration of a veteran songwriter, and some off-the-wall chaotic guitar chops that are, at times, reminiscent of King Crimson's Robert Fripp at his prime.

In 2015, Johannes released a live video of his band rehearsing the song in the studio, and it's such a phenomenal performance, I actually enjoy it more than the album version (which is, needless to say, absolutely no insult to the album version).

It's just so tight and heavy where it needs to be, loose and chaotic where it needs to be, and never loses sight of what it's trying to accomplish. It is, in a word: perfect.

4. Elliott Smith - Waltz #2

I'm tempted to curate this next entry with the following: If this performance doesn't touch you, then it may just be that you possess neither a heart nor a soul. (And in fact, that may actually be true.)

Perhaps because it was performed in such an intimate setting (what appears to be either a small office or hotel room), Smith's 1998 rendition of his "Waltz #2" on a Swedish television program felt almost impossibly personal -- as though he were singing for you and you alone, in your very own living room.

By 1998, Smith had already been through the mill with drug abuse and depression, and the inevitable outward signs had just begun to show. The stains on his shirt and his greasy mop of hair seemed especially unkempt, even for an artist who had reached his career apex in the "grunge" era.

Much like with Billie Holiday's television rendition of "Strange Fruit", Smith's pain was written all over his face as he quavered through this heart-wrenching performance of "Waltz #2". It was clear that his songs weren't just performed, they were lived.

The song itself is something of an ode to the unrequited love he felt for his own mother -- (I'm never gonna know you now/But I'm gonna love you anyhow). By the time he reaches the lines "XO, mom/It's ok, it's all right, nothing's wrong", the performance hits its apogee of heartbreak.

There are some musicians who are performers in the traditional sense of the word -- people like David Lee Roth, who would karate kick his way around a stage while his band, Van Halen, was busily pummeling the universe into submission. But then there are others, like Elliott Smith, who could almost be aptly described as anti-performers. They present themselves, not rock star avatars of themselves. They are not there to put on a show, per se. They simply invite you to see themselves, as they are. Not merely as performers, but as human beings.

(The video to which I've linked also offers a bit of an interview with Smith, who shares his philosophy and intuitions about the label "singer-songwriter". His commentary offers yet another glimpse into the man himself.)

3. Pantera - Domination

And then there are artists who not only want to pummel concertgoers with their performances, but want to utterly disfigure audiences with the sheer mack truck-intensity and aggression of their showmanship and musicality.

Pantera was one such band, and they are literally my favorite band of all-time (aside from the Beatles, which I usually find just too obvious and unremarkable a fact to even mention).

For those unaware of the background of what they're seeing in this video, it would seem apparent that what we're witnessing is a hugely popular band playing to thousands upon thousands of their long-time adoring fans. However, this would be an enormous mistake.

This was 1991, in the Soviet Union only months before its collapse, and it was a part of the Monsters of Rock tour -- this particular show featuring Metallica and AC/DC. Pantera had only one album out at the time, released the year prior, and while they were certainly coming up in the ranks in the world of metal, they were by no means an established band. According vocalist Phil Anselmo, at the time of the Moscow show, "Nobody knew who the fuck we were."

To add to the intense pressure an unknown band might be inclined to feel at a hugely important gig in a foreign country, opening for the likes of two already-legendary bands, this was also quite literally the single most heavily attended concert in history at the time. When Pantera hit the stage at around 2:00 PM, approximately 700,000 people were in attendance. (By the time Metallica went on, an estimated 1.6 million people were in the audience.)

For most, it's an almost unimaginably anxiety-inducing prospect: you're a newcomer sharing a stage with veterans in front of one of the largest audiences in the history of mankind.

Yet for Pantera, it seemed like just another day at the office. There didn't even appear to be the slightest hint of nerves coming from the band's general direction -- only pure focus, flawless performance, energy for days, and a brash attitude that silently screamed "you will all know who we are by the end of this set".

They not only won over the audience, they absolutely leveled this unsuspecting Soviet crowd.

In the same way I would entreat anyone with a heart to give an open-minded viewing of Elliott Smith's "Waltz #2", I would implore anyone with even the slightest hint of reckless youthful abandon, or even a simple appreciation for technical musicality, to feel the energy of Pantera's "Domination" at the Moscow Monsters of Rock show.

2. Alice In Chains - Junkhead

Alice in Chains is another of my top three favorite bands of all-time. (If there's any lingering confusion as to whether or not I tend to have somewhat eclectic tastes, it should be properly laid to rest by now.)

In 1992, the band was featured semi-prominently in the Generation X cultural watershed moment that was the Cameron Crowe film Singles. So naturally, the band was invited to perform at the Singles Release Party at the Park Plaza Hotel Ballroom in Los Angeles, which was broadcast on MTV only a few weeks before Alice in Chains would release their seminal record, Dirt.

There's a surprising dearth of high-quality footage in existence of Alice In Chains performing live with Layne Staley, and much of what has survived depicts a band that, while always impressive (at a minimum), seemed to be rapidly falling to pieces. (In my view, they were falling to pieces in a still somewhat inspired and artistically interesting way. But starting around 1993, there was the unmistakable shape of a black cloud looming over their heads.) Staley's already thin frame seemed to be turning to dust before the very eyes of the entire world. (Just take a quick look at the gaunt figure he cuts in the Mad Season footage above in this blog post. Shockingly, that was only three years after this performance at the Singles Release show.)

Yet on this night, September 10th, 1992, Alice in Chains were in rare form: on the one hand, their second number, "Junkhead," proved lyrically portentous in that drugs had clearly become the center of the bulls-eye of Staley's obsession. However, the drug abuse and road-weariness had not yet taken their toll on the singer's chops. He looked good. Healthy. And sounded like a man possessed. Positively unearthly.

The raw screams that drove the song's choruses were perfectly offset by the beat poet swagger with which Staley delivered the song's verses.

This is live footage of a vocal legend at the very top of his game. It's a shame how rare it is to find, as there really was no singer in history quite like him.

1. Jeff Buckley - What Will You Say

I have to admit, I'm a little embarrassed by how late I arrived to the Jeff Buckley party. I always had a respect for the man as a musician, and certainly as a singer, but I never had enough context to more fully understand him. It was not until my mid-30s that I finally searched for such context.

There are things about Buckley that shocked me -- things that would likely be trivially obvious to any big Buckley fan. He had only released one full-length studio album, Grace, in his lifetime; he had a very serious penchant for Sufi music, especially Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose "Yeh jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai" Buckley faithfully covered on a whim for his legendary Live at Sin-e performance (the track is on the full-length Legacy Edition of the record); his late father was the 1960s folk phenom Tim Buckley, who had abandoned his son so thoroughly that the pair met only once, and an 8-year-old Jeff was not even invited to his father's funeral. But perhaps most interesting of all was Buckley himself. The man. I remember devouring hours upon hours of Jeff Buckley interviews in one afternoon, and in each of them I was quite impressed with the insight and wisdom beyond his years that this young man seemed to possess. This was no dopey, idiot rock star. This was a thoughtful, intelligent, and deep soul.

Unlike Buckley's mega-fans (of which there are a great many), I can't say that I'm in love with every one of the man's compositions. But after having lived long enough to watch enough artists grow, I feel right down to my bones that Buckley (who tragically died at age 30) was just getting started -- as a songwriter, a guitarist, a singer, and as a human being.

There are a great many legendary singers (and many of them are on this list). But I don't know of a single vocalist who has had the fluidity of Jeff Buckley.

I have often called him the Jimi Hendrix of vocalists. Hendrix was one of those guitar players who was just so fluid and adaptable, it often felt as though he could just make whatever music he desired simply appear out of thin air. If Jimi wanted to play a blues lick and take it directly into a dissonant psychedelic freak-out moment, it would all fly effortlessly from the tips of his fingers.

Buckley was much the same way with his voice. One gets the sense from watching Buckley that he was simply capable of making happen whatever vocal sound his heart desired at any single moment. (And I really don't think I'm being very hyperbolic when I say that.)

He was endlessly experimental, never singing the same song the same way twice. His voice and approach just embodied a freedom that any musician worth his salt would aspire to.

The particular performance that I believe is not only Buckley at his best, but live performance itself at its best, is the 1995 Glastonbury Festival rendition of a song he co-wrote with Fishbone co-founder Christopher Dowd, called "What Will You Say".

The lyrics feel almost voyeuristically personal (It's funny now/I just don't feel like I'm a man...Mother dear, the world's gone cold/No one cares about love anymore...Father do you hear me?/Do you know me?/Do you even care?...My heart can't take this anymore/What will you say/When you see my face?). This is a man who is letting it all out, leaving blood on the field, and every moment of it is utterly rapturous.

The song itself is constructed to continue building dynamically throughout. At about the halfway mark of my first listen, I recall thinking, "Ok, they aren't going to keep building this." At about the three-quarter mark, "Ok, they literally can't keep building this. There's nowhere else to go." And finally, the last minute or so of the song utterly proved me wrong by escalating to a level that is truly incomprehensible.

This performance affects me in a way that nothing I've ever experienced quite has. It is truly as good as live music gets.