Former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider is no stranger to live albums. He’s released several throughout his career, including Live at Hammersmith from his Twisted Sister days and Twisted Forever in the late ‘90s. That LP that found him running through a set of his old band's classics and deep cuts with his touring band.

For the Love of Metal Live, his newest release, offers an overview of his career, mixing solo material with hits and deeper tracks. The live album and DVD pulls together recordings from a number of different places.

“I wanted to show the vastness of the metal community,” Snider tells UCR. “I’m not talking about my community, I’m talking about the metal community. It exists all over the world. I wanted to show and make a subtle statement about how much more we’re alike than we are different.”

We asked Snider about some of his favorite live albums. He discusses four of them below.

Humble Pie: Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore

Just a month before the legendary New York area venue was set to close their doors, A&M Records made plans to record four Humble Pie concerts scheduled across two nights. They captured rock 'n' roll lightning in a bottle those nights. “Humble Pie [were] one of the progenitors of heavy metal,” Snider says. “Hearing ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor’ and ‘Hallelujah’ at volume, I think, is metal defining, really. Those screaming [Steve] Marriott vocals were amazing.”

Kiss: Alive!

The classic double live album brought the experience of seeing a Kiss show to the masses. Some work was done in the studio to sharpen the energy of one of the band's gigs, but there's no denying the onstage assault captured here. “Kiss Alive!, back in the days when you could only see a band when it came around once a year in concert, it really captured the excitement,” Snider noted. “Between the pictures on the cover and inside and the album itself, it was awesome.”

UFO: Strangers in the Night

“It’s the Michael Schenker era encapsulated in an amazing live record,” Snider says. Strangers in the Night offered a progress report, taking stock of the many miles the U.K. rockers had traveled together and the songs they recorded since the guitarist joined the band for 1974’s Phenomenon. For many metal and hard-rock fans, this live album was an introduction and the beginning of a lifelong love affair with UFO.

AC/DC: If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It

“This was really one of my first introductions to AC/DC,” Snider says. “Oddly, it was the live record leading me to the rest of the catalog.” He wasn't alone. When If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It was released in 1978, AC/DC had played hundreds of concerts and released five albums, but not one of them had gone platinum. All of their hard work was about to pay off with the arrival of 1979’s Highway to Hell, which helped seal AC/DC's legacy.

 

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