The Live Experience

Keith Green's The Live Experience is perhaps one of the most effortless fables about a music legend's unreleased treasure trove. Story has it Melody Green, the late singer's wife, got a call from EMI's Christian music arm inquiring whether she had a few exclusives to share for a future retrospective celebrating her husband's career. Matter of factly, she said yes, but she didn't just have a few exclusives; she had a truckload of stuff — hundreds of hours' worth of audio and video culled from cassettes, reel tapes, and whatever the singer's estate got a hold of at the time — that was just waiting to be picked up. Ministry-minded as Melody Green is, she turned it all over to EMI and eventually ended up overseeing what would become The Live Experience, the first-ever collection of concert recordings from the iconic singer/songwriter. There was so much material to be poured over, EMI couldn't quite meet the deadline of compiling and releasing it in time for the 25th anniversary of Green's death, but that didn't matter much: what saw the light of day was simply unheard of — 16 of Green's biggest hits, collected from a cornucopia of concert performances, festivals, and television appearances spanning Green's entire short-lived trajectory. Thanks to masterization, the sound of The Live Experience is loud and clear, but its message remains as raw and unpopular as anything Green delivered in the prime of his youth: "We need to live like Jesus." This clarion call is made all the more urgent by Green's show itself, an unadorned spectacle consisting of just him and his piano. The almost living-room feel is the real revelation of The Live Experience: for the first time, the world is privy to what really went down at Green's revivalist gigs, for decades a mystery since all that was available were his four lone studio albums. These in-studio, highly polished piano-pop recordings fit the spirit of '70s and '80s CCM well, but Green's Jesus-centric lyricism didn't always jibe well with the music's clear Elton John and Billy Joel affectations. In contrast, The Live Experience shows Green in his element: sitting at the piano, bantering, and preaching the word, often all at once, to anyone with ears to hear, always careful not to let the music become the be all and end all, but merely a conduit for the greater calling that God had placed on his life.