> Good point...keep in mind that MOA is not a complete concert. She did play > some of the other C&S songs on the tour, for whatever reasons > (unfamiliarity, etc) they were not included on the record. Also, Joni & the > LA Express had done lots of shows in '74 prior to the C&S release, so they > probably had an established setlist that they were comfortable with. This > was Joni's first time out with a band, and some of those C&S compositions > were pretty complex.
I used to think it was odd that there wasn't more than one C&S song on MoA. I also thought that maybe the complexities of the arrangements made them more difficult to perform live. C&S is fitted together like a Bach piece or like clockwork to my ears. It would be very difficult to reproduce that precision I suppose. But not impossible. As some of the live performances from that tour attest, Joni did perform other numbers from C&S and judging from some of the tape trees and the video from the BBC, they worked just fine in concert. I've come to the conclusion that either Joni or Asylum decided that it was pointless and maybe not wise from a marketing standpoint to put a lot of songs on a live album from a record that had just been released. As it is, MoA serves as a pretty good retrospective of her music up to C&S. If somebody had bought C&S as their first Joni album (as I did), fell completely in love with it (as I did) and then got MoA, wouldn't it follow that they would want to hear the earlier albums that those live versions came from (as I did)? Mark E in Seattle still waiting for Lama's *real* review of the Cowboy Junkies' concert
