Recorded Live Mary Wells On Stage For those who have this, question to you...

[WaitingWatchingLookingForAChance]

At long last, I got this album. Does anyone else have this? A very interesting and somewhat curious listening experience. At the very outset there is some unintentional humor; the intro to "Two Lovers" strikes up and the audience goes berserk, but instead of Mary coming in, you get The Love Tones harmonizing an introduction [[the same intro you can see The Temptations performing in the clips of the Motortown Revue). Well, the audience seemed to have the same reaction I had- I was ready to hear Mary and so it was kind of a bumpy ride to get this "interruption" and it seems you can hear some in the audience being very vocal in wanting The Love Tones to get it over with! I swear, I heard a few females loudly saying "AWWWWW COME ON!" Maybe this was a very smart gimmick because when Mary did come in, that audience was squarely in the palm of Mary's hand.

Now, I've read how some of these live albums were assembled from various performances patched together but Mary's album makes it VERY obvious when you're hearing a performance from an entirely different venue. I can deal with that. What really threw me for a loop was on side 2 when the second song is very audibly the studio recording of "Old Love [[Let's Try It Again)"! I can't tell if they played the record in the venue over the sound system- because you can hear some paltry audience sounds- or if Motown just dubbed in the sounds from an audience. Either way, the "audience" seems just as baffled by why a record is being played on a supposedly "live" album.

If that ain't strange enough, the next song is, again, the studio recording of "Operator" with some audience sounds sorta going on over the top of it. And it's not like the audience was applauding or getting into these two records, it was like everyone was just stunned into confused silence with a few moments of murmuring. Whaaaa?

The album ends with a live performance of "You Beat Me To The Punch." In all, there are four songs on each side, so it's a fairly short album. So my question is, were the two records played during some sort of intermission during one of Mary's shows? There's no way Motown could have believed, even for a nanosecond, that anyone with a brainstem would have believed these were live recordings. And before anyone brings up the practice of singers being brought into the studio to dub some "clean up" vocals over live recordings, that's not even close to what's going on with this album. My guess is there just weren't enough live performances to fill an entire album, so Motown made do with the addition of these two album cuts.

It's actually a good album from the standpoint of showing that Mary could sound just as good, sometimes even better, in person than on records. But did anyone else who bought this album found the whole thing somewhat odd?