Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Say Hello
2. Walk the Dog
3. Violin Solo
4. Closed Circuits
5. For a Large and Changing Room
6. Pictures of It
7. Language of the Future
8. Cartoon Song
9. Small Voice
10. Three Walking Songs
11. Healing Horn
12. New Jersey Turnpike
13. So Happy Birthday
14. English
15. Dance of Electricity
16. Three Songs for Paper, Film and Video

Disc 2:

1. Sax Solo, Pt. 1 (Continued)
2. Sax Duet, Pt. 1 (Continued)
3. Born, Never Asked (Part One Continued)
4. From the Air
5. Beginning the French
6. O Superman (For Massenet)
7. Talkshow
8. Frames for the Pictures
9. Democratic Way
10. Looking for You
11. Walking and Falling
12. Private Property
13. Neon Duet
14. Let X = X
15. Mailman's Nightmare
16. Difficult Listening Hour
17. Language Is a Virus
18. Reverb
19. If You Can't Talk About It, Point to It
20. Violin Walk
21. City Song
22. Finnish Farmers

Disc 3:

1. Big Science
2. Red Map
3. Hey Ah
4. Bagpipe Solo
5. Steven Weed
6. Time and a Half
7. Voices on Tape
8. Example #22
9. Strike
10. False Documents
11. New York Social Life
12. Curious Phenomenon
13. Yankee See
14. I Dreamed I Had to Take a Test...
15. Running Dogs
16. Four, Three, Two, One
17. Big Top
18. It Was up in the Mountains
19. Odd Objects
20. Dr. Miller
21. Big Science
22. Big Science Reprise

Disc 4:

1. Cello Solo
2. It Tango
3. Blue Lagoon
4. Hothead (La Langue d'Amour)
5. Stiff Neck
6. Telephone Song
7. Sweaters
8. We've Got Four Big Clocks (And They're All Ticking)
9. Song for Two Jims
10. Over the River
11. Mach 20
12. Rising Sun
13. Visitors
14. Stranger
15. Classified
16. Going Somewhere?
17. Fireworks
18. Dog Show
19. Lighting Out for the Territories

Product Details

• Released on: 1993-10-01
• Number of discs: 4
• Formats: Best of, Box set, Import, Live

From Amazon.com
For most musicians and groups, the live box set marks the culmination of a lengthy recording and concert career. Not so for Laurie Anderson, whose United States Live appeared in 1984, following her tenure in academic and bohemian circles and a small handful of releases on Warner Bros. and smaller labels. The release was an unusual event, though perhaps less so for a musician who seeks to upend musical traditions, most notably the distinctions between pop and classical, spoken and sung, live and Memorex. The lengthy set is a recording of a live performance composed of dozens of carefully defined experiments in form and technique, most of them fitting into one or two of these three categories: show pieces for items from her technological music arsenal (like her emblematic electric violin), witty narrative snippets (back when "spoken word" was called "performance art," prior to the rise of the poetry slam), and full-band performances, featuring, among others, Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem. "O Superman" and "Big Science" are the familiar titles that appear amid the nearly 80 tracks. "Just a slow accumulation of details," her computer-enhanced voice intones moments before the intro to "Blue Lagoon" (later heard in a studio version on Mister Heartbreak). That makes a nice epigram for the collection as a whole, which is essential to understanding art music of the '80s in general and the New York scene in particular. --Marc Weidenbaum

Customer Reviews

Overdue for digital remastering
I remember seeing this performance series being advertised in The Village Voice & wanting desparately to go...but at 17, I didn't quite have the wherewithall to get the $ together to go & have always regretted this. But it was soon enough after that I had a summer job & the LPs were available. The sound was rather thin & scratches noticeable, so I bought the CD box soon after that. I always see this box set around (new & used), so I'm surprised that people say they haven't been able to find it. I always had half-wished that it had gone out of print, if only so that it finally gets the digital remastering (from the original tapes) that it deserves. The one thing that has bugged me about the set is that there is occassional popping/crackling noises that makes it sound as if the cd's were mastered from a pristine LP. The sound on the LP's was always very quiet & you had to turn up the volume, which made any surface noise extremely unpleasant. The CD's are louder, but the tape hiss is more obvious. Some cd's are already on their 3rd remastering.....so it seems that an upgrade is long overdue, SACD would be nice too.

Buy it, relive it or live it for the first time...
I had the good fortune of attending this two day performance in Brooklyn. It felt then like we were participating in something special. Looking back it was as I can't think of anything else from the 80's that was in anyway cultural or arresting. Maybe the Clash's first night at bond's before the fire dept showed up? Anyway during intermission the second night my current wife then girlfriend accidently kicked Grace Jones in the ankle while she was sipping champagne. We thought she was going to kick both of our asses. Luckilly Phillip Glass was walking by at that moment and struck up a conversation w/ her and save us from such humiliation. Plus it was so hard to get a cab to take you from the city to brooklyn back then.

Nights I Swim in the Blue Lagoon
Yeah, it's worth [money] for her 13:00 minute version of "Blue Lagoon" from MISTER HEARTBREAK. Professor Anderson says it all very well, below. I never fully appreciated Laurie until I saw her live recently on tour. I mean, I knew she was smart and inventive, but she finally got to me. She's paying attention to it all; she sees beneath the surfaces.

I suspect you do, too.

And she's coyly feminine and beguiling.

This is a great live set.