York, PA · alt-rock · post-grunge

Live

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Throwing Copper made them inescapable in 1994 and the songs never really left — Ed Kowalczyk's clenched, searching delivery over guitar figures built to fill a field, with 'Lightning Crashes' still the moment a crowd goes quiet.

Live formed in York, Pennsylvania, where guitarist Chad Taylor, bassist Patrick Dahlheimer, drummer Chad Gracey and singer Ed Kowalczyk had played together since school. The group cycled through names such as First Aid, Action Front, Paisley Blues and Club Fungus before settling on Public Affection in 1987; Kowalczyk joined in 1984 after the band lost a school talent show.

Regular shows at CBGB in New York helped the band land a deal with Radioactive Records in 1991, the year they renamed themselves Live. Their first records for the label, including Mental Jewelry, were produced by Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison, who also worked on the album that broke them nationally in the mid-1990s.

The band's sound pairs ringing, open-tuned guitar parts and a heavy rhythm section with Kowalczyk's declamatory vocals and lyrics that lean toward the spiritual and the searching, a combination that separated them from grunge peers even as they were grouped with them.

Throwing Copper, their 1994 album, sold eight million copies in the United States and produced a string of hit singles. 'Lightning Crashes' topped the Mainstream Rock chart for ten weeks and the Modern Rock chart for nine. Overall, Live has sold more than twenty million albums worldwide.

Later singles such as 'The Dolphin's Cry' kept them on rock radio into the end of the decade. Kowalczyk left the group in 2009; the remaining members carried on with singer Chris Shinn, releasing The Turn in 2014, before Kowalczyk rejoined in December 2016. The band issued the EP Local 717 in 2018 with its original line-up restored.

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alt-rockpost-grunge