![]() It might be difficult to imagine now, when YouTube clips shot on shaky iPhones and free-flowing concert MP3s online have degraded the handsomely packaged and carefully curated live album to the point of near-irrelevancy, but this sort of release was practically a requirement for artists back in Diamond’s day. As you’d expect, Neil does not scrimp on the pomp and circumstance on this record: There’s a soupy pre-concert orchestral “prologue” that lasts three minutes and feels 30 times longer there’s a track (on the new reissue) devoted solely to musician introductions that stretches past the seven-minute mark and Neil’s sweaty, impassioned delivery packs enough ham and cheese to turn each overly familiar oldies radio chestnut into a flavorful Hot Pocket of AM gold. With the benefit of a little more hindsight, Lester Bangs might’ve described Diamond’s unabashed public clanger-whanging as a metaphor for the era of extravagant ’70s live albums that Hot August Night helped to epitomize. As Hot August Night became a thrift store and rummage sale staple to rival the collected works of Herb Alpert and Mitch Miller, Neil Diamond has been sexually assaulting innocent, budget-minded bystanders through their eyeballs for the better part of four decades. You still with me? Or has the mental image of Neil Diamond’s oversize member sent you scurrying in the opposite direction? For all the millions that Hot August Night has sold - and that number will surely go up, given the new 40th-anniversary edition that packs an extra eight tracks onto an already beefy 21-song frame - most people have likely encountered the album via its cover and understandably declined to venture any further. To the south are Neil’s large hands, which appear to be simulating, um, something in the vicinity of his, ahem, midsection region.Īt this point I’ll just quote directly from Lester Bangs’s review of Hot August Night from the March 15, 1973, issue of Rolling Stone: “He’s pantomiming whanging his clanger, and from the look on his face I’d say he’s about to shoot off, and the only bogus part is that he’d like everybody out there to think it’s 13 inches long.” A little further north, Neil’s brown locks are puffed out and tinted a reddish-orange from nearby stage lights he looks like a lion with his head down, rearing to take down the slowest zebra in a passing pack. Neil is pictured in a girdle-tight blue denim suit that is ornamented with multicolored beads precariously framing a plush wilderness of chest hair. ![]() Before discussing the particulars of Neil Diamond’s landmark 1972 double-live opus Hot August Night - the music, the impact on the trajectory of Diamond’s career, the album’s place in the pantheon of live records, the album’s place in the pantheon of Neil Diamond live records - we must address the cover.
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