Live albums are an important part of what rock bands, particularly heavy metal bands, did in the 1970s and 80s. And whether you personally saw the band live on that tour or not, the album’s music, cliched stage banter and photo montage made you feel like you were there.

At least that’s what 13-year-old me thought as I bought the double-LP “World Wide Live,” an album that both documented the Scorpions’ arena-filling “Love at First Sting” 1984 tour and (I realize now) gave the band a break from recording an album of new material after playing 166 shows that spanned the globe.

So as the summer concert season kicks off at venues big and small across the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, let’s take a look back at live rock records in general and a Scorpions album that captured the band at their creative and commercial peak.

Hello San Diego! Good to see all of you tonight!!! We’d like to perform a song from our new album, “Love at First Sting,” called “Bad Boys Running Wild!”

The Scorpions date to the 1960s, formed in Hanover, West Germany, by guitarist Rudolf Schenker. Vocalist Meine has appeared on all the Scorpions’ albums since 1972, and he and Schenker are the band’s primary songwriters. At times during the 1970s the group included Michael Schenker, Rudy’s younger brother, on lead guitar (he eventually joined UFO).

During their peak years from the late 1970s through the 1980s, the group also featured lead guitarist Matthias Jabs, bass player Francis Buchholz and drummer Herman Rarebell.

The band eventually sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, many of those copies of their early 1980s breakthroughs “Animal Magnetism,” “Blackout” and especially “Love at First Sting.” The latter record contained the anthem “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and one of the decade’s best power ballads, “Still Loving You.”

Personally, my favorite Scorps tune is “No One Like You,” which includes such a kick-ass guitar solo from Jabs that group put it at the beginning of the song. All these songs are included on “World Wide Live,” along with some choice earlier album cuts like “Loving You Sunday Morning,” “The Zoo” and “Can’t Get Enough.”

The band continued to enjoy success in the latter half of the 1980s, participating in the mega-popular (among metalheads) U.S. Monsters of Rock tour in 1988 and scoring a hit single that same year with “Rhythm of Love” off their top-5 “Savage Amusement” album.

Their biggest hit came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in their homeland-inspired “Wind of Change.” The 1990 ballad whistled its way to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the U.S. and sold an insane 14 million copies worldwide. But apparently a song featuring a whistling solo offended the heavy metal gods, because that was the last gasp of popularity from the Scorpions.

Fortunately, “World Wide Live” is out there to remind us how the band sounded in its prime.

Rock bands cashing in on their popularity by releasing a live album was nothing new by the mid-1980s. In fact, several 1970s rockers — Peter Frampton, Kiss and Cheap Trick to name three — vaulted to superstardom thanks to hugely popular live records.

We’ve mentioned Cheap Trick’s “Live at Budokan” in this column previously, and don’t worry, we’ll get to Kiss and “Alive” soon enough (they played in Yakima early in their career). But “Frampton Comes Alive” proved that a live album by a lesser-known rock musician could sell millions of copies by recording stretched-out live versions of his earlier songs, capturing a cool concert atmosphere on vinyl, and using a sonic gizmo or two (such as the “talk box” Frampton employs on “Do You Feel Like We Do.”).

Released in early 1976, “Frampton Comes Alive” spent 10 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 album chart, was the year’s top selling album in the U.S. and to date has sold more than 8 million copies here.

It made Frampton such a superstar that he was able to claim the fourth spot (along with the Bee Gees’ Gibb brothers) in the 1978 film “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” OK, maybe that butchering of the Beatles’ career and music wasn’t such a great thing in retrospect … but it shows how popular Frampton, a previous member of Humble Pie, became as a 1970s solo artist, and it was largely due to his live album.

 

It didn’t take long for other bands (or more accurately, their accountants and business managers) to take notice, and soon just about every hard-rock band with an album or two of original material was cranking out a live record.

How “live” these albums were is a matter of debate among fans — often, a whole lot of studio patch-ups were recorded and mixed in — but they certainly became popular.

“World Wide Live” by the Scorpions follows the formula to the letter: Live performances of both newer hits and “classic” tracks; not one but two photo montages from the 1984 Love at First Sting tour (one record sleeve featuring performance photos, the other one “behind the scenes” pics of band members, tour personnel and groupies on the road). And solos … oh yes, there are instrumental solos.

As a historic document of a band’s songs, it may seem silly or stupid decades later to waste the precious vinyl space of a live album on extended guitar, bass and especially drum solos. I mean, no offense to the Scorps’ Rarebell, but he’s not exactly Neil Peart behind the drum kit.