This is the kind of thing I want out of a live album. I am glad to have been given two similar albums previously which can be compared to this. Because they both struggled to accomplish what the prison albums from Johnny Cash achieved. Tom Waits' simulated live diner experience was just that. A faux live performance where Waits spent too much time doing shtick without enough actual music. Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall album was almost the opposite. Sticking to just the music and minimizing or in some instances censoring the live audience for a live album. When you present this without these parts of the experience, while also being a bootleg album with much poorer sound quality than the studio versions of these songs it feels almost redundant. Today's album on the other hand skips most of these shortcomings at least. Compared to his album from Folsom this is definitely more of a fun, showman style. They emphasize his banter and jokes a lot more and seem to have recorded the live audience a lot better. And you can tell this was a riot for them. The way they pop off in celebration whenever Johnny makes a gag at the expense of the prison or at the system itself. With some bits in there about the recidivism and the prisons failure to reform those it contained. While I like a lot of the more somber songs he uses in the second half of his Folsom album. I can see why they pretty much ditched that for most of this. As not only did this selection of tracks create a more lively atmosphere but this album was also being recorded for a UK broadcast, with them trying to dictate what he should play. He would later in the set famously flip off the crew for this and for getting in the way of the crowd. That being said. I wish the standard version of this album had more to it. It's about 15 minutes shorter than Live at Folsom, contains a lot more banter and one of the songs is a reprise of what was performed just before it. I'm not sure who made this decision but it almost makes the fun feel like it's over before it even begins. I still think the songs chosen and the energy of the live crowd carry this. But I reckon Live at Folsom has a better balance of performance and crowd interaction while also having a bigger and better variety of songs. Highlights A Boy Named Sue, I Walk the Line, San Quentin (Both Performances), Peace in the Valley.