We never needed the word “analog” until digital came along. In the technologically antediluvian universe of pre-zeroes-and-ones, analog, like God, simply was, with no reason to have to somehow quantify it. Similarly, when Thomas Edison came along with his new-fangled recording machine, we then had to adapt our understanding of the word “live.” Before you could record it, music, of course, was always performed live. Edison’s invention led us to the irony of the “live” album, which had its heyday in the 1970s, as well as endless variations meant to fool not our frontal lobes but rather our limbic cores with phrases like “recorded before a live studio audience!” Is it live or is it Memorex? After a while, we seemed to stop really giving a damn.
Then Milli Vanilli came around. When their 1990 Grammy Award for “Best New Artist” was yanked when it was discovered that they didn’t actually perform the vocals on the record that got them nominated, it created a virulent scandal about the authenticity of how music is created and performed. Too bad they couldn’t have hung on for a few more years — by mid-decade, Auto-Tune was becoming ubiquitous, and the idea of performing in concert to, and with, synched prerecorded tracks was commonplace in some genres.
Making It Perfect
But as live music has become a much bigger piece of the revenue pie for the media business, making it as flawless in live performance as it can be made in the studio has become a guiding principle for entertainment media. As televised award shows have become more important as a sales booster and music search platform at a time of diminished sales, we’ve seen a more pronounced shift to prerecorded backing tracks that often encompass everything but the lead vocals, to avoid mistakes on stage. And when a ticket to a big Vegas music show starts heading into four-digit territory, even the lead vocals have a prerecorded doubling track for “support.” (Yeah, that show.)
There’s a need to make it perfect, because so much is riding on a live event — something that can take things to some odd extremes. One prime example took place during the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. When a pyrotechnical snowflake failed to fire and morph into the fifth of the iconic five linked Olympic rings, Russia’s Channel One television network switched over to rehearsal footage so Russian viewers wouldn’t see the flub.
This all becomes relevant again after this year’s Super Bowl halftime performance. Flea, bassist for Red Hot Chili Peppers, the support act for headliner Bruno Mars, wrote a confessional apology on the band’s website. After establishing that the band had rejected most previous demands to perform to tracks, and had made a purposeful mockery of the few times they felt compelled to do it, Flea said the band, as football fans themselves, believed it would be a “…once in a lifetime crazy thing to do, and we would just have fun and do it.” And then, apparently, he experienced enough regret about it to write a remorseful post-event rationalization.
We’ve Been Here Before
Flea’s moral anguish is nothing new. For years, when performing live, artists found ways to pad the bill, so to speak. There was Kiss and other guitar bands of the 1970s and 1980s with their synthesizer players hidden offstage during concerts, living in constant fear that a Wizard of Oz-like windblown curtain flap could destroy their cred among 16-year-old headbangers. Another incident involved Terry Lawless flailing away unseen underneath U2’s stage (outed, ironically, by keyboardist Billy Joel). After decades during which the magic of the recording studio became virtually every band’s “fifth Beatle,” there remained a stubborn reluctance to concede, at least publicly, that artists sometimes needed tricks to reproduce for an hour on stage what they accomplished over the course of a year in the studio.
More recently, Flea’s mea culpa is also a sign of the times. The NFL — the world’s most lucrative non-profit organization (the individual teams are for-profit; the league, no) — was producing a show that would be seen worldwide. After some infamous faux pas by Janet Jackson and M.I.A. during previous halftime extravaganzas, this multi-billion-dollar entity has become utterly risk averse, especially as it’s sending feeds to other multi-billion-dollar entities like Comcast and Time Warner, which were on the brink of forming an even bigger multi-billion-dollar entity. The very thing that makes a live performance as vital as it is — the potential for the unforeseen, whether for good or the bad — has been almost completely eliminated. And as the powers that be have officially removed most of the spontaneity from such mega-events, it’s becoming the new normal.
At the same time, there is a palpable yearning on the part of people who love music to get back to some earlier, more basic connection to it. That’s visible in the reprise of vinyl and even recordings made directly to disc, as though Alan Lomax was back from the dead and venturing deep into Williamsburg, Brooklyn in search of authenticity. How long before that same pining for a more innocent time infects the live-music scene?
Now and Then
Until it does, though, it seems the idea of using tracks live has become embedded and widely accepted. Some of that is ascribable to simple logistics — if an artist has to divert to do a quick television one-shot in the middle of a tour, it makes sense to use tracks and not fly an entire band and backline in — and some of it to genre: backing tracks have been deeply integrated into urban acts’ shows for a long time.
Also, these days, it’s simply technically easier than ever to synch tracks to a live performance. Brad Madix recalled in a conversation how, back in 1992, he was mixing FOH for
Queensryche when they used tracks live, synching a pair of video projectors to a Tascam 8-track deck. It was challenging and hair-raising, night after night. Now, synch is way easier to achieve, and stems are coming ready-made out of the studio with the finished recordings. And let’s face it, consumers have come to expect perfection in all of their media.
It’s now more about the money (Comcast, national TV networks, awards shows, etc.), fear (Janet Jackson’ breast, M.I.A.’s middle finger) and a change in the culture that’s made the inclusion of prerecorded tracks more akin to augmented reality than to hedging your bet. As one person I spoke to put it, “Every performance is in danger of becoming its own little television show.” Maybe that’s why we all really tune into the Super Bowl just to watch the commercials. At least those seem to be taking some chances.
