I’ve been thinking about this post ever since I saw this video. Basically, a recording engineer was hired to record the performance for the venue and was never paid and then he posted the isolated guitar and vocal tracks of Courtney Love’s performance that night in 2010. Now, to take the easy low road, you can make fun of the guitar playing. It’s bad. I get it. Here is the video:
But the interesting thing… I started to reflect about my own guitar playing. I don’t want to defend or justify the quality of play. I mean – she’s in Hole. They’re *pro*. It should be awesome, right?
What it did remind me of – those times when you’re on stage. You think you killed it. Performance was high energy. You felt like you were in the pocket, but after listening to a live recording of the performance, you start hearing the clams all over the place. Maybe I was *too* loose. I guess I wasn’t that awesome after all, you begin to think… wow.. I actually sucked.
I think playing live is about walking the tightrope of high energy performance while maintaining massive control of your instrument. Experience, and practicing (like you were playing a live show) is the key.
Regardless of her performance, the rest of the band pulled it through. The fans were into it. And when we talk about a band, it’s a group effort to get through the night and leaving the crowd stoked.
Let me know what you think about slop/energy when playing live. What do you do to tighten the screws while being energetic and loose? Let me know what you think!
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10 years ago
the guy who posted this is a mean bastard, but the only way to know if Love is a fraud or not, is to listen to what the audience heard, that is this > http://youtu.be/_HDMp8j7i1E – this is what she intended to be heard.
if you carefully listen to some radical rock classics with headphones – for example the Rolling Stones’ ‘her satanic majesties request’ or Magma’s ‘Mekanik Destruktiw kommandoh’ you might think that the guys who recorded that were crazy frankensteins on dope, or real genius who create music from chaos!
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10 years ago
Great post! This is a topic about which we (performers) rarely speak and your points are well taken. A live show – as much as bands/artists often aim to be tight or pro or whatever – is just that: an artistic moment in time. And ignoring all the details that that fact entails, I think it’s important to add that this post also brings up the fallacy of capturing a live performance through recording. To wit, I will now indulge in some long-windedness.
I remember when my feelings on this shifted from obsessive archivist to more of an in-the-moment approach. I had just played what we all felt was a truly magical show with The Paula Kelley Orchestra and I, as usual, had recorded it on a MiniDisc recorder (yep, really). But it turned out the disc was corrupted and unplayable. After my initial disappointment, I realized what a gift it was to be able to hang on to the feeling of having experienced what felt like a perfect night of music with seven or eight other musicians and a rapt audience.
Most performers aim for perfection of a sort, whether that be note-for-note accuracy, tone championship, or even the perfect channeling of sloppy, atonal, disported rage. And truly “perfect” performances are as rare as they are supremely rewarding. So, I now only listen to live recordings in the course of my job, making sure things work, checking out improvised ideas to see if they could become a regular part of the show, etc. Or else I’ll listen years after the fact, because it’s nice to have records of moments in time from what has become a long and varied musical life.
As for watching a show, I never want a shitty phone video to cheapen the great, sweaty physical experience I’d had. I can still gleefully call up memories of having seen AC/DC twenty-five years ago and I sure don’t need to hear an out-of-tune vocal track to illuminate to me the experience I WASN’T having.
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10 years ago
It’s a very fine line between art and noise. A song, either in the studio or live is a recipe. The parts on their own may be bitter or sweet. It’s the final out come that matters. I recently heard the isolated guitar track to the Beatles “Getting Better” and thought on their own it was somewhat sloppy, wrong notes, odd twangs, but in the final mix it was art, not noise.
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10 years ago
I happen to know someone that worked on this tour (non musical crew), andcan pretty credibly say that though there is definitely some truth to Love’s reckless nature as a clumsy human (see; every single chord she “plays”), she is a very calculated individual. I am willing to bet her guitar signal has not been sent to the main’s for years. The guitar is a essentially a prop, to provide hardcore fans with a sense of authenticity. But she surrounds herself with musicians that are there to play those parts.
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10 years ago
Interesting video. I wish the band looked more like punk rockers. They just looked like hired hands playing there parts. There are plenty of bands out in the trenches who have at least one player who is not cutting it. They are generally not included in the house mix. And there are plenty of bands out there that are unable to make good live recordings. Big deal. Courtney was into it and for a live show, that’s what counts.
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10 years ago
If you watch old videos of hole she tends to give up halfway through the song and not even bother pretending to play. Fairly sure Eric Erlandsen played most of the guitar parts on record anyway. Not that it diminishes Hole’s awesomeness and Courtney Love is a great front person, although after 18 years you’d have thought she’d at least try and play despite where she’s placed in the mix
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