During a recent conversation with SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk“, W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless clarified the complaints from some of the band’s fans about the use of backing tracks during the group’s live performances.
Blackie said:
“About 10, 12 years ago, we did ‘The Crimson Idol’ the first time in its entirety with orchestration. Now, prior to that, we had just done, I call it the ‘Live At Leeds’ version… Because if you look at what The Who did with the ‘Live At Leeds’, which we all thought was live at the time, and we now realize there are overdubs on those as well, like most live records. We would take the bare-bones approach to doing it. Well, we decided to take an approach where we tried to make it sound exactly like the record.
”And we had never used orchestration or anything like that. So we went in the studio, we took all the tracks off the record as far as the orchestration, we took the background vocal tracks, we took doubles on leads, we did everything. And we took it and we tried to make it sound as much like the record as we could.
”I stood in the middle of the room that first night in rehearsal, and I swear to you it was like an out-of-body experience. I had never heard anything sound like that before. I had never played with a live orchestra before. And so this was the closest thing you would get to doing something like that.
He went on:
“Listen, I understand both sides of the argument on it. For me personally, when I’m up there, I’m singing my a** off. But what’s wrong with having enhancement to make something sound exactly like the record? Because you’re not gonna get a band like Queen or any other band that does big productions like that… Four guys cannot go out there and reproduce that record. It’s impossible. It won’t happen. So do you want it to sound like the record or do you want it to be just a general live performance? And that’s a question of taste.
“If you’re gonna start making records where you have a lot of orchestration and things like that going, it is impossible to make it sound like that record unless you have that. And you can also make the argument, which has been going on Broadway for the last 20 years, the musicians’ union has been fighting this fiercely but technology rolls on and it’s not gonna stop, where they no longer have live music in Broadway productions. And the musicians’ union has had a fit over that. Well, even before that happened, when you had keyboards introduced that had entire orchestras in them, you’ve got one guy now replacing a hundred and twenty different people. So where do you draw the line?” […]
1 comment
Well said. Blackie is going through alot. People need to take a step back. He is currently giving 110%. To some that is not enough .