A Night To Remember based on the 1955 Walter Lord book of the same title.

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Vow Wow’s management had decided to film their show from the 1989 UK tour at London’s Astoria in Charing Cross Road. The thing with shooting live videos is that although everything is planned, stage-mapped, camera angles worked out and the sound is line-checked, things can and do go wrong and have to be tweaked at a later date. This is also true of live albums as well. Most of the great classic live albums have had to be patched up in one way or another due to technical failure or performance error and you may be interested to learn that:

 

1965 Live At Shea Stadium – The Beatles

Due to the amount of screaming from the 65,000 fans, the audio tapes for the film of this concert were unusable and so five months after the gig, producer George Martin started to heavily doctor the tracks. Paul McCartney overdubbed new bass parts onto four songs and John Lennon recorded a new organ track for I’m Down. The Beatles also made entirely new recordings for I Feel Fine and Help!, and also recorded overdubs for Ticket To Ride. The EMI studio of recording Act Naturally was used to save time. George Martin  wanted to re-record Twist And Shout but there was no time so the recording of the 30 August 1965 Hollywood Bowl concert was added, enhancing the sound of the original.

 

1970 Absolutely Live – The Doors

The recordings are live but the performances are taken from an unknown number of shows recorded over ten months between July 1969 and May 1970. Many of the songs are edits of two, three or even four shows put together by the engineer Paul Rothchild who was trying to create the perfect Doors performance. Sadly, many of the master tapes are now lost so we may never know how many cuts there are but the odd bootleg does give us a clue.

 

1970 Get Yer Ya-Yas Out – The Rolling Stones

Mick Jagger overdubbed at least half of the vocals for this album and Keith Richards added some backing vocals.

 

1974 Journey To The Centre Of The Earth – Rick Wakeman

There is an excellent piece of engineering by Paul Tregurtha who copied the English Chamber Choir’s chorus (Crocodile’s teeth, lizard’s head, etc) and overdubbed it later in the recording to cover an error and there is also a small overdub by narrator David Hemmings. This writer was also at one Rick Wakeman show when he told the audience that Ashley Holt had to overdub most of his vocals although the reason given why was not mentioned.

 

1975 Alive!  - Kiss

Producer and engineer Eddie Kramer stated in an interview with Home Recording magazine that ‘there was a lot of sloppy playing and missed vocals during the live show and that they were not very tight musically’ He goes on to say that the entire Alive! album was overdubbed except for the drums. It should be noted that Gene Simmons’ autobiography simply states “We did touch up vocal parts and fix some of the guitar solos, but we didn't have the time or money to completely rework the recordings.”

 

1976 Made In Europe – Deep Purple

An audience tape loop was used in the studio to enhance the atmosphere of the concert. It can clearly be heard as the same whistles by their fans can be heard twice and although all of the tracks are taken from a gig in Saarbrucken in Germany, two parts in You Fool No One - one of Ritchie Blackmore’s solos and Ian Paice's drum solo - were used from different shows on the same tour.

 

1979 Unleashed In The East – Judas Priest

This album has been known in later years as Unleashed in the Studio due to many (if not all) of the vocals being re-recorded by Rob Halford when the band returned to England from the Japanese shows. The official explanation is that Halford had influenza and laryngitis at the time of performance but other sources say that it was just a poor recording. Nobody has ever denied or confirmed whether anything else was dubbed or not.

 

1977 Alive II – Kiss

Both Hard Luck Woman and Tomorrow And Tonight were completely re-recorded in the studio and an audience effect tape was added afterwards. The intro was also overdubbed by Gene Simmons and several bootlegs of the shows cited in the credits indicate that other songs were also edited and dubbed.

 

These are just a few examples and many more have never been questioned. Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive has such a fake audience reaction you wonder what on earth they were thinking when they mixed it. Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokan was ‘fixed’ according to one of the production team and having met several of the audience members in later years, I can categorically state that the screaming on the record was not present at the actual performance. Queen, as excellent as they were live, overdubbed parts of Live Killers as well as splicing it together from several concerts while editing out Fredie’s expletives. It’s quite a masterpiece of tape dexterity. The fact is, musicians being musicians are very loath to let an imperfect performance be sold in the shops and almost all official live recordings of your favourite artists are changed in one way or another and always will be. For balance though, I should point out that Deep Purple’s Made In Japan (1972) and Uriah Heep Live (1973) are both untouched and that the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East has just one edit, where the engineer Tom Dowd spliced together two versions of In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed. Similarly, UFO’s classic Strangers In The Night is 100% live but the songs are taken from six different shows.