Perhaps few here know, you go to Broadway, little of what you hear is live.

Shows have become commodotized, few people could honestly afford the ticket prices if everything were done completely live any more. Backers but millions into new Broadway production and high overhead from dozens of musicians in a pit orchestra would deter most of them.

Technology has allowed us to go in and do a job that used to take 4-6 people. That same technology is used on TV to replace dozens. It doesn’t seem right for us to moan about it! Maybe it’s telling that there aren’t any professional dancers on this forum! You certainly won’t be hearing from THEM how ‘artificial’ the halftime show has become…

Not until the dancing robots get better, anyway!

Years ago, I had the privilege of attending a concert by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The leader of the band was one of the original members, the trumpet player, and all the others were local musicians who were highly accomplished. Everything was live, people were dancing in the isles, and tickets were $50 each, and the event was sold out in a matter of days for a 600 seat theater. The individual band members, locally hired, were each paid $75 for the performance and paid $25 for each of the one hour practice sessions. It was absolutely incredible and each song they performed made chills run through me. To this day, I still love hearing big band music, and probably always will.

Several years ago, while watching the Super Bowl, I quickly came to the realization that everything was prerecorded and canned. That was one of the reasons I stopped watching half-time shows.

All the best,

Gary

To be honest, I don’t really give a rats whether the Super Bowl halftime show is live or not. I am not EXPECTING it to be live. Maybe bits of it are, maybe none of it. I don’t care. If it’s entertaining, it’s entertaining.

However, to try and steer this thread back to where it started, it’s the expectation of live music that makes using tracks at the high end of the concert scale that’s primarily dishonest. The Super Bowl makes no pretense to being a live show. And the current couple of generations is well aware that it’s not live. Only us boomers may not yet have grasped that..!

But anyone that goes to see a rock concert, heavy metal, big band, whatever and expects a full live performance and end up listening to significantly part of it off tracks, I think they’ve got every right to feel cheated.

Our problem, we expect EVERYTHING to be live (like it was in the 50’s/60’s) and don’t want to face how canned it all is. Mind you, we happily play our little wonder backing machines but still fail to make the connection…. It’s a different world from the one we grew up in! 🎹