The Eagles have become the Partridge Family

[T Boog]

 Last year, Fil from Wings of Pegasus completely exposed the Eagles as musical mimes. By using crowd captured cell phone recordings, he proved they were using the same pre-recorded lead & backing vocals and at least some instrumentation(like piano) night after night and year after year. At least on the two songs he tested...  Desperado & I Can't Tell You Why.

Then, clearly in response to them being exposed, the Eagles rerecorded or perhaps just retuned the vocals so they would have new tracks to mime to.

And here's the icing on the cake...   

The Eagles now force all their concert goers to put their phones & smart watches in magnetically sealed "Yondr pouches" that are locked when they enter the venue and unlocked when they leave.

The Eagles claim they're now doing this for the good of the audience... to create a more intimate experience. (Bullsh*t! 😄)

Don Henley was already a ***** in my book. This definitely don't help his case.

Anyway, I'm curious what u guys think. Have we reached the point where it doesn't matter anymore to most people?  Do most concert goers just give into the delusion rather than question if it's live or Memorex?  And should people just have sympathy that the remaining Eagles are too old to do cardio & sit-ups to maintain their voices and then pay lots of money to go see them mime their "performances"?

Me personally, you couldn't pay me to go to an Eagles concert. Don't get me wrong, they were once an amazing band... FULL of talent. However, I think it's way past time for the Eagles to fly into the sunset.

Anyway, here are some of Fil's videos exposing the Partridges... Sory, I meant the Eagles 😁

 

 

 

Edited October 7 by T Boog

[Chaps]

I've seen the videos. The evidence he offers as proof is undeniable. Science!

[OutrageProductions]

I saw the Eagles perform (unannounced & clandestine)  in a little bar in Lyons, Colorado in the fall of 1975.  I just stopped in for a few minutes on a road trip. They were singing for themselves then, although it may have been one of the last times doing so...

[Jeremy Oakes]

My two Euro cents worth. How can you take someone who mimes, and who prances shirtless in the rain  out of a tube station in London seriously ?

He’s like a stuck record and takes great pleasure in assassinating groups/singers using poor quality audio and videos from telephones. If he used the original recordings i think he’d have more credibility, but he doesn’t. He uses stem splitters which produce tracks riddled with artifacts.

YMMV

 

[T Boog]

42 minutes ago, Jeremy Oakes said:

My two Euro cents worth. How can you take someone who mimes, and who prances shirtless in the rain  out of a tube station in London seriously ?

He’s like a stuck record and takes great pleasure in assassinating groups/singers using poor quality audio and videos from telephones. If he used the original recordings i think he’d have more credibility, but he doesn’t. He uses stem splitters which produce tracks riddled with artifacts.

YMMV

 

Cheers Jeremy. I personally don't find he takes great pleasure in it. Viewers request videos for him to analyze and he does. He actually seems like a nice person to me who's just being honest.  Also, the lack of audio quality is not an issue because if you watch the videos above, the pitch graphs from the phones are very detailed and they match each other pretty much perfectly in pitch and they match down to the hundreds of a second in timing throughout the entire song. That simply would not happen if it were different performances. Cheap phone or not, it wouldn't even be close.  Now as far as him prancing shirtless in the rain.... I have no good excuse for that 😄

[Jeremy Oakes]

2 hours ago, T Boog said:

Cheers Jeremy. I personally don't find he takes great pleasure in it. Viewers request videos for him to analyze and he does. He actually seems like a nice person to me who's just being honest.  Also, the lack of audio quality is not an issue because if you watch the videos above, the pitch graphs from the phones are very detailed and they match each other pretty much perfectly in pitch and they match down to the hundreds of a second in timing throughout the entire song. That simply would not happen if it were different performances. Cheap phone or not, it wouldn't even be close.  Now as far as him prancing shirtless in the rain.... I have no good excuse for that 😄

We’ll have to agree to disagree ref the sub par quality and his methods. I’ve asked him several times what set up he was using to pontificate his crap. He never bothered replying.

J

[Notes_Norton]

It's been going on for a looooooooong time.

I remember a concert when the tape broke, and the Alice Cooper band continued to pantomime while marching, and “hang” Alice with nothing but the parade drum the drummer was marching with. I think that was in the 1970s. The bass guitar, guitars, and drum trap set got quiet, and I don't know if Vince was supposed to be singing or not. I didn't care, I came to see Dr. John.

I friend of mine who owned a music store got a keyboard from a Madonna tour. You could hear Madonna's voice sampled on the keys, so the keyboard player could play her vocals while she gyrated to the delight of the adolescent boys in the audience. 1980s. 

I knew a guy who worked at Criteria Studios in Miami. They had a GM motor home that was a recording/playback studio. One big cable from the motor home to the stage and a camera that fed back was all he needed to “play” the concert.

I was a band on a cruise ship where Cyndi Lauper and MTV came to hold a concert. We were filmed for MTV, but at sea, we never got to see us on TV. Anyway, Cyndi's show was pre-recorded. And I know for a fact, she is a very capable singer. But what happens if something unexpected happens on “Live” TV? Plus they did the same show a few times in a row, with different camera angles, and some pointed at the fans. To splice the shows together, they had to be in sync.

In defense of the artists. Often it is not their choice, but with the big money riding on the performance, the “suits” don't want to risk anything, like voice trouble. There are way too many profits to lose if the singer gets laryngitis. So they make the artists mime the concert. So they are forced to mime the show.

I suspect (but don't know) this is what happens in The Dome in Las Vegas. After all, the music has to sync with the videos.

 

[mettelus]

1 hour ago, Notes_Norton said:

It's been going on for a looooooooong time.

+1, so many concerts are based more on visual, so if there is much exertion involved at all (especially with vocals), it will affect performance. Go jog a mile and sing a song while doing so... see how long the performance sounds good.

Examples of this abound. The funniest one I ever saw was Justin Bieber yacking his guts out on the stage while the song kept going with his voice in tact. It only seems to get attention when someone makes an issue or a technical glitch happens (the technical glitches make them obvious), but many don't seem to care.

[Byron Dickens]

2 hours ago, mettelus said:

Go jog a mile and sing a song while doing so... see how long the performance sounds good.

Two words: Bruce Dickinson.

[hockeyjx]

30 minutes ago, Byron Dickens said:

Two words: Bruce Dickinson.

UP THE IRONS!

[craigb]

I'll ignore the 600 pound gorilla in the room and go with this epic failure!

[T Boog]

1 hour ago, craigb said:

I'll ignore the 600 pound gorilla in the room and go with this epic failure!

Ashlee was just ahead of her time. She'd fit right in with today's music scene 😁

[Notes_Norton]

I'd rather the band get up there and play live, warts and all, without amazing theatrics. But then, I'm a musician, and I'm not looking at the show for the dazzling theatrics. 

Back when I was opening for major stars, it was the beginning of the rock concert phenomena, and we just got up there and played. The headliners got up and followed us, and they just played, too.

But like almost everything else commercial, a good way to sell more is to in some way out-do the status quo. I guess it's human nature.

[craigb]

13 hours ago, T Boog said:

Ashlee was just ahead of her time. She'd fit right in with today's music scene 😁

My comment was in reference to Milli Vanilli by the way!

[kitekrazy1]

Most TV performances were not actual performances.

[Notes_Norton]

23 hours ago, craigb said:

My comment was in reference to Milli Vanilli by the way!

They weren't the first ones, nor the last to do that. 

I wonder why they got exposed? Did they pi$$ off the wrong person? Did they not pay off someone they owed? For whatever reason, they got taken down.

 

Edited Friday at 08:38 PM by Notes_Norton

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

They weren't the first ones, nor the last to do that. 

I wonder why they got exposed? Did they pi$$ off the wrong person? Did they not pay off someone they owed? For whatever reason, they got taken down.

Their producer/creator had a history of putting together similar acts  (Boney M.) where he cut the records and then hired other people to perform "live." It was in Europe, no secrets about it, nobody cared, they sold millions of records. I suspect that in Europe there were fewer expectations/illusions about "authenticity" of pop music.

I think what may have caused (or greatly contributed to) the trouble is that Milli Vanilli (that is, the "artist") won a Grammy. This embarrassed NARAS. Therefore they had to be made examples of.

If the album or one of the singles had won the Grammy rather than the act itself (Best New Artist), things might have been different. They would have been acknowledging the work, not celebrating the arrival of a new talent and anticipating future achievements.

It's one thing for a restaurant's dish to get an award, it's another thing for their chef to get an award for something they neither designed nor prepared. Although to quote The Beatles, I'm certain that it happens all the time.

[Notes_Norton]

12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I think what may have caused (or greatly contributed to) the trouble is that Milli Vanilli (that is, the "artist") won a Grammy. This embarrassed NARAS. Therefore they had to be made examples of.

Thanks for the explanation, it makes sense.

[JnTuneTech]

In my experiences over the years, I went from disdain over miming & such in things like The Partridge Family (etc.), and in fact on many televised performances from the 60s and onward, and then seeing issues like the Milli Vanilli "scandal", that just happened to expose how even some accepted industry metrics could go awry along with the acts themselves, -to eventually realizing just how big of an influence the media and technology have over the circumstances in those performances. I can even appreciate the technical & business aspects of a lot of it now. But in general, I still get put off when the balance of originality & genuine live performance goes too far off. That's where I find many sensational critics like the one mentioned at the top of this post seem to get it wrong, for me anyway.

As others have pointed out here, playing a highly integrated multi-media performance takes an entirely different approach than just setting up a few amps, mics, and a PA, and just playing. And again, this has been going on from before most of us were born. But if you are a basic fan, or even a musician who never has had to do anything of that nature, just taking it literally can make it seem wrong, and as I say, I totally get that. -One of the reasons I enjoy playing covers over the years, has always been my desire to see the recorded songs I love get played to a live audience as closely arranged and mixed as possible to (what I might consider/interpret) as the original material. I found out early on how hard that can actually be, just even technically, from an audio standpoint.

There is still a possibility for balance with "mimed" and copied material, just as there is in DJ mixes, Rap, and so forth. The part that unbalances it for me, is when very little of the end performance was even created by the artist on stage (or screen, what have you). That again brings up the Milli Vanilli comparison as an example. Not so much the Partridge Family, but maybe that is just a humorous reference to get started.

 

P.S. Around the time of my enjoying one of the original Pink Floyd "The Wall" concerts in LA, was when I began to understand the core of what I describe above a lot better, and it still informs me to this day. From where I was seated, I could see both the stage show, and the massive sound pit/control center, and I realized that if all those elements hadn't been present along with the original performers doing what they did live, as a fan of the original material, I just wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much. And it was a balance - between using technology to both synchronize the many live performances and media elements, as well as bring in elements of the original recordings that could be created live, that was their vision.   - It was still their performances, and their media, under their direction.

I think that the Eagles performances being criticized are under (slightly) similar circumstances. And in fact, I would have to say, that if you go to one of those types of performances expecting a basic rock band with some amps & mics and a PA, doing an intimate live show, that would be your own error. I bet the musicians themselves can still do things, at their age, etc., that I've never managed to achieve, and that they are doing their best to present a show purposely coordinated and balanced as best as possible. Even many of the principals who did the TV show mentioned in the post title here could play and sing live but of course didn't because it wasn't that kind of a TV show.   It's all in the context, there needs to be a balance of view as well I guess.

Not of course, that there aren't plenty of failures to achieve the balance that I'm talking about in the music business, especially these days it seems. And now we are entering a huge challenge with use of AI versus human imagination. I hope it goes well, but I do have to wonder.  -Jn-

[mettelus]

3 hours ago, JnTuneTech said:

And now we are entering a huge challenge with use of AI versus human imagination.

This is probably coming swifter than most expect. With advances in holography and AI generated "artists"/CGI, it won't be long before those become more prevalent. As with the Milli Vanilli example, the day will come when there may be no artists involved at all for an act, and everything in a performance and behind the scenes can be created with AI (just the business machine running the show). Those artists will never age and their voices will never change, and they can even "perform" at multiple venues at once (almost like a movie release). People will get tired of seeing the same artist ad infinitum, but behind the scenes it will be a simple change to make somebody new. If you have not already read about "Tilly Norwood" (AI generated actor), this is already causing an uproar and it has not even been used in films yet, but the concept is not very far beyond the same technology that brought "Thanos" to life, just no actor is needed at all. Even the Sphere is doing a 3D rendition of the Wizard of Oz now where AI is interpolating motion in the original picture to expand the action outside of the original frame view into a 3D format.

Positive flip side though... a woman in front of me the other day was buying "The Game of Life" so I said, "Wow, I have not seen one of those in years." The version I have tucked away is from 1960 so she joked it is pretty much the same, just the jobs have changed. Then she mentioned she likes to do real interaction with her son, so I told her to stay that course... social media is no substitute for human interaction and it saddens me to see people fixated on their phones to avoid human interaction. People will literally pull out their phone to avoid saying hello to someone, and we wonder why social skills are lacking.