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Originally Posted by jmn3
I was way too young to understand any of this at the time, but clearly something happened during the 80's because a lot of bands made this pivot at the time. I'm a pretty big Stones fan and the concert approach from 1981/82 as compared to their 1989-90 tours are indescribably different. They added a mini-band behind them and approached their catalog with the intent to mimic as best as possible, the sound of the album recording. Stones fans lament the change to the "Vegas-era" of the Stones in 1989 as compared to their live approach from 1969-82.
My take has been that the bands were older, the audience was older, there were less drugs and the ticket prices were much much higher. Middle-aged (and now senior citizen) baby boomers had, and were willing to shell out, larger dollars to see their heroes and relive a piece of their youth for one night...but were going to be a lot more critical of bands playing loose with the live performances. I don't know if I'm right at all, but just a theory I have had on it.
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I think all of that came into play—the “philosophy” of live music changed in the industry. In the sixties and seventies, bands just drank a bottle of tequila and wailed. Whatever came out of the amp is what the show was. It was loose enough (and the musicians were still young enough) that inspired bits had plenty of room to surface. You attack your instrument (and your set list) very differently when you’re 28 and again when you’re 48 or 58. Rock concerts were bigger business and ticket prices were higher, so all the business people want you to be immaculate. If you had said to a psychedelic sixties band like Vanilla Fudge or to any number of hard-rocking seventies bands, “Be immaculate,” you would have been laughed out of the room. But it became the rule in the eighties.
Another thing that pushed things in a new direction—I think—is the transformation of the technology of live music. In a nutshell, you went from electric and electronic in the seventies: analog synths, tube technology, vocoders, wah pedals, two-channel stereo for keyboards (like Christine’s own late-seventies board, the Yamaha CP30), manual samplers like the Mellotron (which used Cr02 tape), and all the fun stuff musicians screwed around with in the studio and onstage (usually they played shows with the same instruments they were using in studios). In the early eighties, what changed? The digital revolution and an initial turn away from vintage sound. It’s funny but digital technology down the line was actually used to
replicate vintage sound. This revolution in the size and sound of microprocessors really influenced what all these bands sounded like in concert. The technology in recording has always been great because it eliminated leakage without having to put everyone in separate rooms. But in a live setting, you look for a kinetic strength that the vintage approach was so great at capturing.
And let’s face it: drugs, too.