Question about the live albums
 

Does anyone know if there were fixes, overdubs, etc. made to the recordings of the FM live albums in the studio before they were released?
If so, has anyone got further information?


I was listening to the live performance of Stand Back from The Chain box set and somehow it doesn't sound very live to me, especially the vocals. When you watch the Tango In The Night DVD it seems even more staged, with all those close-ups of Stevie, which I can't believe were really filmed at the concert itself...

It's quite a well known fact that, at Stevie's insistence, most (if not all) of her TINT live vocals were over-dubbed, and her close-up's all reshot and edited in later. This is something that started with her Red Rocks live video as she was such a mess on stage due to being coked up that her close-up's HAD to be reshot. I'm not sure what made her reshoot her close ups for TINT. Probably because most of her facial expressions during this time looked like she was thinking "I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE!".

Prior to this, I think the live recordings (live footage for the Tusk and Mirage videos, the Live (1980) album and Stevie's HBO special) had very little studio touch ups. It was only in the mid-late 80's that over-dubbing and reshooting became popular

I'm pretty sure The Dance was *heavily* sweetened in the studio.

Because "The Dance" was filmed at Warner Studios, I don't think it would've taken that much tweeking. Something like "Live In Boston" or the TINT video would've had more touch ups as they were just filmed at a standard concert venue, not one that is specifically set up for filming.

The 1982 Mirage Tour special was edited slightly, though not overdubbed, just very lazily edited. Sisters of the Moon was spliced together from two seperate shows. You can see Lindsey's shirt strangely opens mid song. Also Eyes of the World was edited so that the 1st chorus and the 2nd chorus are actually one and the same.

The Dance needed a lot doing to it. If you look at articles around that time, Lindsey spent quite a lot of time in the studio on it. There was a fair bit of augmentation and re-recording of instruments and vocals. When Live in Boston came out, I remember him remarking that it would be far more raw than The Dance, which was intentionally very polished.

and Stevie's hair keeps changing in Blue Letter....:nod: LOL

This is no surprise. the Dance was also touted on the radio as a forthcoming album of "re-recorded classics" before it actually happened....and we got a live album, so I think recording the live show and polishing everything in the studio was the intent all along.

In a word....YES.

It's pretty much an industry standard that "Live" albums are "sweetened" in post-production.

Dave Mason's Certified Live was one of the first ones that "outted" the practice back in the late '70s. That was opening a can o' worms...pretty much every live album that had been released in the prior few years (and there were a whole lot of them at the time...that's the "era of the double live album") was then looked at (& listened to) with jaded eyes/ears...everything from Frampton Comes Alive onward was questioned as to its "authenticity" of "live-ness".

Thanks for all your replies!!!!

I'd be really interested to see / hear the original recordings of Stevie at the TITN show... I guess I will now listen to some bootlegs of that tour to hear if her voice was really that bad during this period :D

Concerning The Dance, I'd never suspected they cleaned it up in the studio that much as some of you say. To me it doesn't sound very polished... but then again neither does Stevie's HBO concert - but I found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SgJgVqI0ZY

I'm totally ok with editing live stuff, for example splicing two versions together to get the best performance. But I think I'm a bit sensitive to additional overdubs and rerecorded vocals. That's not live anymore at all.
It's probably because I'm also an Elvis Presley fan and all his live recordings that feature additional overdubs sound rather strange to me. His live albums were overdubbed as early as 1969, btw. So I guess it was common to do it even then. With so many EP collectors' releases available it's an easy thing to compare the originally recorded versions with their overdubbed counterparts, btw.
It would be great if we were able to do that for The Dance!

From everything I've heard, her voice wasn't too bad. Certainly better than her Rock A Little tour vocals. But she sounded quite flat a lot of the time. Mind you, I guess she was feeling pretty flat due to the klonopin.

Really? The first time I heard The Dance, it sounded so fake. I remember saying to my brother "This sounds so wimpy.... this band didn't use to sound like this, and I have bootlegs to prove it". Then later when I was at the Hartford show (the first Dance show), they sounded so different than the Dance CD, so much more raw and edgey; it was so obvious after going to more shows just how "unlive" (dead?) that "The Dance" sounds.

yup they tinkered with The Dance for months after recording it. the guy who was producing it with Lindsey described that when they were presenting Lindsey with Les Paul or whatever was one of the other awards he was given about a year ago.

compare that to the most recent Lindsey's One Man Show release that was put out within a month or so of the actual show, while LB was still on the same tour.

Thanks for posting this link! To me Edge of 17 had some of the most obvious tweaks/overdubs of that whole concert, so it was fun to hear what the original sounded like.

Man, this is so sad! But well, you can see it: Stevie is moving all the time, so her voice could change with some moves.

Sometimes I really don't know why they make those changes. I know sometimes the artists ask for it, but sometimes, with its "original" sound, a live version can be good too!
About The Dance, well, I listened to some radio broadcast (that included other songs that wer not released on the CD), but I couldn't hear any vocal change.