The Most Unfortunate Thing About The Original Prog Era Are Television Directors

[Splicer]

That the experimentation with music came at the same time that TV directors were fooled into thinking they were geniuses. So instead of seeing a band play, I get snippets of a band playing interspersed with manic camera gyrations and psychedelic color bombs going off. Bonus mention of the Belgian Genesis video where rather than seeing them, I get to see montages of them flashed before my eyes.

Bonus mention to all TV directors of the Rock era who thought the bass player was the guy doing the drum solo.

[Bytor]

That the experimentation with music came at the same time that TV directors were fooled into thinking they were geniuses. So instead of seeing a band play, I get snippets of a band playing interspersed with manic camera gyrations and psychedelic color bombs going off. Bonus mention of the Belgian Genesis video where rather than seeing them, I get to see montages of them flashed before my eyes.

Bonus mention to all TV directors of the Rock era who thought the bass player was the guy doing the drum solo.

If you think the Genesis is bad, wait till you'll see what they did to ELP's Picture At An Exhibition

[Splicer]

If you think the Genesis is bad, wait till you'll see what they did to ELP's Picture At An Exhibition

Yes. I've endured that.

[Jacob]

I definitely agree with this and I have difficulties when I'm subjected to it. One particular example is ELP Pictures At An Exhibition where somebody went the whole hog with lights flashing or drip drop colors over the screen while the band played.

In the late 60s Jefferson Airplane , Blue Cheer and others featured a Psychedelic light show on stage. The concept seemed to differ from what I see on the Pictures At An Exhibition film. In the late 60s the Psychedelic bands seemed to capture the audience by having a trippy light show to accommodate their music. Nick Mason was impressed by the light shows for Psychedelic bands in the U.S....yet there is something dreadfully wrong on the ELP Pictures of an Exhibition film and I don't know what that is...

[chalkpie]

Modern day concert DVDs usually change camera angle every eighth note or so, so most of it is unwatchable for me. There are exceptions of course.

[Sturgeon's Lawyer]

[QUOTE=Jacob;1236304In the late 60s Jefferson Airplane , Blue Cheer and others featured a Psychedelic light show on stage. The concept seemed to differ from what I see on the Pictures At An Exhibition film. In the late 60s the Psychedelic bands seemed to capture the audience by having a trippy light show to accommodate their music.[/QUOTE]

...not to mention Nektar...

[Jacob]

...not to mention Nektar...

Saw them at the War Memorial in Trenton NJ..early 2000s Outstanding performance!!

[Czyszy]

In post-communist Poland that trend remained until the mid 90's

[Unfrankie Valli]

Obvious mention for the weird directorial decisions and obtrusive visual effects in the video of Yes's 1996 San Luis Obispo show. Some undeniably great playing, but you can't ever fully immerse yourself in it.

EDIT - Doesn't really qualify as the original prog era, except for the music.

[Poisoned Youth]

Maybe the directors didn’t factor in someone would be watching 50 years later to complain about their trendy decisions.

[flowerking]

It wasn't just television directors, movie directors too. In Yessongs while Howe is playing Clap, they spend more time showing his leg and foot stomping up and down than they do his hands on his guitar, and there's all the weird amoeba stuff interspersed during Close to the Edge. Not as bad as the war footage during Suppers Ready but still pretty bad.

[Man In The Mountain]

The objective in those days was to present a visual show that differed from a typical live show. Even in The Song Remains The Same, the band is shown in fantasy sequences while they played live. I don't think, even today, that film editors think that the main objective in capturing a band live is to make sure everyone sees what notes they are playing. They are trying garnish moods and excitement. In the 60's & 70's it was even film experimentation that was sought after while presenting a band. It was all art. And certainly trends in how they achieve that have shifted over the years. I think live broadcasts tend to be better, have longer shots before an edit or switching of cameras, than hatchet jobs with a gazillion cuts complied for DVDs.

[JKL2000]

I think many of the deficiencies can be chalked up to the amount of usable footage they had to work with (and that still sometimes seems to be the case). And of course, the fewer cameras there are, the more likely something's going to happen like Squire scratches his nuts during Howe's solo, so they have to cut the shot short but have nothing to go to but some effect, or the only available shot is out of focus, etc. But certainly a lot are also because of directors getting creative.

[arturs]

Modern day concert DVDs usually change camera angle every eighth note or so, so most of it is unwatchable for me. There are exceptions of course.

For me, most modern mainstream DVDs are totally unwatchable for this reason. When I see boasts about "16 camera shoot" or sometimes even 32, I know to stay away. I own a McCartney one from the early 2000s where there is an edit literally on every beat (quarter note) throughout many of the songs. Oy vey...

I don't understand how the result of such production values can be anything but a headache-inducing mess. And it's not necessarily even an artistic objection, it is purely visceral. My eyes hate it, my brain hates processing it, I just need it to stop after about 5 minutes.

Fortunately many prog DVDs don't fall into this trap. Either they understand the problem or they just don't have the money for all those cameras or for all that editing.

[Progbear]

It wasn't just television directors, movie directors too. In Yessongs while Howe is playing Clap, they spend more time showing his leg and foot stomping up and down than they do his hands on his guitar, and there's all the weird amoeba stuff interspersed during Close to the Edge. Not as bad as the war footage during Suppers Ready but still pretty bad.

Obligatory reminder that this monstrosity exists:

[Trane]

One has to see those 70's rock filming as period-pieces, and criticising that 60 years down the line is a bit unfair (IMHO).

If you're a 20-sumthin' nowadays, one could understand the critics, as they have no idea of the time-frame and its realities, but in PE, the average age is more like 60-sumthin'; which means that most of us should rmember the context of the era.

That the experimentation with music came at the same time that TV directors were fooled into thinking they were geniuses. So instead of seeing a band play, I get snippets of a band playing interspersed with manic camera gyrations and psychedelic color bombs going off. Bonus mention of the Belgian Genesis video where rather than seeing them, I get to see montages of them flashed before my eyes.

Mmmmmhhh!!!... I know you're not just "attacking" early 70's Belgian TV shows, but the context was European, which meant that there were no commercial TVs (or radios) back then and often just one channel per country (OK, France & Germany each had three channels) - all state-owned. This would last +/- another decade until liberalisation of broadcasting.

In Belgium, it was also further divided between French & Dutch language TVs & radios. (Maybe Mr Krautman will also chime in)
In that given context, there was a still fairly-closed and very conservative decision-taking direction in both camps. And the film crews designated (maybe a few volunteers in the crew) were not experts in rock music and probably knew next-to-zero about the music they were about to film - and they had little budget to do them. FTM, it's kind of a miracle that there was a crew (not always the same names in the credits) that was affected to those "rock shoots" on both sides at all in the 70's, but the treatment was fairly different: Yes & Floyd were shot by the Flemish TV, which included a lot of fooling/goofing around in Brussels' streets or parks, while the French side concentrated on studio filming of the music of Genesis, VdGG, ELP, Pentangle, Sabbath, Atomic Rooster, etc... Roughly, the treatment was visually more "inventive" than what was done for the jazz shoots (see Placebo's feature, for ex), because the audience was viewed as more conservative and not likely to be pleased by those visual effects.

The Belgian RTB (not yet F, at the time) was my first employer when I came back to Brussels in the very early 90's, and believe me, the place was still filled with old-style stuck-up and ultra-rigid civil servants (they would've gone unnoticed in Pentagon or NATO HQ - if judging by their appearance) that were nearing pension time, but all of them in decision-making posts - if only by seniority factor, rather than competence. But by the 90's, commercial TV & Radios now existed for almost a decade, which meant that these state-owned chains were losing major audience shares. In my six-months tenure (actually 2 x 3 months contracts in transmission/archives dept), I searched their archives for the films, and most of them were nowhere to be found - which doesn't mean they were trashed either, but that also showed that the "rock-culture" heritage was not taken seriously even 20 years down the line.

If you think the Genesis is bad, wait till you'll see what they did to ELP's Picture At An Exhibition

Actually, when those were shot, I was 7 to 9 y.o. and back then in Canada; but for some odd reasons, most of them films, I witnessed a few years later (77/79??) when, TV Ontario broadcasted most of them, including one about Tull, which I don't remember ever seeing since - not sure that particular one was a Belgian production, though.

Maybe the directors didn’t factor in someone would be watching 50 years later to complain about their trendy decisions.

Yup, back then, it was probably viewed as state-of-the-art film editing. The French ORTF also developped some trickery via filters & such other effects (see the French TV session for Crimson's Red feature).

The objective in those days was to present a visual show that differed from a typical live show. Even in The Song Remains The Same, the band is shown in fantasy sequences while they played live. I don't think, even today, that film editors think that the main objective in capturing a band live is to make sure everyone sees what notes they are playing. They are trying garnish moods and excitement. In the 60's & 70's it was even film experimentation that was sought after while presenting a band. It was all art. And certainly trends in how they achieve that have shifted over the years. I think live broadcasts tend to be better, have longer shots before an edit or switching of cameras, than hatchet jobs with a gazillion cuts complied for DVDs.

TBH, I still prefer TSRTS film than Zep's DVD, in no small part due to these "fantasies" parts, even if viewing the film in "rock friday midnight" seance in local Toronto movie houses when a teenager. TSRTS builds the Zep myth, while DVD actually unbuilds it. (IMHO, of course). So yeah, technically DVD is a better (more faithful) source of Zep info than TSRTS, but maybe nostalgia plays a role.


.

[Zeuhlmate]

Generalization:
In the old days the photographer never knew who was singing or played the solo, you got to watch the pianoplayer while Holdsworth went ballistic somewhere else, then the photographers got 'artistic' and focused on weird details that had nothing to do with the music, then they focused 90% of the time on the guitarists fingers, and today they clip or shift angels every 4 seconds.

[gallen1964]

My only addition is the sort of fetish of overly close up on hands with head body cut off . I remember the footage of Weather Report circa 76 at a festival with early Jaco , but few camera angles that weren’t just really close up on his hands . There seemed to be trend of that in the 70s

[interbellum]

For me, most modern mainstream DVDs are totally unwatchable for this reason. When I see boasts about "16 camera shoot" or sometimes even 32, I know to stay away. I own a McCartney one from the early 2000s where there is an edit literally on every beat (quarter note) throughout many of the songs. Oy vey...

I don't understand how the result of such production values can be anything but a headache-inducing mess. And it's not necessarily even an artistic objection, it is purely visceral. My eyes hate it, my brain hates processing it, I just need it to stop after about 5 minutes.

Fortunately many prog DVDs don't fall into this trap. Either they understand the problem or they just don't have the money for all those cameras or for all that editing.

Amen, although the last Porcupine Tree (at least from the scenes I saw) have the some "problem".

[Guitarplyrjvb]

The part of Yessongs where they have a microscopic view of a drop of pond water instead of the band playing during Close to the Edge always drove me crazy.

[JJ88]

Some of those late 60s Pink Floyd TV appearances are very badly shot. I remember seeing a TV compilation of stuff which was released on those Early Years sets. 'Flaming' (a rarity, with Gilmour singing it) was basically one camera angle, on the stage!

Directorial pretensions are definitely worse. The absolute worst is undoubtedly Pictures At An Exhibition mentioned above (or Rock And Roll Your Eyes). I only saw the Pictures... part for years. Sadly, when I saw the rest, it was completely ruined by the effects. It's in some of Pictures... too, of course, but not quite to the same extent. And there's that 'directors cut' of Pink Floyd at Pompeii with all that computer graphics junk added to it.

I can live with The Song Remains The Same. The silliness is oddly appealing and at least it involves the band, not inserted silent movie footage or effects or whatever.

I own a McCartney one from the early 2000s where there is an edit literally on every beat (quarter note) throughout many of the songs. Oy vey...

The Space Within US maybe. That tour had an amazing set-list and at least the performances are largely complete, but I know what you mean. There are all these useless interviews with famous faces and Joe Public fans, which irritates me even more.