The Portable Recording Studio: Documentary Filmmaking and Live Album Recording, 1967-1969
Keywords:
live music, performance, sound recording, documentary cinema, fidelityAbstract
While live performance and rock authenticity are topics widely investigated across popular music studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the particular media practices that constitute “liveness” in rock music have been treated without rigorous historical specificity. Utilizing the concept of “fidelity” as it has developed within sound media scholarship as a means for historicizing the technological and cultural practices of sound recording, this article examines the construction of liveness through media objects produced via intersecting practices of documentary filmmaking and live album recording. By exploring the operations of filmmaking and sound recording in four live albums produced from North American rock music festivals between 1967 and 1969, this article not only highlights an overlooked history of the relationship between cinema and popular music recording, but also demonstrates how liveness as an experiential category is constituted through media practices not always exclusive to the conventional parameters of popular music industries.References
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Discography
Plastic Ono Band, the. 1969. Live Peace in Toronto 1969. Apple, UK.
Woodstock –
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Rolling Stones, the. 1970. Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert. Decca, UK.
Various. 1970. Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More. Cotillion, US
Videography
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Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music. 1970. Dir. Michael Wadleigh, Warner Bros.
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