narten@CS-Mordred (Thomas Narten) (07/17/85)
Someone commented that Phil Collins wasn't doing much while playing for Led Zep. MTV had several (pretty bad) interviews, one of which included Phil. Phil admitted that for he didn't hardly get a chance to practice the songs he was to perform, and rather than improvise on the fly, he sat out for part of songs. I might add that he was one of the few performers that MTV interviewed that handled the interviewer well. I couldn't hardly believe the MTV interviews. They asked the same (bad) questions, and didn't know when to quit. For instance, the most common questions was: "Do you feel an energy in the air?" In asking Robert Plant if he felt the old chemistry while playing, are there plans to regroup, etc, even when Plant would not answer the question (and it was obvious that he wouldn't) they kept on going, leaving a kindof awkward silence. Its a shame that MTV couldn't do a better job at showing the music. I tried taping parts of the set, but they seemed really good at cutting in right as the band was starting! They never seemed to be paying attention to when the music was about to start, they would cut to it in a hurry once it began. For those upset with the loss of contact during the Who, that was one of the every few moments when they had technical problems with the satellite broadcast. All in all I was impressed with the way the whole thing was pulled off. The sound quality was excellent (not necessarily the playing), and they were very fast at switching bands, especially at the end. Does anyone know if there was more than one stage to make the switching of bands go faster? Thomas Narten
evan@petfe.UUCP (Evan Marcus) (07/18/85)
I thought MTV's coverage was pretty lousy. (In fact, I heard today that
Bill Graham, the promoter, is really pissed off about it!) But what
bothered me the most about it, and I haven't heard anybody else complain
about it was their tendency to flashback to the VJs watching the show.
A lot. Who gives a flying $%$#& what Martha Quinn thinks of Paul McCartney
playing Let It Be? And every 15 seconds? There were other problems too,
but I think they've been touched on.
I did find that if you switched between MTV and the independent coverage
(at least until when the Independents started showing tapes from earlier
in the day), you could do a pretty good job of covering it all.
--Evan Marcus
--
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