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There’s been much said, written, gossiped about and postulated about what really happened when Scott Weiland fell off the stage in Ohio last week yet appeared to keep singing without sounding like a guy falling off a stage.  Was he lip-syncing?  Is STP using backing vocal tracks to enhance their live performances?  Or is Weiland just such a pro that he was able to carry on without losing his place?

My guesses:  (a) No; (b) Maybe; (c) Possibly.

Backing tracks and other forms of vocal assistance have been a part of the concert experience for more than twenty years.  Audiences expect excellent performances for the money they pay, so singers and bands do whatever they need to in order to deliver.  This includes real-time pitch correction in the vocals (just about everyone), vocal augmentation by an unseen singer offstage (hello, Ozzy!) and even pre-recorded vocal tracks (Britney, GaGa, Madonna, etc) so that the performer sounds perfect even as he/she runs through all their dance moves.

Then again, we sometimes forget how masterful and professional some singers are.  U2 played a two hour set in torrential rain in Moscow last week and even though I was right up against the stage for much of the show, Bono looked like he was singing to me.  Then again, I’ve also heard that large chunks of the 360 Tour are “tracked,” just because of the complexity of the stage show.  I’ve also heard that the reason AC/DC didn’t switch up their set lists at all during their last world tour was because it was all tracked.  “If they wanted to change the set list,” one insider told me, “they would have had to gone back into the studio.”

Regardless of the truth, we’ve ended up with two camps.  In the first are those who don’t care how it’s done.  They don’t care that AC/DC’s Brian Johnson is 62 years old and can’t hit the same notes he could when he recorded Black in Black 30 years ago.  They just want their favourite songs performed perfectly.

Then there’s the camp who believe that backing tracks of any sort destroy the authenticity of the live performance and the spirit of rock’n’roll.  These are the same people who decried Queen’s use of backing tracks in the 70s, calling it “cheating.”

For the record, Weiland denies he was lip-syncing.  And even if he was, this won’t change anything.  Backing tracks and other forms of PA trickery are here to stay.  Might as well get used to it.