Television’s First Recorded Lip Sync Melt Down…An Epic Fail …
Television’s First Recorded Lip Sync Melt Down…An Epic Fail
Aside from showing you The Dave Clark 5’s epic Sullivan audio fail, I’ll also share some inside information I got yesterday from Sullivan’s long time audio man, Art Shine, who was hired immediately after this.
Now THIS is EMBARRASSING! Just two weeks after The Beatles had made their third debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”, the second wave of The British Invasion arrived on this day, March 8, 1964, when when The Dave Clark 5 hit the stage at CBS Studio 50.
In all, The DC 5 made 18 appearances on the Sullivan show and this major embarrassment to all happened on June 20, 1965.
Even though Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”, Lloyd Thaxton’s show and countless local dance shows had been on the air live for years with the guest acts lip syncing, that I am aware of, this is the first time a major act was caught “cheating”. (Flash back to new year’s eve and the Mariah Carey incident.)
According to Art Shine, very few acts lip-synced their songs on Sullivan, and Ed always preferred live performances, but occasional it was allowed, especially with rock acts.
Art said The DC5 always did this, because they didn’t trust TV audio men to get the vocal mix right. The only thing they wanted live mics on was the drum kit, and you can hear that here, especially on the crash cymbal hits.
At the time, Sullivan’s audio man was Bob Miller, who had just done the three Beatles shows with only a few minor audio hiccups. All of those Beatles performances were sung and performed live, and the biggest problem was micing the three guitar amps hidden behind Ringo’s riser.
Given this :34 second lag, and where the song starts, the audio man seems to have hit the play button (taped tracks only, never a record) but had a patch panel problem.
As I mentioned above, Art Shine was hired as the Sullivan show’s chief audio man immediately after the June 1965 incident, but replacing Mr. Miller had been in the works for a while.
Why? Because times were changing and so was the line up of acts on Sullivan. There was a move to bring more bands to the show and they needed an engineer with a recording studio background who was more attuned to a band’s needs.
With his background at Decca Records, and CBS Radio, Art Shine was just the guy. He knew how to talk to musicians and singers and how to make them sound their best, which took some of the pressure off their performance anxiety. Art was good at making their live sound, the same as their recorded sound, which is very important.
Art’s touch with the masters like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Bing Crosby was just a important as his savvy with The Rolling Stones sound and The Mama’s And Papa’s and Fifth Dimension’s live vocal mixes.
Art reported to work on the Sullivan show at Television City in Los Angeles where the show had moved for a few months while Studio 50 was being equipped for color. Audio upgrades were done there too before the move back to New York.
After Art came to the show, the production team had come to the conclusion that prerecording background music and backing vocal arrangements would be a better idea than having it all happen in live rehearsals and performances. Again, Art’s background as a Decca engineer helped and doing it in a recording studio would add a more intimate sound than they could get at Studio 50, plus free up the orchestra space for seats.
All of the prerecords were done at Media Sound Studios on West 57th Street. Ray Bloch’s Orchestra provided the musicians for all the sessions and singers (like Dionne Warwick listed there) would hire their backup vocalists. By the way, the autograph is to Sullivan’s long time stage manager, Eddie Brinkmann, from Duke Ellington. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
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I would love to hear the comments in the CR while this was happening.
It was also known that British session musicians made the DC5 records sound as good as they did and Clark, not wanting the world to know that, would insist on miming to a track on TV. Very rarely can you find an appearance on YT that almost sounds like the band playing live. I’m surprised they weren’t busted like this more often! That being said, they had one of the greatest rock voices of all time in Mike Smith.
The New York portion of The Cerebral Palsy Telethon often originated from a CBS theater crewed by CBS. I was always overjoyed when Art Shine did our audio. One weekend in the 80’s we were coming from a CBS truck and an ex CBS studio on the East Side. Luckily Art Shine was doing audio. It was quite late and Frank Sinatra arrived unannounced and agreed to do a number. I called the LA Control Room to insist that they put us on the network which they did. They took New York and Florence Henderson introduced Sinatra who started his number. At that point my Producer wife called from the stage to tell me that someone had let the audience go so Sinatra was singing to an empty house. It looked like the number would end to no reaction but as soon as Sinatra finished there was thunderous applause that sounded perfect. I opened the door to audio to thank Art Shine for the save. He told me that he always brought some applause carts just in case. He said the applause he had played was from an old Sullivan show. He said they were probably all dead now. What a great audio guy!
I well remember my friends and myself being put off by the fact that performers on shows like Sullivan and American Bandstand were not live, but lip syncing or back tape use–For me it wasn’t until my USAF military service in the UK in the late 60’s that I saw and heard live performances on UK tv–some can be found on utube these days
When all else fails, just go to black. 😉
Those of us in broadcasting have all had “those moments” when failure happens. I can just imagine how the audio man felt with the outage. But, as we all know technical failure beyond our control is always waiting at the door to strike. Reading the above I really feel for the guy…….
I have an audiotape of the Beatles live performance Ed Sullivan Show audio fail when you couldn’t hear the lead vocal.I had our audio man tape it for me when I worked at KFDA-TV in Amarillo so I could learn their songs for my band.
This is awesome
Cool info. and history on this one. I have forgotten more over the years than I can remember but this really rings like a new bell with all this detail. Thank you !!
Here’s the mentioned Sullivan schedule with the Orchestra Record Sessions listed at the bottom. The autograph is from Duke Ellington.