About this Photo
"Fly Away" was one of Leonard Albert Kravitz’s big hits at the turn of the millennium. We went to see Lenny perform at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in Woodlands, Texas.
“Rock and roll is dead...You can’t even sing or play an instrument...” These are the words of his prophetic 1995 record “Rock ’n’ Roll Is Dead”. It was a deep irony that this was the song that the backing track decided to cut out on. One minute into their rendition, the megasonic wall the audience were enveloped in evaporated instantaneously. Suddenly, all we could hear on stage was the sound of the band’s own amps, monitors and the drums acoustically, and it was pitifully quiet. The front-of-house speakers had clearly failed halfway through the song. As musicians, we gave Lenny the benefit of the doubt, thinking that the poor onstage sound was because the auditorium system wasn’t working or that the microphones and amps were turned down really low for feedback reasons.
However, when the band started playing again, it sounded identical to the first minute we’d just heard, and most alarmingly, so did the vocals. The crowd were slowly getting back into it when suddenly the sound cut out again. Smelling a rat, the charade started again, identical to before, and Jeremy and I looked at each other in shock. The sound engineer was clearly attempting to restart the DAT machine, but it kept skipping. Watching this car crash unfold, we just put our heads in our hands. It was clear that Lenny and the band were essentially miming to backing tracks; to say we were massively disappointed is an understatement; we were mortified. Lenny Kravitz, the 90’s bastion of authentic live hard rock music, was playing to playback…was this the same musician who insisted on using only vintage instruments on his debut album “Let Love Rule”. Whose famous virtuosity allowed him to adeptly play almost all the instruments on that album?
Quote from Losing Eldorado
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