Oingo Boingo 'Elevator Man' live at The Palace, LA, 26 June 1987 (remastered audio and video)

Here’s another remaster I did this weekend. Only one song, but it’s a good one. Elevator Man, live at The Palace in Hollywood (probably my favorite mid-sized music venue in LA, now called The Avalon I think). The date on the original video is 26 June 1987, but I don’t know if that was the date of the performance, or when this tv show aired it. I suspect the latter.

The tv show is called In Person. Never heard of it. In that original video (here    • Oingo Boingo 6-26-87 L.A. late night TV fu...  ), they play three songs- Elevator Man, We Close Our Eyes, and Not My Slave. Unfortunately, though, only Elevator Man is complete. We Close Our Eyes fades out at the beginning of the second verse. Not My Slave is almost complete, but it upcuts the intro. So, for this remaster, I included only Elevator Man.

There’s also a short interview at the end of that original video.

I remastered the audio. Original audio is in mono, but I gave it a little air. And I pumped up the low end and evened everything out. There’s a whole lotta boomy room sound and audience sound in the original, but I put a hint of a de-verb on it, which helped out in minimizing that.

Video is remastered, too. Original is super small, VHS transfer size at 640x480. I have one of those new AI video 4K upscaler programs, and this video was more or less a test of that program. I pushed this one only to 1080, and left all the settings on their defaults. It definitely came out a lot bigger than the original, and killed a lot of the video noise, but everything now also has that smeary, painterly cartoon look, like it’s some sort of weird animation. It’s not unpleasing, but it’s definitely not natural.

But in the end, it turned out really good, I think, overall. And now I think, is this the best live recording version of Elevator Man?

Although, I’m still not convinced that this is 100% live. Vocals look live, horn section looks live. Not sure about Steve’s guitar. Can't tell with John's bass. But the giveaway is always in the drums. But sometimes Johnny is smacking that snare drum where it’s impossible that it wouldn’t be live, but sometimes the opposite goes for his cymbals. So, totally not sure. What do any of you think?