Live After Death: Inside Music’s Booming New Hologram Touring IndustryWith specters of Frank Zappa and Roy Orbison attracting respectable audiences, are holograms truly music’s final frontier?By Kory Grow
September 10, 2019 5:06PM ET
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/hologram-tours-roy-orbison-frank-zappa-whitney-houston-873399/
"It's a concert, but it's more than a concert," explains a fan of the Zappa hologram concert experience.
Bryan Weber*A recent tribute concert dubbed The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa in Huntington, New York had all the markings of a concert by the rock iconoclast from nerdy fans geeking out about the night’s guitar players before the show to doo-wop intro music but with one marked problem: Frank Zappa died in 1993. The mustachioed musician at the center of it all, playing alongside erstwhile members of Zappa’s band, wasn’t a real person at all. It was a hologram.
To be fair, the apparition truly looked like an otherworldly version of Frank as it played guitar, adjusted its shirt, and wiggled its mustache. It sounded like him, too, since the audio came from an uncirculated 1974 live recording. It was enough of a spectacle that the packed house gave it a standing ovation. “At first, I felt a little sad,” a fan, Annelie Indilla, said after the show. “I got a little choked up for a second, because he’s not around anymore, but I just really liked it. It’s very unusual. It was very well done.”
The show was sold out, and the rest of the tour sold well, too, with people paying as much as $125 a ticket. Similarly, a Roy Orbison hologram tour last year was a financial success, selling 1,800 seats on average per show. There’s enough demand that those tours have more dates lined up — Orbison’s will be touring with one of Buddy Holly this fall — and holographic versions of Ronnie James Dio, Whitney Houston, and Amy Winehouse will be hitting the road later this year. It’s a trend that marks a new wave of holographic tours that is much more sustainable than one-offs, like the Tupac hologram at Coachella in 2012.
“On the shows I went out to, I asked the fans what they thought of it afterward,” says Ronnie James Dio’s widow Wendy, who also does industry relations for Eyellusion. “And there wasn’t one negative comment whatsoever. They were all thanking me for bringing him back.”
Getting these shows to the public, however, hasn’t been easy. “The hardest thing is convincing people what the show is,” says Jeff Pezzuti, CEO and founder of Eyellusion, which produces the Zappa and Dio tours. “It’s very hard to describe. It doesn’t translate as well to YouTube or photos. People think they’re coming to watch a movie, and it’s not that at all. It’s a live show.”
For the Zappa and Dio shows, Eyellusion has built a special stage that places the apparition in the middle, and musicians play on either side of it, as LED screens all around the screen show off wild animations. The company that handles the Orbison, Holly, and Winehouse shows, Base Hologram, projects their specters on a translucent screen in front of the musicians. The latter is a modern effect, while Eyellusion uses a variation on a 19th century magician’s trick called “Pepper’s Ghost,” in which a moving image is projected onto Plexiglas.
“Our technology gives us an enormous amount of freedom,” says Robert Ringe, Base’s CEO of distribution and touring. “It gives us the ability to have the hologram walk onto the stage from the wings and interact with either the band, the orchestra, the musical director, the audience, et cetera.”
Ringe says that when the Orbison hologram played London, there were people dancing in the aisles. At the Dio shows, Pezzuti has seen parents with young kids. “We finished our 18th show last night, and maybe 15 percent of the audience has been made up of kids 15 or younger,” he says. “To me, it’s amazing.”
Phil Sandhaus, whose Sandhaus Entertainment manages Buddy Holly’s estate, says he was initially skeptical of holograms when they came onto the market but that he now “doesn’t have the luxury to ignore them.” “Very few people saw Buddy Holly onstage back in the day,” he says. “But we’re going to create a great entertainment experience.”
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
