ABSTRACT
Documents have traditionally maintained a specific trajectory, that being from event
to record. A public meeting, for example, may take place at city hall and subse-
quently be written up for the local newspaper; likewise, in the music world, a band
creates music in a live setting and later records an album, documenting the songs as
they might have sounded if performed in concert. Documents typically attempt to
represent or to re-create the live event as “accurately” as possible since documents
seen as distant from live events often are considered “secondhand,” or subordinate to
them. Thus, as Philip Auslander (1999) notes in his book Liveness, few rock records
“foreground the artifice of their studio construction; most are made to sound like
[live] performances that could have taken place, even if they really didn’t (and
couldn’t)” (p. 64).
