In defense of technical issues
The stakes of live music
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“Me piano’s busted.”
Thus spake Sir Paul McCartney, Chicago, November 24, 2025.
In rush the techies, “the best in the business,” lilts our Liverpudlian friend. We thousands wait while the men in black work their magic. Paul seems unphased as they crawl around his feet, connecting cables, swarming like a pit crew around whatever root cause has left Paul’s lefthand 44 keys mute. After a few seconds, we hear Paul strike a low chord, the audience applauds, and the show careens on into the pyrotechnics of “Live and Let Die.”
The more I see live music, the more I’ve come to appreciate these moments. I kinda love it when a show jolts to a brief but unexpected pause, the artist forced to improvise, the fourth wall broken. The tension builds, we are all bought in; we feel personally relieved when the show goes on, and we feel connected to this performing human who, after all, is not a master of the universe.
Of course, technical issues can become proper fuck-ups and poison the entire show. Mariah Carey’s 2016 NYE performance, or pretty much every showing of Broadway’s Spiderman, testify as much.
But a single wrong note hidden in the flurry of pickin’ from the world’s best banjo player? A humble request to restart a song-begun-too-quickly at Madison Square Garden? A 30-second technical interlude afflicting one of the four Lads responsible for bringing pop to a stadium in the first place? Paul McCartney is the closest we’ve got to a god among man, and even he has to contend with the demon in the wires.
These moments remind me how fragile musical performance is, how carefully it balances on a tightrope, how high the stakes are. Live music! The crowning jewel of human consciousness, itself maybe the single most complicated, mysterious thing to happen since the Big Bang. And a single bad XLR cable can get in the way.