Comments for The Nice, Five Bridges

As I have said many times before, the Nice tried new things, other bands actually accompished those things. Probably one of the earliest live interactions between an orchestra and rock band. To my knowledge, no other bands before this tried to pull this off live and there is a reason: lack of live on stage monitoring systems. To give a brief history lesson here, about the time this album was recorded (October 1969) all the technicans felt that a live monitoring system was not possible since a microphone could not possibly be placed that close to a live speaker. In this case the band had to rely on whatever sound bounced off of the back of the auditorium through the audience amplification for any sort of sonic guidence. Also the type of amplification between a mostly electric rock band and a mostly acoustic orchestra is grossly different and without a monitor of some sort, being able to blend the two is nearly impossible. This is quite evident on Five Bridges, especially on their rendition of Tchiakovsky's "Pathetique" where drummer Brian Davison attempts playing with the orchestra, but seems painfully behind since (if you look in the original record gatefold) the band was not really seated with the orchestra which would have had to lead to some sort of sonic lag. This is not gospel, just merely a speculation and observation