Still on the topic of that performance by the cast of Hair on that 1969 Ed Sullivan Show, Steve Bacher writes to ask…
Was the musical backing for the Hair segment live or prerecorded? If live, the Hair troupe would have had to bring in their own backing band, wouldn't they? Or were there rock musicians on the staff already?
The Sullivan program had a pretty good live orchestra, helmed by a gent named Ray Bloch, which was called upon to play all sorts of music for all sorts of acts. They may have been augmented with pre-recorded music or a few outside musicians for the occasion — it's hard to tell — but I'd guess that a lot of what you were hearing was Ed's usual orchestra.
When I worked on variety shows, I became aware of how many different ways the music can be generated. One time, we had on a singer who was performing a popular number he'd recorded more than twenty years earlier. His voice no longer sounded the way it did on the record and while he still sang it live for live performances, he was reluctant to be heard on network television singing it with his current voice.
The logic went something like this: A live audience at a concert might not expect him to sound exactly like he did on the original record but an at-home audience watching TV would be less forgiving of the change. Many of them would also recognize it if he just lip-synced to the old record and they'd think, "Gee, I guess he can't sing like that any more if they had to use the old record."
(This was not the way I thought. I wasn't even thinking about that kind of thing. But the singer and his managers wanted to make him sound more like he used to, and I think our producers did, as well.)
So what they wound up doing was obtaining a master tape of the original recording without the music — just his voice. It still existed in some vault somewhere and he knew where it was. He'd apparently done this before. Then they slowed it down a teensy-tiny bit and put some filters on it to make it sound almost the way it did originally but not exactly. Then they edited in a few micro-seconds of pause between some words…so it was the same vocal performance but not exactly.
Next, they recorded a whole new music track to it with an ever-so-slightly-different arrangement from the original. When it was all mixed together, it definitely didn't sound exactly like the original record. It was like 97% the original record. He did a good lip-sync job when we taped the show and during post-production, the editors did a little of their magic to put his mouth perfectly in sync with the track. I'll bet any viewer who gave it a smidgen of thought thought, "Wow, he still sounds almost exactly like he did 20+ years ago!" Professional audio technicians might have guessed what was done but I doubt most people could have.
The Ed Sullivan Show was broadcast live. Sometimes, an entire number was recorded in advance and the singers just moved their mouths. Sometimes, just the music track was prerecorded. Sometimes, it was an amalgam. When someone came on to perform their new hit record, the record company might be real fussy about how it was presented, fearing that a bad (or different) performance would impact sales. The record company might even pay for extra musicians that night…or pay to pre-record a slightly-different rendition of the song in another studio with their own musicians.
So this is me taking the long route to saying I really don't know about that performance from Hair. Any configuration of the music might have been employed. But I wouldn't be quick to assume that the CBS Orchestra under the baton of Ray Bloch was of no use with the arrangements for the music that was being played over at the theater on Broadway that was housing what they called "The tribal love rock musical."
(By the way: Reader-of-this-site Raymond Zinsius writes that he's pretty sure that's Melba Moore in the still-frame/thumbnail for the video and that you see her in the video beginning at 2:27.)
