At the entrance to the auditorium, ticket-holders were greeted by the usual legal-release placard: “This event is being taped for broadcast on television. If you do not wish to appear in this broadcast”—with your hair a fright, mistress in tow, brown necktie, or playing hooky from your business dinner, the implication goes—“you should not attend this event.” Before the show started, a disembodied voice asked the audience to ignore “the call of nature” during the speeches and musical numbers, so that shots of the hall would not catch people getting up and sitting down. What ensued was a sort of half-Surrealist, half-Cubist musical presentation: widely interspersed songs (the “concert” lasted four and a half hours); sepulchral silences; informal banter among the participants; TV cameras on booms repositioning themselves like mantises; artificially produced fog, which protectively humidified the acoustic instruments, shrouding long, eerie blank periods onstage while the TV crew readied itself for the next number; flubs by Tim Robbins that he redid on the spot (he kept pronouncing “phone” as “feunne,” like Inspector Clouseau). At one point, Robbins had to deliver a phantom re-introduction of Jones, Kristofferson, and Nelson, who had started the show, with “Big River,” and the audience, without being cued, gave a standing ovation to the arrival onstage of nobody at all. Like so many extras, people knew what they were supposed to do.