It was six minutes after eight in the morning in California when Jake Berry, the production manager for The Rolling Stones’ Forty Licks Tour, rang me from a hotel in Long Beach.

This in itself was a surprise. What is a major player, on the road with The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World doing up and about at 8 a.m.? Didn’t The Who only go on stage at the legendary Isle of Wight concert at 2 a.m.? Didn’t the character Mick Jagger plays in Performance stay up all night even when he was a retired rock ‘n’ roll star?

Jake did not sound tired. He did not sound like he was even in an altered state of consciousness. He sounded businesslike. British businesslike. Pleasant. Pumped. Helpful. Hmmm.

The other surprise, of course, is that Jake rang me at all. After all, if I was managing arguably the most expensive rock ‘n’ roll tour in history and somebody asked me to ring a guy in Toronto who writes a little column in a Canadian ad trade rag from my hotel room on the edge of the Pacific, I’d give me a swerve. Which, of course, would have been unbusinesslike.

This all came to pass because my 11-year-old daughter really knows how to pick friends. Either that, or like her father, she will some day realize how much better it is to be lucky than smart. Anyhow, one of her best buds at school turns out to be the daughter of a guy who stages concerts. For bands. Big bands. U2 and CSNY and The Rolling Stones and O MI GAWD THE BACK STREET BOYS!!! which is by way of explaining how come our family was invited to watch The Stones in Toronto from a box at the SkyDome and all the vodka and tonics that statement implies.

What struck me, as the evening thundered up to cruising speed, was that by far the majority of the 47,000 of us there were not so much watching a Rolling Stones concert as watching a movie of a Rolling Stones concert. For towering over the performers on stage was a screen almost 40 feet high by 70 wide. Constantly alive, it danced with brilliant images in motion, in stills, in animation.

One second it was two Keith Richards, the next eight Mick Jaggers. We were maybe 500 feet away, half the crowd was farther back. Yet except for the few thousand folks by the footlights, most eyes were inexorably drawn away from the five-foot-something Stones on stage to the five or six thirty-six-foot-high images of Charlie Watts from the waist up, hammering his drum kit up on the screen.

It took them something like twelve months to edit Woodstock the Movie. But this movie was being performed, shot, edited, enhanced and screened all in the same nanosecond. Jake (remember Jake?) explained to me that certain of the ‘concept’ images, and of course the animation, had been in preparation since April. But the live stuff it was interspersed with was being shot on the stage below with a combo of eight fixed and hand-held cameras, and edited on computer to fill up to eight columns of light on the screen.

What’s more, effects are being applied to the images. Instantly. Jake says we can fuzz it. Haze it. Scratch it. Black-and-white it. Freeze it. And they do.

Rock concerts have been simultaneously shot and shown on video monitors since the ’70s. But what’s going on here is another art form all together. It swallows a rock concert whole, blows it sky high, then fragments it, chops it up, multiplies it, bends and stretches it, edits it, retouches it, and marries it to a visual onslaught of imported images, photos, illos, and animated inserts.

The curtain rod this screeny-thing hangs upon is a steel frame that takes three days to build in each city the band performs. (Only seven hours to hang the screen.) It’s topped off with some kind of flamethrowers which belch roof-licking bursts of burning gas when the boys do Sympathy for the Devil that must have turned SkyDome’s insurance carriers white with fear.

The top-dollar ticket that night ran three hundred and fifty bucks. With The Rolling Stones in the house. Remember The Stones? They’re the tiny figures you realize every fifteen minutes or so are still cavorting around on that tiny stage tucked away below and to the right of THE SCREEN. Now, what would you pay to watch the same movie/show/spectacle again, on THE SCREEN, with The Same Sound Track, in the SkyDome, tomorrow night? When The Stones have left town. How much would it matter? At even 10 bucks a seat, if the same number of folks showed up, that’s nearly half a million bucks. Trust me, it will happen.

In 1974, I saw Bob Dylan and The Band perform at Maple Leaf Gardens. The guy next to me squinted at the dinky figures ‘way across the rink and said I wonder if that’s really Bob Dylan. Today we’d know Bob was in the building. But with this kind of techno-art, how much longer will we care?

Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He creates this column for fun, and to test the unproven theory that clients who find the latter amusing may also find the former to their liking. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533, or faxed at (416) 960-5255, at the Toronto office of Barry Base & Partners.