I definitely get the Lynchian vibe, this act easily could have opened at The Black Lodge.

Wow!

At that time, this was one of those juxtapositions of cutting edge technology, and the exact antithesis in one band.

If it were happening today, it would be Beck playing in a Lawrence Welk cover band.

Again, Wow.

I'm going to go out on a limb and deconstruct why everyone seems so detached-
They're lip syncing this, the whole thing.

The dead giveaway is the talk box.

The Heil talk box works by having the guitar play into that box with the driver speaker, (and it's LOUD in that box) so the sound can go thru the tube and into the players' mouth. That much you can see. What's missing is the second stage where the sound comes OUT of the player's mouth and it has to go somewhere (another mic) or it's the player alone who hears what he's doing. The sound coming out of his mouth isn't very loud, so it HAS to be mic'd pretty close and pretty directly.

I could be wrong. Those old broadcast overhead mics (that you see guys operating on HUGE booms were and are phenomenal, and are still being made and used today almost to their same specs. But in order to have the right prominence in the mix, there was that whole problem of balancing the tiny sound out of his mouth with the sound of a band and a whole passel of backup singers.

I'm sure it's his band and his singers with him. They seem to know their parts very well, and are actually playing their instruments. They're not pretending to play. But I just don't think that the sound that's recorded is the sound that they were making right then.

Which puts a whole other surreal layer on this.

Again, wow!