What's funny is that Zappa may have pulled off one of the first recorded "live" performances.
A modern music ensemble wanted to commission him to write a work for performance, and he presented them with some stuff that was truly very, very difficult. So hard, in fact, that they
gave up, saying that there was no way they could get it peformance-quality in time.
So, he says that's fine, he'll just run it through his Synclavier (which is what he used to write it, anyway), and play the recording through speakers on stage while the group pretended to play.
The result was seamless enough that none of the music critics (whom he hated anyway) in the audience even suspected what was going on. The charade lasted for a week or two before some of the ensemble members leaked the story.
Zappa, understandably, reveled in having fooled music critics who supposedly knew so much about music performance.