Walker Arts Center

By the time Robert Fripp was playing the second of two nights at the Walker Arts Centre he’d notched up no less than 16 gigs in 17 days. The following weeks during July and August would be just as busy as the guitarist took his ‘Small, mobile intelligent unit’ out on the road and into unconventional settings. While nowadays the concept of stripped-back concerts in intimate settings such as galleries, house concerts, and at-desk gigs are very much the norm, in 1979 there’s nobody of Fripp’s ‘rock-star’ status undertaking this kind of work.

This show in Minneapolis has been painstakingly restored by engineer Alex Mundy, spending hours skilfully grafting bootleg audience recording of Fripp’s soloing to the original loops which have been preserved in the DGM archive. During the process, Alex consulted Frippertronics expert, Al Okada who noted that during Loop 1 and Solo 1, Loop II and Solo, Loop III and Solo 1, Fripp’s soloing occurred while he was creating the backing loops themselves. To these ears, the soloing here is especially passionate in tone and nature, a sense of pent-up energy being released all at once.

Covering the start of the tour in Boston, Rolling Stone magazine reported “Fripp says he is trying to promote a return to an intelligent way of living by reducing the scale of events to anywhere from twelve to 250 people and by putting forward the idea of active listening. As the van stops, Fripp picks up the flaking old case that holds his 1957 Gibson Black Beauty and steps out, with a last word: "If the values I believe in are right, the tour will work. If not, it won’t. . .Though he warned the audience they might find the program "indescribably tedious," they are with him all the way. In Boston, the tour is working; this crowd is small, listening hard, and much of Fripp's intensity seems to come from currents they supply. "You have every bit of the responsibility that I have," he reminds them. "Because life is ironical, I get paid for it and you don’t."