Once again, David Singleton and I are here on the Late Shift continuing to assemble "Sometimes God Smiles"". My legs have snapped like whipcords propelling me towards the Music Room here at World Central.
Ongoing news from yesterday:
Little Horse Willcox and the BBC camera team have been prevented from approaching Mount Etna, or filming it from a helicopter over it, because of the danger. She has just telephoned, after coming down from the roof of the hotel, watching in amazement the erupting lava. The Holiday programme's team have been eating food served with a peppering of Etna dust.
Meanwhile Beaton the Wonder Bun, star of television and print media, featured photo idol of anti-animal testing advertising, continues to eat dustless tasty food, careless of the culinary suffering of others.
Bill Bruford and I spent some time on the telephone today discussing the un-fixing-of-Crimson plans and how Bill's interests and passions best combine with my ludicrous ideas for Crimson, drumming and performance. Bill is not interested in long tours. On this we are in full agreement.
Conventionally, rock group tours follow the model of the caravan. You begin in one part of the world and move inexorably towards another, as far as possible from the beginning point. This is a wonderful liberal education for a young person, generally without family and location-based commitments which need to be regularly and frequently addressed. For 2-3 years. One gets an overview of the world and tastes a variety of cultures, approaches to living, and enters the spirits of place over a wide geography. And discovers the different uses to which music is put.
But for the mature, or in any case older, working musician (by which I mean myself) to embrace the numbing and restricted rationale of commercial touring, which is geared towards promotion of "product" by playing in venues utterly unsuitable for an authentic act of music to unfold; to generate the greatest amount of cash possible, without regard for the quality of performance; attacked at every hotel and stage door with demands for attention; and moving too speedily to be touched by any place, or to contribute some resonance to its presence. It appalls me that the process of musicking can be so trivialised by those nominally responsible for it.
Conventional tours are designed by people who don't go on them for people who do. Rather like generals in the Great War who didn't actually climb into the trenches alongside the troops they put there. After all, climbing over barbed wire and running into a merciless hail of machine-gun fire really was the best approach to solving the problem. If managers, agents or record company personnel who insist upon the necessity of (conventional) touring were to accompany those who bear the brunt of their witless, unimaginative and careless initiatives, touring as we know it would have ended with Paganini (whose 3 year tour of Europe was probably the basis for his enduring reputation).
Rock touring is as conceptually innovative as an English transport cafe serving peas with chips, but somewhat less nourishing.
The approach I have been putting forward to the other Crims, Crim manager Richard Chadwick, The Agency, and Anthea Norman-Taylor (Mrs. Brian Eno) who is hoping to take Crim / ProjeKcts / Fripp to Russia, is of event-based performance of short duration, which focuses on a hub. Like, a King Crimson tour of Chicago which begins at Park West, moves to Park West, and completes at Park West. Generally the events would centre on small venues, preferably with audients standing (for those that prefer up close and personal and snapping their whipcords) as well as seated (for those who would rather listening earnestly, whose legs are as old as mine, or would like to persuade their wives or partners to accompany them by providing them a place to collapse). No, doubt, more on that later.
News from today:
Chris Murphy, engineer from Soundscape, BLUE, ProjeKcts One and Two touring, has arrived jetlagged and slightly slack from America. Chris has arrived to help us process the queue of goodies for release in all three divisons which DGM supplies. He carried with him two CDs of the new mixes of "USA". These await my pearly auricles, as do several archive recordings of the Mel, Boz & Ian form of Crimson transfered to DAT for me by our assistant engineer Alex.
Meanwhile David and I have just constructed (22.55) an interesting series of segues from "Prism" (KC live from the second of three nights in Mexico City, 3rd. August 1996) to ProjeKt One (first piece, fourth night, December 4th. 1997) to ProjeKt Two's "Space Groove II" to John Wetton's early home demo of "Easy Money" to KC's "Easy Money" from Amsterdam to "Dinosaur" from KC Live On Broadway (1996) to Matt Seattle's Border pipes ("Out Of The Flames" album forthcoming) to a Soundscape from G3 on the 83rd. anniversary of my Mother's birth.
And now (24.20) it is time to wind up for tonight.
"We begin again, constantly."
