In August 1979, Don Snowden, of the Los Angeles Reader, asked Fripp about the value of the Frippertronics tour. “I’ve learned that in Europe, one sells records between lunch and dinner, and in America, one has no lunch and dinner in order to sell records. That would be one way of expressing it – that America is an incredibly commercial culture, even to the point of losing, prohibiting from existence, any possibility whatsoever for a qualitative involvement in its normal life. Whereas in Europe, one is far more concerned with a reasonable balance and a reasonable approach to life.
I've also met lots of very nice, ordinary people with a strong commitment to music, young people of eighteen or nineteen who work in record shops purely because they love music. They're often far more effective in selling records than a record executive or person in a position of authority within the record company who's more concerned with his expense account and sitting around drinking Chivas Regal by the pool while I'm doing interviews.
Also, the tour has been a remarkable validation of several ideas and principles that I consider important. A number of ideas that seem right, through incorporating them in my day-to-day life as a very effective means of testing them, have been substantially justified. One idea, for example is the idea of the parallel organization, the small, mobile, intelligent unit. If one took the example of Robert, a single musician playing in a record shop – if I can do it, so can anyone else.”
12/08/2024
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