Rock touring is as conceptually innovative as an English transport cafe serving peas with chips, but somewhat less nourishing…
On The Road Again.
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 appals 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 Redfearn-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).
Thursday 23rd. July, 1998; 21.34
DGM World Central, Broad Chalke, Wiltshire.
"A test of our understanding is whether we can apply it in practice."
