Robert Fripp's Diary

Hotel Very Acceptable Munich We

We drove around town for almost an hour looking for the hotel. This is Gigster's Bane: 2 hours to the city, one hour to the hotel. But it's a very acceptable hotel.

The performance: one again, a superb & supportive audience. The acoustics: appalling. The Circus Krone is a great venue for circuses, and a good atmospheric for groups. But not sound. All the same, we enjoyed playing.

Hotel Modest, Bonn.

17.28
Up at 05.47 this morning for a leisurely breakfast read of Charles Ferguson, an old Observer & Guardian, & today's FT. The hotel was stunning (we got a rate!) and of a standard that we're not used to in Crim touring.

My morning interview for 10.15 was cancelled - the only one of this tour - which I had promised Alex the Xxceptional from Shooter, our German promoters. Hooray! Interviews distract my attention from focusing on the group & playing. Although arguably diarism & e-flurries replace the space once filled by press.

An 6-hour drive to Bonn to a modest hotel, of a standard which I do associate with Crimson touring, and now into a room which simulates a vacuum with a bed in it. I could get depressed in this room, particularly if it's raining (it is), if there's no view (there isn't), and no welcoming lounge in the hotel (not). The reception on Sky News (English speaking) is awful. So, I shall wash my smalls in the bathroom sink (no bath, only shower) & then shower. A bath, even shower, often results in a remarkable change of state. I guess, something to do with the properties of water.

21.55
A modest salad selection in the hotel restaurant at 18.00. Adrian looked in 5 minutes later, also carrying a book & looking as forlorn as I felt. He didn't stay but wandered off in search of less modesty.

Then, via computing, to the sauna & swimming pool. Trey arrived after a modest Thai meal with Pat nearby. According to trusted sources, says Trey, the sound last night was as bad as the Crims thought it was. Trey & I were standing six feet apart in the swimming pool: it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying. Pat conducted the same experiment with a stagehand at the gig last night. If this is hard, think what it's like trying to play relatively complex music in a large echoing hall.

23.54
Many thanks for the views sent to the Guestbook. I'm doing what I can am able to address the main topics, and hope that my responses to specific posters cover a lot of general ground. Most of my attention is presently directed towards touring with KC & getting a feel for what is possible in our future.

Broadly, it seems to me that there are two key issues within most of the bootlegging / taping commentary:

1. How to make available live recordings:

Fairly soon, I'll be making a formal statement on behalf of King Crimson, Discipline Global Mobile & BootlegTV which will present our practical answers to the debate.

2. Right Conduct.
 

Responses To The Guestbook:

1. Tom Ace ([email protected]) 29-May-2000 00:47 GMT

TA: "Theft is never innocent," Mr. Fripp wrote.
RF: The quote is from Rodney Collin's "The Theory Of Celestial Influence". I was reading this at the time Crimson were recording "Starless And Bible Black" at Air Studios, Oxford Circus.

TA: But notions of theft depend on notions of property
RF: What is theft? Good question. Examine the intent, would be my first approach. We may or may not know what is ours, but we have a pretty good idea of what is not.

Tom may be reacting in his post to what he sees as Fripp being "up on a high horse when he talks about theft". If Tom looks at this, what is he reacting to? Why "a high horse"?

TA: which vary from place to place and from time to time.
RF: i) Qualities (the unconditioned) manifest in our world through the conditions of time, place & person.

In the time and place of Nashville on the Sunday afternoon of May 21st. 2000, with the "notion of property" for Crimson publicly declared, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Abbott was wracked in anguished personal debate over the "legitimate question of Crimson's intellectual property ownership being always fair and just". Mr. Abbott came:

With the intention of recording the show/s;
Without concern for the publicly expressed wishes regarding recording Crim shows;
Without regard for principles, codes, conventions & laws relating to intellectual property ownership (of whatever diverse cultural disposition, contemporary or historical formation);
Without regard for the performance, performers or audience.

Mr. Abbott came for himself. Where is the innocence in Mr. Abbott's behaviour? Does Tom believe that Mr. Abbott might "share respect for the integrity of the event"? Or, also with Tom, "prefer to cooperate rather than antagonize"?

ii) So, another good question: what is "ours"? What does belong to us? Perhaps two things:

b). What we've been given. This is an interesting one: a gift only has value if it remains in motion (cf Lewis Hyde's "The Gift"). So, a gift is "ours" only for as long as we continue to give it away. This implies that we enter process in some way.

I look on a gift as a kind of loan; but one which carries or makes no demand for repayment. It's a subtle test: if we fail to recognise that the gift needs to remain in motion, something is lost. The loss is of possibility, of potential. But there is no compulsion in this: unless we recognise a personal necessity, we "keep" the gift for ourselves. And this is equally legitimate.

c) Either way, owning stuff carries with it responsibilities.

TA: If a band is on tour, and performs in a town where local customs do not include the band's notions of intellectual property, who gets to make the "house rules", the band or the locals?
RF: Tom's question is a specific. For a concrete answer, the question would also have to be concrete. For example, if the band were Phish, the answer would be different to if the band were Crimson.

So, practical examples from Crim history:

If it's Crimson at their own shows in a dedicated venue in Nashville over a 3 day period where the "house rules" are publicly declared, Crimson makes the call. The audience is informed, and may make a choice whether a performance is sufficient in itself for them to attend.

If it's Crimson on the Horde tour of 1996, Crimson accepted the "local house rules" of the Horde shows which was an open taping policy. How did I find this, and the battery of photography? Hard. But that was the "local custom" & for my part I accepted it. Everyone knew where they stood: the transaction was clean & above board.

The concrete answer is always specific to time, place & person. Although the question is singular, the answer is plural. How to find the right answer in a variety of settings? We are guided by:

Principle;
Code;
Convention;
Law.

i) Principle: a universal guide to conduct. All the great traditions have determining principles.

ii) Code: the forms of conduct held to be appropriate to any particular discipline, which may be expressed as "Right Living". This is how anyone within a particular way will undertake to act.

The code combines exercises, information & a sense of connection with the "spirit" & aim of the particular way. On a lower floor, we might interpret this as "moral" or "ethical" behaviour. But in the practice of a way this is directed towards the development of conscience. With conscience, one has a "director" on hand through the variety of specific situations.

iii) Convention: customary solutions or answers discovered and / or accepted as being generally applicable in practice.

iv) Law: immobile, inflexible, fixed norms of behaviour to which all are subservient.

Each of these relates to a different "world" of relatively greater / less subtlety in experiencing. It is impossible to understand a more subtle "world" by applying notions of how our "world" operates.

Law applies to the basement: basement reasoners (a contradiction in terms) cannot allow for a convention to be consensually binding, if they don't like it. For example, on the garden floor I may want to tape a show but, without consent, I won't. If I live in the basement, I'll get away with what I can unless there is a binding form of "law" which prevents me.

Reasonable, decent people who engage in open debate & accept its norms, are not bound by a Code of Conduct based on a personal practice. They accept the restraint of withholding from a non-consensual act, but without seeing or understanding the principle involved.

TA: My personal choice is to not tape Mr. Fripp's shows. I think he's up on a high horse when he talks about theft, but I share his respect for the integrity of the event and I prefer to cooperate rather than antagonize.
RF: This is a garden floor response, and part of a "convention": we may or may not agree with a declared position - "theft" or "violation" - but we will honour the position because the alternative is to undermine a particular context; would be non-consensual & therefore offer a subtle form of violence; and prevent possible forms of agreement & consensual negotiations from taking place between reasonable people in debate.

TA: Regarding musicians who don't want the audience to tape: I like the example set by Paul Richards. He is truly engaged with his audience. I've seen this in several ways: in his attitude on stage, in his diary, in his gracious responses to email, and in the tone he used when writing about the CGT's policy on taping. That kind of genuine intimacy fosters cooperation and respect.
RF: Well said.

TA: In a recent diary entry, Mr. Fripp said he was able to sense the act of bootlegging in Nashville
RF: Correct. This is (fairly obviously?) not the first time!

TA: If he has such a (possibly preternatural) level of sensitivity, good for him.
RF: We all have the same innate capacity for subtle perceptions (or "sensitivity"). If we train these subtle perceptions, over a period of 26 years, they become finer & more reliable. I would suggest, no radical innovatory argument here?

TA: But he wrote as if certain that those perceptions were accurate.
RF: With some perceptions, yes. In Nashville, yes.

If I see a duck, smell a duck, hear a duck, and the duck sits on my face, I'm prepared to put my reasonable scepticism on hold for a moment and declare - yes! it's a duck! - until better evidence presents itself. And this is one particular breed of duck with which I have long familiarity.

TA: If he's infallible, again good for him--but maybe he isn't.
RF: How does Tom move from the possibility of "sensitivity" ("preternatural" is not a word I would use, "practised" is) to infallibility? Should I read in this that Tom doesn't believe himself to have "sensitive perceptions" and is therefore unable to accept this possibility in others?

To introduce a comment by Gary Weisel which is relevant (Guestbook 30th. May): "this might be one of the contributing factors to the problematic band-audience relationship (Fripp as seer)".

i) In response, then, to both Tom & Gary: is this - "seer" - a rather grand way of asking, do I have insights?

Yes. Of course. This is, after all, what we hope of our artists (even our aspirant artists): that they have insights which they translate into forms of expression which, in turn, make these insights available to the rest of us. We may enter the "creative world" somehow via a work of "art". Surely, an artist that doesn't have creative insights isn't properly an artist?

Personal example: in mid-1981 just after eight in the morning, on a sofa in Chelsea, New York, at the apartment of Karen Durbin, Fripp & Eno (Karen's two large cats) ran over my head and woke me up. Then, in a flash, I saw how it was that music enters our lives. This insight, which came to me (as a gift?) completely changed the way I approached my life as a professional musician.

This is not to privilege the perception of artists over the rest of us: we all have insights, but our culture doesn't value them to the same degree as "traditional" cultures. In "the West" we attach more value to argument & rationalisation.

In Guitar Craft we refer to "points of seeing" and recognise qualities, degrees & intensities of insight, while also recognising (and this is important) that insights, "experiences", "perceptions", imply no personal merit whatsoever of the person "receiving" the "transmission".

A creative insight is a direct contact with the nature of the subject / object; except that if the insight is genuinely creative there is no subject / object.
A "lesser" degree of insight is where connections are made, but under subject / object relations.
The next degree of insight is where things simply "fall into place".
The next degree of insight belongs to the basement. In Guitar Craft this quality of insight is called a "bright idea". Basement insights are illusory & misleading. They cause enormous amounts of waste & often damage.

Insights downgrade as we analyse & discuss them, & run the danger of becoming tainted by (automatic & associative) imagination. I have seen powerful (and I believe "real") insights unhinge the person at the receiving end when their (unprepared) personality caught the blast of a download. So, where possible & when we are fortunate, better to have our insights checked / confirmed by our peers and / or those of more experience. This acts as a safeguard against authentic insights generating basement activities & excitements. (For myself, this "checking" primarily stems from my background of Sherborne & Guitar Craft).

"Points of seeing" I interpret as gifts (and sometimes more like a miracle). We aren't responsible for whether the sun is shining, but if we're not on the garden floor we'll never know if its raining or shining outside (or inside). The responsibility we have, and may accept if we wish to see a blue sky, is to get out of the basement. Perhaps, should we ever visit the roof garden, we may discover that we have some responsibility towards the luminosity of the sun. But that is quite another story.

ii) How does Fripp know that "bootlegging" feels & senses like this?

Partly, long experience. I don't have sufficiently fine perceptions, as would a trained clairvoyant, to differentiate in the subtleties of this area (although, as the the advert goes, I know someone who does). But I am sufficiently sensitive to detect violation; particularly intentional (as opposed to "careless" or basement-slumbering) violation. Sunday afternoon in Nashville was exceptional in the violation department.

Can I prove it to an honourable sceptic? No. But an honourable sceptic would grant me my space, while not accepting my viewpoint or opinions, & hold the same question in front of themselves.

There are some ways / beliefs which don't personally speak to me; but I accept that they may well be leading the seeker towards what is true, even if (to my eyes) the path is unproven. If the aspirant / believer is honourably sceptical, belief may in time lead to faith (I would understand this as faith seeing a believer moving towards it, and moving towards them in return).

To make this practical: I have faith in music, but little belief in musicians. I have no faith in myself as a player (or as a person), but Fripp persists & endures & is prepared to accept more suffering than I feel he needs. I look over his shoulder & suffer for him, sometimes, and assume that he is serving some purpose of his own. I can say that, little capacity that he has, sometimes profound experiences move towards him. Why, is another matter; but that this happens, I don't dispute.

Music makes musicians "real", and grants them any "power" which they may have in the performance space. The work of the musician is to stay "online" while the musical "information" is downloaded. This is hard enough, and deserving of our respect, particularly in disruptive or even hostile environments. Like, where audients nominally serving the same aim as the musician (being in the presence of an unfolding musical act) are attempting to distract the player or, as with Mr. Abbott, attempting to access the data-stream for their own uses.

Our consideration of the musical event then moves into the more subtle areas of intention, attention, personal presence, basement slumbering; and passive (even active) ill-will, such as envy & jealousy, from members of the audience. (I am prepared to accept that Mr. Abbott is unaware of the damage he causes; but I do not believe his motivation in posting MP3 files is one of "sharing" with others). I don't claim authority in these subtle areas, neither am I prepared to abandon the experience I do have. And I do have a lot of experience of looking over Fripp's shoulder in public for several decades.

When KC began, public performance had a degree of innocence & genuine sharing which it has since lost (and I am not dopey enough to believe that all was sweetness & light in 1969). Cf. this post:

Phil T. ([email protected]) 04-Jun-2000 20:03 GMT

<"once upon a time there was a concept known as the "Rock Concert." In its ideal form, the "Rock Concert" was a shared cultural experience in which the participants came to together to make the event "greater than the sum of its parts" (to coin a phrase). In order to do so, audience and performers each contributed to the available energy, and the good of the whole, rather than making individual demands".>

iii) So, Tom Ace: how do we get from "sensitivity" (or insights) to "infallibility"? Insights don't confer infallibility: how could they? Over to you.

2. gary weisel ([email protected]) on 30-May-2000 at 01:40 GMT

GW: Read more David Hume and less David Bohm. I am not saying that only cold, hard, cause and effect relationships affect our lives but rather that we may not be able to specify a cause for every single thing in this world. The idea that "there are no accidents" runs the risk of becoming a sort of "totalitarian rule of causality." Also, this might be one of the contributing factors to the problematic band-audience relationship (Fripp as seer).
RF: I don't think that Gary has quite managed to accurately extrapolate my views on causality & accident!

Any part of a creative process is hazardous, & without guarantees, but puts us in a position where we are more likely to "see things as they are". In some situations, we see directly. I'm not suggesting this necessarily happens very often; I am suggesting that on Sunday afternoon in Nashville, when feeling "hollow" as the life of the performance ebbed away, in a flash I knew: "We're being bootlegged!".

In the creative world, "accidents" are "intentional".
In the basement, accidents are accidental.

GW: Fripp has accomplished a rare thing by creating a new idiom KC has built up ideas over the years bit by bit. Many of these contributions came from Fripp but not only him.
RF: Doesn't this rather imply, then, that it wasn't Fripp that "created a new idiom"? That this was the achievement of several people?

GW: Besides, it is true that "you have to be there."
RF: Complete agreement.

GW: In 1974, I saw Krimson play their "last show" in Central Park. I was eighteen years old and went with my great friend Steven. We were shocked and amazed by the rendition of Starless, blinded by the red floodlights, and knocked out by Fripp's feedback and strange scales (he seemed to be trying to free himself of the entire galaxy).
RF: This is a wonderful turn of phrase, even if it is a gross exaggeration. Looking back, I'd say that the guitarist was trying to free himself of the planet. But he was younger then, and youth may be forgiven many things.