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Musician FEBRUARY 1981 - by Robert Fripp

THE TROUBADOR TODAY: PART TWO

The cart is finally put behind the horse and live performance is declared the end and not the means.

Most groups only make money after breaking up. Because running costs are so high very few "successful" bands earn more than subsistence wages until the costs stop. When the group disbands record and songwriting royalties continue, for two reasons:

1. Royalties are paid six to twelve months after the event;
2. The life of a classic record can be ten years or more.

Put another way, a group must stay together long enough to break up. Currently, the League of Gentlemen can't afford to work because it can't finance itself, and can't afford not to because it's $30,000 in debt. Note that when a band loses money on the road it is still liable for agency (10-15%) and management fees (25%).

Before the recent League tour of Europe and America I made three stipulations:

1. The tour should make money, or at least cover itself: $3,000 a week for the privilege of playing music is a high price to pay and in the context of the League tour, depressing.

2. The tour should not be a series of one-nighters. The main drawback to touring is the traveling, because it exhausts the Happy Gigsters and is expensive. Finding an alternative to daily moving would save energy for music, and reduce overheads.

3. The venues should be rock clubs with room for dancing, and preferably a bar. My advice to the audiences was to "actively listen while maintaining a sense of one's bodily presence in motion:" i.e. to listen while dancing. For the League, a dance band with the emphasis on spirit rather than competence, to play in a seated concert hall would invite erroneous expectations and comparisons with King Crimson.

In Europe the tour lost money in a daily series of mostly inappropriate venues; in America it lost money in a daily series of mostly appropriate venues. Because the tour was booked as promotional, with the accent on visiting record markets rather than paying venues, it failed as a working tour. But as the record being promoted was Fripp's God Save The Queen/Under Heavy Manners, Polydor had difficulty identifying the League with their artists and the promotion was ineffective.

The advantages of the tour were an improvement in personal and group competence, group feel, some exquisite music and audiences, and an educative overview of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada in mid-1980. How else could one really experience the unemployment in Youngstown, Ohio ( where a Young Turkey shouted " Play like Genesis"!) or read a sign in an elevator: " All conversations are monitored for your safety" (Cincinnati car park adjoining a store). On a commercial level, the reviews were mainly favorable and interest in the League well tickled for the future. The three months were excellent research in the field for a thesis (presumably Ph.D. Rock, Hons.). But the working conditions were intolerable.

So why should one tour?

1. To earn a living;
2. As an education;
3. To enjoy the intrinsic qualities of one's work;
4. To participate in an event with others, both players and audience.

How can this be done? Everything follows one principle: live performance is the basis of the music industry. Live music is the foundation for printed music, records and radio (in the U.S. at least). The income of recording artists has halved in the past two years and, with the shaky future of Megabucks Records, an emphasis on live performance as a way of making money becomes increasingly likely. In England during the 1950s stage shows were the Big Earners, their position taken during the 1970s by records. But the decline of the performer's importance is long term, and the reasons for that decline and the consequences of it have considerable implications for the industry throughout the 1980s.

Records are to rock what scores are to straight music: they freeze a performance forever. Written music, and records even more so, preserve the state of the art but fail to develop it. In the Middle Ages musical notation was only a guide for performers, an aide memoire and basis for improvisation. Up to 1830 at least a player who took a score as given would have been considered a Big Dullard. After Beethoven's death the increasing emphasis on notation changed music from a visceral to a literary experience, and switched the emphasis from the performer to the composer. With the Romantic elevation of composer to deific status, a performance would necessarily demean his sublime insight, expressed in perfect detail on a score.

The growth of music publishing and performing rights in the 20th century has cemented this split between composer and performer. The phenomenal increase in record sales, from $44 million in 1939, $158 million in 1969, to $3,501 million in 1977 (U.S.), and radio, from 200 stations in 1922 to 5000/6000 today, has turned music from a performer's art to a re-performer's, or reproducer's, art. This became quite apparent with the rise of the discotheque in France during the early 1960s, with the parallel in straight music of the "star" conductor taking wild liberties with the text in all details but the notes. (Listen to twelve different conductors on L'Apres Midi d'un Faune consecutively and see what you think).

A creative side to this re-performance is "rapping," probably first pioneered in a major way by Jocko in New York during the 1950s, and by Pete DJ Jones, Hollywood, Eddie Cheeba, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow in the 1970s, with close parallels between rapping and the reggae toasters. The use of "dub" and "the version" are now well-known and widespread. Negative aspects of re-performance are a decrease of audience experiencing music first hand, and the pressure on artists to duplicate records on stage. The problem of translating a burning live band onto record belongs to the producer, but the problems going from the studio to the stage belong to the artist. As with film, any magic in the moment can be frozen. But the "definitive performance" implies that for all future performance the playing can only be, at best, a repeat of that moment: the experience of live music changes from instantaneous to historical. For the player there can be no definite performance: all that matters is the moment in which the music is performed. This isn't to criticize the development of recording as a new creative medium, where the aim is not to reproduce live performance but to generate new music; i.e. the record is itself the "performance," a synthesis of new " instruments" and compositional tools derived from studio techniques and technology. When working in a New York studio with Eno last year I saw him operate a Lexicon (variable pitch and delay line) with a musicality and facility that turned a sophisticated echo box into an actual instrument.

Just as live performance in the concert hall has been ossified by too much attention to the score, and all that that implies, so in live rock the influence of recording and the recording industry has restricted the possibilities for the performer to meet music and audience in a way that stirs the blood: e.g. it kept The Beatles from playing live. The tremendous enthusiasm for live performance by young players since 1977, mainly in punk or new wave groups, has stressed (deliberately or otherwise) non- competence or non-musicianship, and was initially met with scorn by the music industry. This democratic incompetence broke with the (historically recent) tradition of performer as uninvolved executant, simply because the new performer was unable to execute. The mechanical restrictions abandoned and the writer/player divide ignored, the performer can once again get stuck into the music as a contributor. A whole range of new music has been built around new players' capacities and idiosyncrasies. Now that players are regaining their freedom the next step is to develop competence to explore that freedom. Nobody criticizes Parker or Coltrane because they had more chops than Lester Young.

So, what solution for the touring musician today?

1. View the tour as a tour; i.e. viewing live performance as the basis of everything else, it needs to make money. Set the break-even point, which for the League is around $3,000 a night in the U.S., and don't work below it. An opportunity to play in Pittsburgh for $500 as a record promotion requires a $5,000 gig somewhere else. Promotion can be arranged around the booking rather than bookings around the promotion. Touring has three aspects: playing, traveling and promoting. Any two of these in a day is enough for me, but on the Frippertronics tour of 1979 I did three a day nearly every day for four months.

2. Play in venues of 500/1,000 capacity for two shows a night, for two nights. This reduces traveling (and tiredness and expense), requires less equipment than in large halls, gives time to explore the town, enables more personal contact with the audience and a better chance of dealing with their expectations. In practice, 250 people is the top I can handle as a soloist and 500 with a group. Beyond this expectation and excitement can get out of control.

With falling gig attendances, smaller venues are at least more efficient, but worked this way still have a potential gate of 2,000/4,000. The objection that not everyone interested in the band might see it can be met by occasional larger, but appropriate, venues: Hammersmith Palais instead of Hammersmith Odeon, or an open air concert.

Note: working this way one is unlikely to "break out" and become a big star.

3. Create residuals by intermediate recording. This smaller way of working builds genuine support from below rather than having "popularity" imposed from above by high powered advertising. Gigs are a way of preparing for recording and getting music into the body, so that first takes, oozing passion, needn't break down from lack of familiarity with the notes. The League record at Amy's Shack in Parkstone, Dorset, a 24-track at $26 an hour.

4. Develop a local music industry. With the possibility of transport difficulties in the middle 1980s, how can one work as a traveling musician? For me, I look to the area I live in: the West Country, or what was called Wessex. A network of people interested in music should accept responsibility for promoting in Bodmin and Truro, Wimborne and Weymouth. This could be the local manager of a record shop, musician or music fan. A local group can headline a dance and be supported by a band from a town further away, this being reciprocated by the support group in their home town. Steve Smith, guitarist and singer with Wimborne's Martian Schoolgirls, is currently organizing the League's English tour of November 1980. This helps a local musician work, decentralizes the industry from London, and is the beginning of a local network independent of Mogul Pressure. Recently the number of rock venues of various sizes has increased in the Wimborne area, despite the recession. Recording studios are well established outside London, such as Rockfield in Monmouth, and others in Bath, Reading and elsewhere. This enables national groups to base themselves in the provinces. And once Wessex has its network of reciprocating units it can build up exchanges with the networks of Cumbria and Mercia.

See you at the Brewster Arms?