Bill Bruford

Rummaging through his early Yes posters for an upcoming book project, Bill came across this fine example of the sort of intricate poster art that was much used on the European scene in the 60s and 70s. Before local rock radio and TV carried paid announcements for upcoming gigs, most of the local concert promotion was by heavy use of posters, which could be quite elaborate.

Interesting to note the highest ticket price for this 1971 gig of 75p was about $1.15, and the lowest - 40p - about 62 cents! This poster and another from the Bruford archive will be in the ‘Art of British Rock’ by Mike Evans, published later this month by the Elephant Book Company. More details as they become available.

The music for the CD If Summer Had Its Ghosts.

Several people have written recently asking about Bill's material in sheet music form. Just a reminder that 44 instrumental parts to some 15 Bruford compositions are available for download from Sheet Music Direct.com. Costs incurred in transcription and preparing the material for upload are high, so we don't anticipate any further uploads for a while unless demand goes off the scale.

On stage May 1969: L-R Banks, Bruford, Anderson, Squire

Sal suggests that very little has been said about Yes’ first album, so I thought I’d try to be helpful.

Of course we Yesmen were new to each other, and from wildly different musical, social, and geographical backgrounds. In a country where regional accents can vary within 60 miles, and somebody who lives 250 miles north of London (Jon Anderson, Accrington) can be virtually unintelligible to a southerner, it may come as a surprise to North American Yes-watchers that early Yessers had practically nothing in common. Jon was all Sibelius, Beach Boys and vocal harmony, as was Chris. I was a jazzer who wanted to be Max Roach who knew little about rock or vocal-orientated music. (Harold Land was a hard-bop tenor saxophone player, dead now, but quite why we named a song after him I can’t remember.) Pete was big into being Pete Townsend but knew Wes Montgomery’s octave-sound. And I don’t think anyone asked Tony Kaye what he liked.

From this unlikely smorgasboard we had to fashion something. Perhaps more than contemporay bands, we were a ‘covers’ band. We played music from the Fifth Dimension, the Beatles, David Crosby, and Leonard Bernstein, inserted vast amounts of ripped off digestible classical music and TV themes, and made the whole lot sound like a cross between Vanilla Fudge and the Beach Boys. My kind of band!

I suspect I thought we were great – in the manner of most 18-year olds. Atlantic gave us a four-page recording contract, and off to the studio we went. Probably Advision, then in Bond Street, London. It was my first time recording, and I had to learn fast. I remember it only dawned on me at the end that you could alter the mix you got in the headphones. I hung on through grim death through the album with a deafening Peter Banks in one ear and precious little of anything in the other – quite a feat when you remember much of ‘I See You’ is a guitar and drums duet.

I detect vibes on Yesterday and Today. Jon was entirely encouraging to all comers on all instruments, irrespective of ability, in an early presage of his love of an orchestrally-wide tonal pallette. Tony Kaye stuck religiously to his Hammond organ, and the minute we found a Rick Wakeman who was able to deliver a much broader range of sound colours, Tony’s days were numbered. My mallet playing got as far as Fracture with Robert Fripp and King Crimson, and my own first albums with Bruford, but then I let it drift, with too much else to do.

We didn’t know any producers - other than George Martin, who was probably busy - and didn’t know anything about production. Accordingly we were assigned someone called Paul Clay who ensured that the stuff got safely to tape, with some sort of stereo image and not too much distortion. That was about the extent of that. I don’t remember attending any mixing sessions.

A possible moral of the story for young bands starting out is that I’m a keen believer in starting with covers, but then ‘re-imagining’ them when you are beginning to find your stylistic feet. If you already know the Star-Spangled (Mangled?) Banner, it’s a lot easier to detect the bit about it that is specifically Hendrix when he plays it. If you know Bernstein’s ‘America’, you can more easily hear Keith Emerson’s Hammond organ spitting fire all over it. Covers are a good place to start, you don’t have to write your own stuff until you are more confident.

So, all in all, Yes’ first was a simple, naïve affair. A beginners’ album which got us some headway, and most importantly gave the budding Anderson-Squire writing partnership its first recorded results. It sold poorly after great reviews.

After at least a decade of frantic music-business-related computerising, it may be helpful to try to stand back and attempt to assess the net effect of the arrival of the machine into our musicianly lives. I’m 61. That’s important because it places one immediately into a context – I was about 50 when the computer came crashing into my analogue world. I and people my age had to learn from the ground up, probably starting with learning how to type. The digital native / digital immigrant distinction is useful. Broadly anyone under thirty-ish has grown up with the computer and may be called a digital native. Anyone who had to learn about it in maturity is a digital immigrant. We immigrants may learn the language more or less efficiently, but we don’t speak it like the natives.

The personal net effect of all this, viewed in the round, is that the years of computing have driven me away from music-making, rather than towards it. Perhaps the web has made it simultaneously harder for those of us who were already musicians to continue being musicians, and easier for those of us who weren’t musicians to become one. Those of us who had a slice of the pie (the pie being audience attention) have been forced to hand over some pie to the beginners. My problem is that the so-called democratisation of music-making has produced such an unholy racket that I can no longer conceive of contributing to the din, let alone trying to persuade anyone to listen to my particular din, let even more alone asking them to pay for my new din. Like a bloke with too much food on his plate, all I can feel is queasy.

The web too often introduces a false sense of intimacy. You feel you know me, and I feel I know you. After all, we’re just the other side of this bit of glass, right? We blog, we’re pals. Well, not really. The relationships I now trust are those with friends family and people standing in the same room as me. They’re identifiable and authentic. Same with my music-making – identifiable, authentic, and in the same room at the same time, please. Hence my move towards jazz, which most definitely fits that description. Everything else is just jigging about in cyber-space.

So, for me, the net effect of a decade of jigging about at the keyboard has had the unintended consequence of heightening my belief in - and desire for - the real, tangible, immediate, and authentic. I thirst for almost anything the computer cannot provide, and funnily enough that's quite a bit. Now that the glitzy gloss of sampling, fakery, pro-tooling and anyone-can-do-it wizardry has begun to tarnish, I’m sort of left where I started, only more so. How do you feel?

With Nick Meier, guitarist, modelling the Sum/Win T-shirt at my place.

It seems to me that after an exit from the upper reaches of almost any profession, the retiree has only a short window of currency, (if that’s possible). By that I mean any doctor, lawyer, musician or anthropologist has the essential knowledge in his head, at his fingertips, and on immediate call, for perhaps just a couple of years after he leaves his particular discipline. Such is the speed of development in any area of curiosity, any stockpile of knowledge or skill-set will start to look crusty alarmingly quickly. When you’re no longer in the game, you lose it fast. The black book of contacts seems redundant, and suddenly you don’t recognise the name of anyone on the cover of the drum magazine. And you’ve never even heard of the famous band they’re in.

I’ve been gone a year and a half, and already it shows. Who’s who?! What, if anything, does my experience of the analogue, for-money world I inhabited have to offer the brave new citizens of the digital, for-free music world we now have? At my various lectures and talks to students, the big questions are ‘What will the business look like tomorrow’, and ‘Can I earn a living on a drumkit?’ ‘Your guess is as good as mine’, and ‘with difficulty’, are I suppose the honest if uninspiring answers.

BTW, anybody interested in the online marketing of music - as most of us are, I suspect – could do no worse than check out the thoughts of Andrew Dubber http://www.andrewdubber.com/about/ . His free e-book ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online‘ is required reading for musicians and independent music businesses. http://www.newmusicstrategies.com/ebook . Best analysis of the pickle we find ourselves in that I’ve yet come across.

The new site is up and running. Hope you enjoy it! Lift the bonnet, kick the tyres, poke the interior and generally have a good rummage around. Let the Guestbook know of anything that doesn’t work, broken links, and things that stink. I’ve personally added a fair few links, snippets, CD and DVD descriptions, details, and hitherto little known gubbings, and done a lot of what the wonderful Declan Colgan over at Panegyric Recordings (who distribute King Crimson’s physical product) is pleased to call ‘curating’. I’d never thought of that term connected to anything other than the visual arts, but Crimson, Panegyric, and, to a lesser extent, Summerfold and Winterfold catalogues are all blossoming at some speed, and the audio or aural arts require curating every bit as much as the visual.

As I will be withdrawing from questions and answers when the new site is established, this will be my last crop carried over from the Forum on the old site:

SOME ANSWERS:

Thanks to all for May 17th birthday greetings, and to Andy McDuffie - 5/18/2010 2:29:15 AM for his suggestion that I become a talking-head, a sort of ‘post-percussive Palin’. I’ll let you know…!

Michael Bettine - 5/18/2010 6:30:47 AM - good to hear from you Michael – missed the deep irony of "Phew - I should write a book about this stuff” which comment ended my last blog. I have in fact written a book, Michael, exactly on this stuff. Have a look at the home page of my site.

Pleased to hear Crimson is playing in Matt - 5/21/2010 5:52:33 AM ‘s supermarket. Now that’s odd! Thanks to Kevin Morrissey - 5/24/2010 11:22:47 PM for his Ian Anderson lyric, and comment about the Age of Information on ‘Gradually Going Tornado’. I did indeed write the song’s lyrics, and the lyrics to The Sliding Floor and Plans for J.D. I think Dave and I knocked out the words to Gothic 17 together. Broadly though, I reckon singers do better – somehow sound more convincing - singing their own words rather than somebody else’s.

Roger Norway - 5/27/2010 1:07:40 AM says ‘ Guess you still are in possession of a drum kit / home studio? Do you use it at all these days? If you should stumble across some great music while playing around, what would you do with it? Yes, Roger, I have drums set-up and enjoy playing. It’s great for the mind. An hour a day keeps the doctor away. The last part of you question is, I regret, now unlikely!

Dan Page - 6/3/2010 5:30:53 PM questions the whole basis of tribute bands. Me too, Dan – it completely beats me. But more than the musicians who are just fulfilling a demand, isn’t it weird that one of the biggest and most profitable part of the live scene is tribute bands? Why does the customer seem so happy to shell out a fortune for a tame re-tread of something he had 30 years ago? Not even the thing he had 30 years ago, but a facsimile? Now I know I’m losing it.

Mitch - 6/7/2010 7:01:12 AM was wondering “how Crim was received in the UK versus USA or all of ‘prog rock’ for that matter. What do you think of the style and direction of Carla Bley?” Mitch – I assume (maybe wrongly) you are in the USA? – whatever you do in the UK, sooner or later you’re going to have to do it overseas. The place is so small and the opinion-makers so over-heated that you can be built up and shot down in a week. The US moves much slower in it’s critical judgments. So for a while we were very well loved in the UK, but having established international success, the traditional way here is to be trashed, especially if that international success has been hard-won in the US. The critical vitriol poured on Crimson was sufficiently heavy in the UK to ensure that we hardly ever played here, and then Robert wasn’t keen. To my shame, I don’t know Carla’s work.

Do go back to the Forum and read Dane Terry - 6/8/2010 11:35:05 AM. Thanks for the interesting post, Dane, which compares treatment of drummers in the West to the esteem in which they are held in Bali (and also in much of African, Indian, Asian and Oriental culture!) No, not yet been to Bali, but it would be great. Maybe now there’s time.

Gerald Murphy - 17/06/2010 08:33:05 is on the re-union thing, and asking would I do an 80’s KC? Not if I can help it! It’s precisely because I loved the 80s band so much that I would be highly unlikely to try to recreate the same thing, a mission I fear destined to failure. My experience of reunions, has, on the whole, been underwhelming.

Roger Norway - 18/06/2010 02:26:44 asks “don't you feel that the whole (prog) era has been deleted from the history of rock?… I love 70s prog and think the best of it is in no way inferior to jazz or classical or any other art form…. As a drummer, who are your favorites among the many talented prog rock drummers, and is there any other musical moments in 70s prog rock, except from the ones you contributed to, that really meant something to you?

If you were to convince a music lover that progressive rock really had it's moments, what would you recommend?”

Roger, I’m perhaps not quite the fan of progressive rock that you are. In the UK it now has a couple of dedicated national magazines which cater for this very unfashionable music, a bit like heavy metal. It’s studied at University on courses based on several academic analyses, so I don’t think it’s been forgotten. In fact I’m writing the Foreword to Will Romano’s new book on this very subject as we speak, due out in the Fall.

The ‘unfashionable’ prog and metal continue to be quietly big sellers, unlikely the ‘fashionable’ new bands which have generally some way to go before they out-sell a modest King Crimson album from the days when people paid for the music. If you’re going to be progressive about something, there will be striking successes and abject failures. The rock industry could afford a progressive movement when there was money around. In return for its ‘investment’, it got blindingly good records like ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ ,Soft Machine’s first, or Art Bears ‘Hopes and Fears’, and the huge amounts of dross that inevitably followed. I can’t separate drummers from the music they are generating and the genre they are working in, no matter how talented thay might be. So in the sense that I’m cool about prog, I’m pretty cool about prog drummers. I hope I don’t have to apologise when I say I just always preferred jazz. Perhaps that’s what I brought to prog.

Over at the new Guestbook Don Smith - 6/20/2010 in a generous effort to fill my summer, recommends ‘making a drumming documentary film yourself (never mind all the funding, writing and production headaches)? If your autobiography is any indication, the odds are better than fair that it would be informative and entertaining’ with a spin-off scholarly book on the evolution of drumset playing. Thanks, Don, for keeping me busy! Any drum-crazy TV producers out there with a hefty budget?

Rich - 10/07/2010 – I’m afraid the offer to do signed copies of the book expired some time ago.

Finally, Stephen V. 10.07.2010 has questions about a C2C hike I did recently:

How long did it take? Leisurely pace – about 16 days for 200 miles.

How did your body (and feet) hold up? –No problem, but you have to look out for blisters.

What sorts of insights did you realize? After walking that far, you have this insane idea that you could and should walk everywhere. It doesn’t last long.

What was your favorite area? The Swaledale valley. Something like the Garden of Eden, I imagine.

How was the food? Repetitive English pub food. Bulky.

Did you use maps only or use a GPS? No GPS, but on a couple of scary occasions I appended myself to a group of walkers who had one, and latched on to them.

And, did anyone recognize the retired drummer? If so, did you "fess up" or play coy? Naturally walkers are going to discuss their occupations. Yes, mine caused bit of a stir, in a gentle, British kind of way. They’ve read about ‘rock stars’.

Maybe it would be appropriate to close this blog with a mantra that has certainly been central to my limited thinking for as long as I can remember. ‘It doesn’t matter where you take it from, it’s where you take it to that counts’. Write that on your snare head, or stick a post-it on your computer with it on, and don’t you forget it.

Been nice chatting with you, and enjoy the new site.