live music | Joe Jots

Last night’s adventure was the first date on Italian progressives The Watch’s ambitious tour alternating performances of Genesis classics The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Foxtrot/Selling England by the Pound. And they pulled it off admirably, save for the occasional opening night glitch. The tour also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the release of The Lamb.

The Watch currently consists of Simone Rossetti (lead vocals, flute, keyboards, synthesisers), Valerio De Vittorio (keyboards, synthesisers, guitars, vocals), Mattia Rossetti (bass, guitars, vocals), Francesco Vaccarezza (drums, percussion, vocals) and Andrea Giustiniani (lead guitars). My friend Cheryl and I were stood right at the front of a mostly sold-out venue (Boerderij in Zoetermeer, a pretty friendly room that hosts a lot of prog/tribute acts) just to the right of Rossetti with Vittorio and Vaccarezza in clear sight.

Now, I listened to The Lamb a lot as a kid, though mostly the first two sides of this double-album set. I read the notes and lyrics assiduously, and the way Cheryl tells it, she listened a lot as well. It’s a daunting, musically ambitious album that had a lot of appeal to me for the crazy storyline (found in small print across the inside of the gatefold; if you only had the CD, it was impossible to read) and weird theatricality. For those unfamiliar with the plot, Rael, a small-time Brooklyn hood, finds himself trapped in a weird fantasy world, one step ahead of or behind his brother John. Each experience is told more than shown, but that’s fine, it’s prog rock. At certain points of the show, a voiceover gave the audience occasional snippets of that text.

The whole show was an admirable recreation of the album with no effects, save for lighting and a backdrop reminiscent of the album’s cover.

The sound mix from my perspective was good, but Giustiniani’s recreation of Steve Hackett’s intricate guitar work was too low. This may have had something to do with how close to the stage I was. Simone’s vocals took a little while to get up to the task – this might also have had to do with mixing, but he was also, I think a little nervous. After the third or fourth song, he was in full Peter Gabriel form. Extra shout-outs for backing vocals from Mattia and especially Francesco from behind the drum kit. Simone, as an Italian performing for a Dutch audience, didn’t do much of the between song banter that Genesis-era Peter Gabriel was known for. The exception was the introduction to Counting Out Time, a tale of teenage pre-sexual experience angst, solved with the help of a book on the the erogenous zones. This he read out from a sheet with admirable Dutch pronunciation. (This, however, was also an opening night glitch – he read it before Back in NYC, the song that precedes Counting Out Time. Whatever. He still gets points.)

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is an attempt at a rock opera (released not that long after Tommy and Quadrophenia), and makes attempts at theatricality in its bombast. The Watch held our attention from an otherwise bare stage for the duration. While the story might bog down a bit in the second half, the recreation was fantastic. And this music (prog, after all) is not easy. I spent much of the show watching Francesco’s drumming. There was a moment during The Waiting Room which brought me joy – he was concentrating on a pretty complex figure and when he completed it, his face had a huge smile. Whatever the phrase ‘nailed it’ is in Italian, he did.

After a fair amount of musical meandering, Rael emerges into daylight and the main show concludes with the pure 4/4 rock and roll joy of IT.

For the main set (broken by a short intermission), Mattia only played one instrument, a double neck bass/12-string (and several effects pedals). However, there were two more guitars on stage. What else are they going to play. After another short break, the band came back and Simone looked confused for a second, then tapped the tablet on his music stand before saying something like ‘ah, that’s the encore.’ Yes, he had a tablet and a couple of notes at his side, but barely looked at them through the whole show. Not that I blame any singer with a massive piece of music to sing the crutch of the occasional lyric sheet. The band kicked into The Musical Box, a multi-part epic from 1971’s Nursery Cryme (and possibly my favourite Genesis song, though there are other candidates) which they hit out of the park. (Here’s The Watch performing it at Boerderij two years ago.)

I left the venue with a massive grin on my face – Seeing this formative soundtrack of my adolescence performed in full by stunningly talented musicians who obviously also have a love for it was definitely one off the bucket list.

A gent named Channing Kennedy recently wrote a piece called Face It, Live Music Kinda Sucks for Talking Points Memo in which he went to great lengths to discuss how the live music experience falls short of expectations. I shared it because my wife and I don’t see eye to eye about going to gigs. For her the hassle of getting to a gig even for a band she really loves and standing up for several hours is not generally outweighed by the joy of listening to musicians who really love what they’re doing do it well.

Kennedy puts forth his bona fides: ran a small record label, played in a few bands, and has been to a lot of gigs. On my part: I’ve bought a lot of music from small labels and I’ve been to a lot of gigs. From my first, Donna Summer at the Hollywood Bowl in (I think) 1980 to my most recent, Kraftwerk in Amsterdam two weeks ago.

He then asserts that “musicians you don’t know will bore you to death.” Could be. I saw Mr. Mister in 1984 (an opening slot for Adam Ant), just a couple years before their hits. I wished I’d known to watch the drummer. He has manned the sticks with King Crimson since the mid-90s and is mind-blowing. Was he in ’84 (or even in ’87 when you couldn’t escape Broken Wings and Kyrie)? Not sure. I’ve seen plenty of acts whose music I didn’t know, but whose work I happily purchased after the gig. A couple years ago I saw an EBM crew called Covenant because a friend played keyboards for the opening act. Bloody brilliant. A few years ago I saw Sunn O))) for (what I hope is) the first time. I’d heard their shows were quite intense and decided not to listen to anything they’d done before the gig. Mindbending. Allow yourself the whole experience.

Consider the jazz made in the late 40s and early 50s. Even if you’d heard recordings by Miles or Dizzy before seeing them, what you heard on any given night bore little resemblance to those sides. The same is true of music with any improvisational aspect today.

What distinguishes your experience of musicians you know vs. musicians you don’t is your openness to what the person on stage is doing. Close yourself and it’s dull; open yourself and oh gracious, what a beautiful thing that guy just did with his voice.

Kennedy’s next point is that “the musicians you love will disappoint you.” Live performance is a risk. Musicians have off nights; audiences are capricious; venue policies can spoil even the most well-conceived evening. He describes one of his first gigs: They Might Be Giants, who were just two middle-aged guys playing clever music. The complaint: The show didn’t resemble Van Halen’s Jump video. Did he not notice David Lee Roth’s multiple costume changes in the course of one 3-minute pop song? TMBG disappointed because the writer wasn’t up for the experience of the evening. (Note also the writer’s admission that he attended with a girl he’d just broken up with. That’d put a wet blanket on any gig. I saw David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails with my wife (previous) and a guy she was having an affair with. It was a fantastic show, but I was not the ideal audience. Next time Bowie came to town, I went alone.) The artists you love offer you nothing more than the opportunity to see and hear them perform (depending on your place in the venue). Adjust your expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed. If you’re grown up enough to do so.

The writer’s comments about TMBG and Van Halen, however, come from his next supporting argument: Live music, as a medium, is structurally flawed. His assertion here is that the tension between an audience wanting to hear exactly what’s on the album goes head to head with their desire to hear something new in the music and the artist’s desire/lack thereof to actually perform. In the 80s, Bruce Springsteen released a slow, mournful arrangement of Born To Run which he used briefly in his live sets. Artistic freedom, yes, but I was also relieved that the version he played when I saw him the following year was closer to that on the album. Springsteen might be an exceptional case because of his sheer showmanship. Few young artists can dredge up the experience Bruce’s thousands of road hours provide him. Again, there’s got to be a trust between performer and audience that the experience is not one way.

Kennedy then goes after the nature of the booking system. Acts get booked based on a lot of factors that aren’t talent or entertainment value. Fair enough, but that has little to do with live music as a whole being lousy. What it means is that, especially at the low-budget end of the live music spectrum, there will be surprises no matter the gig. And that’s part of the experience. To be fair, he talked about hustling for gigs and getting cut slack because his band were “two white males with college-town cultural fluency”. That doesn’t speak well for him or his band, but one clapping to him for acknowledging his privilege.

His concluding advice to bands, venues, and audiences is an effort to make live music kinda suck less and points up that he’s not so much against all live music but against the aspects of it that have become unbearable. I’m with him on that.

And Neil Young’s Union Man, from which we get the line “Live Music Is Better Bumper Stickers Should Be Issued”.

Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid – The Watch Plays The Lamb

Live music doesn’t suck