From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V12 #92 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Tuesday, October 23 2007 Volume 12 : Number 092 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [pt] Recording shows [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal)] Re: [pt] RE: precious-things-digest V12 #90 [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Ric] [pt] More theatrics than magic in Amos show [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Ric] [pt] Videotaping Policy for shows [dlynngarrett@aol.com] Re: [pt] Videotaping Policy for shows [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard H] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:48:18 -0500 (CDT) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: Re: [pt] Recording shows Replying here to Karen, mainly as regards Philly: > Yeah, I agree totally Richard - she was so aware that she was being > recorded during the Tori section. As the set progressed it was > apparent that the songs she chose were ones that had been safely > performed the previous few nights, and these versions were very > contained, no exploring the melody or stretching at the edges. As I suspected, although I did not compare setlists. The Santa repeat was a major hint, though. Not the first time she's used concerts leading up to an "event concert" as a warm-up, at least in part. And I don't have a problem with her wanting things to be well-rehearsed before performing an event concert, nor do I object to her using concerts right before a special one to make sure she's got some things down, but into a tour of what I believe was 53 concerts before Philly, I have to wonder what the heck might still need rehearsing! I have to believe that she wanted to do "special" versions of some songs to be the ones for posterity; canonical live versions, if you will. I doubt I'll ever be in a position to check version against version from this tour to have some demonstrable evidence of this, but that's what I have to think. And there was something she did for a TV taping in 1999 that wasn't the way she'd been doing it . . . crap, I think it was the Vegas taping for the Pay-Per-View, but I see I didn't say anything about this in my 1999 concert notebook. I think they left off the Liberace spoken intro for Pro Widow at that concert, and the obvious reason to do that was copyright, as it was lifted from a videotape of his TV shows in the 1950s. And then at the Hard Rock Live taping on 15 Oct 1999, the final anything she seems ever to have done with Caton, she didn't do the soaring ending in Riot Poof that I'd come to love on that tour, so that was a disappointment. The song wasn't included in the TV program, anyway. But that HRL taping was not disappointing overall, and I'll go as far as saying that it was the best Precious I ever heard her do with a band. It was as-TON-ishing! So there's nothing inherent about the event concerts that requires them to disappoint, but if nothing else, the X factor certainly is raised along with the stakes. Maybe she'll hit some of these upcoming recorded-for-release concerts for six, as they say in cricket. I hope so. > During the extended song openings she sometimes closed her eyes, > tilted her head back, smiled and looked quite delirious, and then the > song would begin and she'd go into rote. Some of the intros in Philly were particularly nice, yeah. They can elicit a good reaction from an audience. Her intro for Purple People was obviously devised not to reveal the song until providing an "aha" moment well into it. > Why can't she record everything... Did she say something from the stage at the Philly concert about legal reasons with some venues preventing it, or did I see that someplace? In any event, I'm sure she doesn't want to release even a single leg of a tour, if for no other reason than because she can't micro-manage it into oblivion. Anyone who's been around for a while and paid much attention knows how she is. She even calls herself an antfucker in interviews. A good friend with Epic told me in early 2003 that the recording and release of concerts was something in the offing, but it wasn't anything I expected would be done in an expansive way as Pearl Jam did, even though the PJ example had been something of a model for the concept. So even after *that*, it took until 2005 for anything to come out, and it was only six concerts. Someone sent me the supposed list of concerts they plan to release this time, although I thought she said from the stage in Philly that it was the first one they were doing. Syracuse, NY 10-13-2007 Philadelphia, PA 10-15-2007 Boston, MA 10-18-2007 Boston, MA 10-19-2007 Buffalo, NY 10-24-2007 Detroit, MI 10-27-2007 Pittsburgh, PA 10-30-2007 Milwaukee, WI 11-03-2007 Chicago, IL 11-05-2007 So if they really don't do Syracuse, that leaves a total of eight. She and "they" just aren't getting this concept. And I have to say, I tried to get her to do this more than once, first, in 1996. (She once told me I'm Mercury, but in this instance, I'm more Cassandra.) It's just a nightmare up and down this way. I tried to find that list myself, and at least in the Opera browser, it was telling me I needed to upgrade Java. I went to the link they gave to do just that, and then was told that for a Mac, I needed the most recent version of the Mac OS to get the newest Java, and that just ain't gonna be happening anytime in the visible future. So as idiotic and microfucked-within-an-inch-of-its-life that this is anyway, they aren't making them nearly as accessible as they could for people who may want to buy this stuff. Isn't this thought to be one of the main reasons the record biz is so screwed at this point; they're so technologically behind the curve of being able to sell people recordings online, that stealing them becomes the main recourse for a lot of people? If they don't want my business, I can live with that. Not the first time. But still dumb. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:23:24 -0500 (CDT) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: Re: [pt] RE: precious-things-digest V12 #90 Replying to Tom: > It surprises me that people think that Tori wasn't really "on" at the > Philly show. I enjoyed it very much. It's always interesting to me how people hear things with such different ears. In this instance, I wish I had *your* ears. Everyone has their own personal relationship with music they hear, that's just how it is. > While I liked the set list at the 2nd NYC show more, I thought her > performance at Philly was more energetic. Energy can be good, but the expression behind it is important. I could take a sledgehammer and hurl it somewhere, and it would have a lot of energy, but maybe it wouldn't have much personal expression in it. Depending on where I hurled it, though, it certainly *could*. :-) I think a lot of the people who haven't much liked the solo tours since 1996 are probably missing some of that raw energy of the DDI Tour. I miss the DDI Tour, but have a lot of recordings I can play if I ever want to. One can't reverse time. I found the 2001 and 2005 solo tours to have much more craft in the performances than did the 1996 tour. Let's call it: experience over youthful exuberance. If one craves the raw energy more, one might miss the higher craft in the other concerts. If one loved the craft of later tours, maybe one missed perceiving the energy in the earlier tour. If one only wants specific things from music, one will be interested in a less wide variety of music. That's axiomatic, isn't it? If I only wanted to buy a blue car, I wouldn't find as many cars that I was interested in as I would if I didn't much care about the color, would I? All these concerts are Tori Amos concerts. I don't have specific desires that they be a certain way. I'm much like that in general when it comes to music. A week ago today, I went to a Ravi and Anoushka Shankar concert at the Kennedy Center. Much more music is deeply meaningful for me than just Tori Amos music, and certainly much more music is meaningful for me than just a particular shade or *era* of Tori Amos music. I've seen Johnny Rotten live five times, and I saw Frank Sinatra four times. I saw The Dead like 23 times--once in 1976, at the Tower in Philly. I mainly want music to give me an authentic experience by bringing me along with it one moment to the next. Whatever a given music does to cause that is often fine for me. Bring it on. Some people may need a music to create a sense of belonging with a social group, or to express something they also feel about life, or any large number of other things. Seeing how different people prefer different Tori concerts is fascinating. I have no idea what you want from a concert, Tom, nor do I know what anyone else wants. But it varies a lot from one person to the next. I hear some music that I know is great for some people, even great on something of an objective basis, but it doesn't much interest me. Who knows? > I did think "Leather" was a bit stale, but the sublime versions of > "Cloud on My Tongue" and "Liquid Diamonds" more than made up for that. Cloud and Liquid in Philly were pretty good for me, if not exactly special. And once in 2005 she shocked the hell out of me by performing an extremely heartfelt Leather, so one never knows. I'd begun the 2001 tour, and the D.C. show was the seventh one of the tour. She'd done I think it was four Leathers in the first six concerts, and in D.C., that repeated note started. I was just to the right in the fourth row, and I focused all the concentration I could muster looking right at her with, "DON'T play Leather, DON'T play Leather . . ." And she *stopped*!! It scared the hell out of me! I thought, "This WORKS and I never TRIED IT before?!?!" It turned out that she accidentally skipped a song on the setlist because she had a hard time reading it for some reason, and then she went back to Leather where it was supposed to go as the following song. Had me going, there! Funny stuff. Leather happens. > Was there a problem with the bass? On "1,000 Oceans" and "Pancake" it > seemed overbearingly loud. Interesting. I saw Jon's bass tech handing him one instrument after the other all night long. That alone was almost a distraction. Might have been something about a particular instrument that was prone to booming in your part of the house because of the acoustics. My old boss who's a major audiophile went to the August 1998 D.C. arena concert, and he was somewhere on the floor not too far back, and said the sound was DREADFUL, mainly due to too much and too muddy bass. I was in a sky box with a bunch of talking people, so I had my own problems with the sound at that concert (as well as needing to refrain from committing arguably justifiable homicide), but too much bass wasn't one of them. I had my ears set to hear whether there was too much bass in Philly, because I've heard people complain about this for years at the band concerts, and specifically, some people have mentioned it over this tour, and I never had a complaint about the sound all night. I think Mark does an excellent job, and I always have. So I have to chalk it up to people being in certain areas in a given house, and people having ears that differ along with expectation. The list of variables that affect someone's perception of a concert is enormous. My concert could well have been ruined by a slow waitress at dinner before even going *into* the theater. Glad she was wonderful. I gave her a stupid tip in thanks. At my friend's concert the weekend before, a drunk couple was talking real loud near me, and I got the waiter to try to get them to shut the hell up, and he rushed them to pay their bill and leave when they didn't quiet down. But I still got more out of her concert than I did from Tori's. Sometimes things compound into creating a suck-a-thon of magnum proportions. The drunk couple was one incident, but it didn't wreck the whole concert for me. For me, Tori's concert kept feeling more and more disconnected over the entirety of it, although I won't say that each song was more disconnected than the prior one. But after a while, you reach a point where the frustration with the whole thing dominates your perception of it. People sometimes ask me whether it's cold outside today. Not to *me* it isn't, but I can tell you what the thermometer at my front door said as I left the house. You comfortable at 68 degrees with low humidity? Some people are freezing at 68 degrees with low humidity. There are no such metrics for music. It's too big an area to usefully quantify much of it. Humans are the only animals with a sense of art. I say this, despite knowing that there are many animals in the world who paint. Art is the main thing that separates us from the rest of the animals. Plenty of subtle and unexplainable things go on with art to create the unique experience of it that each of us has, even at the same concert. In real ways, we each experience a different concert. A sporting event has a final score, and fans may argue over referee calls, but there are rules, and the score turned out to be 5-4 or whatever it was, and everyone knows what the score ended up being. For the most part, I don't care about sports. But I'm interested in hearing about the concerts that other people experienced in the same room. It's endlessly fascinating to me. Thanks for the conversation. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:44:33 -0500 (CDT) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: [pt] More theatrics than magic in Amos show [I wrote this woman earlier in the week to compliment her on a Regina Spektor concert review, so I think she may know whereof she heard. - --RAH] http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2007/10/20/more_theatrics_than_magic_in_amos_show?mode=PF The Boston Globe MUSIC REVIEW More theatrics than magic in Amos show By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | October 20, 2007 A severe young woman in black vinyl and blue silk commandeered Tori Amos's piano at the Orpheum Thursday night. She shivered and shook under her inky shag, grabbed her crotch and clutched at her throat, and sang glam anthems - on her knees for "Fat Slut," and with a leg cocked high on the piano bench during "Teenage Hustling." This was Pip, one of five characters Amos assembled to deliver the songs on her most recent album, "American Doll Posse." Amos performs the first portion of each show on her current tour as one of these female archetypes; it's a signature Amos theme - the pursuit of wholeness - taken to a new level of theatricality. By the luck of the draw, the deliriously devoted crowd at the first of Amos's two Boston shows was subjected to a swaggering mini-set by the least likable girl in the bunch. It looked to be liberating for the artist but was a less-gratifying exercise for those of us untransformed by sexy costumes or heavy concepts. Pip's battering rock songs are the least-interesting tracks on "American Doll Posse," and while she only sang six of them, Amos didn't ever quite lose that character's disaffected persona and penchant for poses. And that meant less heartfelt expression from the musical oracle fans know and love. Amos performed as Tori (also one of the characters in the Posse) for the rest of the nearly 2 1/2-hour concert, stomping heartily through new tunes "Big Wheel" and "Bouncing Off Clouds," a shimmering dance number, as well as the older gems "Crucify" and "Cornflake Girl," "Jackie's Strength" and "Concertina." Amos improvised a saucy paean to Miss Massachussetts, who attended the show in her beauty-pageant sash. With the help of her crack band (guitarist Dan Phelps, bassist Jon Evans, and the incomparable drummer Matt Chamberlain), Amos scaled a handful of fresh musical peaks, transforming "Take to the Sky" with reams of fluid grooves and cobbling an all-new "Hotel" from shifting walls of majestic sound. Gorgeous lighting that resembled spinning galaxies contributed to the celestial ambience. But for all the sonic innovation and conceptual theatrics, there was little human drama here. Amos produced few magical moods, fewer meaningful silences, and nary a cosmic-grade revelation - once her stock-in-trade, and the very things that endear her to an audience hungry for more than verse and chorus. Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae/ music/blog. (c) Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:16:46 -0400 From: dlynngarrett@aol.com Subject: [pt] Videotaping Policy for shows Can anyone out there give me some input on videotaping at the shows.? Obviously there is a ton of footage posted on Undented and YouTube so people are recording.? With all of the mini recording devices out there it would be easy to get a song or two recorded but?has anyone out there seen people recording with small hand held videocameras?? Just wondering how tolerant security is at the venues this year. Lynn ________________________________________________________________________ Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:21:09 -0500 (CDT) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: Re: [pt] Videotaping Policy for shows Responding to Lyn: > Just wondering how tolerant security is at the venues this year. Security is always local in its enforcement. This is a general statement related to going to the concerts. I walked into the Tower in Philly with a small bag of figs and bulky keys in my pockets, what not, and got nary a glance. Some venues will pat you down and make you empty your pockets. If you can watch to see how the people going in before you are being dealt with on their way in, you can see how your venue is operating. I once forgot to leave a bulky disposible camera in my car at a concert where they were as strict as I've seen on the way in, and because I was wearing a heavy winter coat, it wasn't a problem. No coincidence that that concert wasn't recorded by anything better than what sounds like someone's mini-cassette voice recorder they'd stuck between their legs. Good luck. And thanks for trying. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V12 #92 *************************************