saw Andy Summers...

[tommy p]

ICYMI Andy Summers is on a small theater tour showing his photography, telling a few stories, and playing some guitar.  I'm a massive Police fan so I checked him out recently at the Beacon Theater in Hopewell, VA (great place to see a show BTW).  I had no idea what to expect and had not read any reviews/reports on earlier shows.

First of all, the guy is 80!  I can hardly believe that.  He looked great and healthy.  He had a chair and his amps, a large video monitor on the floor facing up so he could watch it, and just offstage a tech guy running things.  He played his red Strat all night except for one or two songs when he switched to an E335-type guitar.  Sadly neither his iconic Tele, the Gittler, nor anyHamers made an appearance.  I was in the the pit area right at the stage in my Hamer t-shirt hoping he would notice it but he didn't.  There are little tables in the pit and I also had a Police album cover and his book sitting on mine.  Other people had signable items too, but before the show even started someone from the venue walked through the pit and told us "Don't call outto him, don't point at those items, don't hold up your Sharpie, don't move toward the stage, NOTHING!  You can stand if you stay right in front of your seat."  OK then, I guess he's not signing anything or coming out after the show!

He opened by playing improv guitar behind 3 or 4 slide shows of his photography.  The photography was interesting, but the guitar accompaniment was not all that interesting or impressive.  He just slapped on a ton of effects (and not in a tasteful, intentional "going for a certain sound" way like you might expect from his work in the Police) and noodled.  Literally - he was playing nothing.  It was like a kid sitting in his bedroom turning on a bunch of effects and just making random sounds.  No key, no hook, no rhythm, no melody.  I was very worried I was going to have to sit through 90 minutes of that, but he did end up doing other things.

After 20 minutes of those "soundscapes" (I'm being kind by not calling it "noise") he started speaking a little.  He made some jokes, told a couple of stories, and did little intros to some of the actual songs he played.  He introduced one saying "This is a track off my last album.  None of you have heard it, but it was big in Siberia."  He got my attention when he finally said something about doing a song from "a group he was once in" which turned out to Tea in the Sahara by the Police.  He did 6 or 7 Police songs throughout the night to radically reworked backing tracks but he DIDN'T PLAY THE GUITAR PARTS; he played the vocal melodies.  That was a disappointment.  It would have been great to see how he played some of that stuff and it would have even been OK if he had played something like Walking in Your Footsteps which has guitar playing similar to the soundscape stuff he opened with.

One funny thing is that the video feed for the monitor on the floor that he watched was the same as what the audience saw on the big screen at the back of the stage.  In the bottom right of the video was a little text box that would show a few letters in it to ID the track.  His tech guy (who was a dead ringer for Steve Howe) would set up the next video while he took a little bow from the last one.  If you were familiar with the Police, you could guess when one of their songs was coming up.  For example, he ended one song and the little text box in the corner changed to the letters ROX, so I knew he was playing Roxanne next.  In the introduction to that, he talked about how he came up with the stacked 5th chords he played and then, of course, DIDN'T PLAY THEM.  lol.  He also did Bring On the Night (I REALLY would have liked to see him play the classical guitar part on that one), Message in a Bottle, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, and a few others.  I thought for sure he would have done Murder by Numbers, Behind My Camel, Omegaman, Someone to Talk To, or one of the others he had written.  I would have even been OK with Friends, Sally, or Mother!

It was a decent show for a huge fan like me, but I wouldn't recommend it to a casual fan.

 

[RobB]

Sounds like he’s a bit of a twat. 

[kizanski]

29 minutes ago, RobB said:

Sounds like he’s a bit of a twat. 

Maybe. Or sometimes a guy is just 80 years old and needs to stop.
If I wanted to hear pointless, keyless noodling, I wouldn't have sold my guitars.

[Steve Haynie]

That was a good review.  Thank you! 

 

Was he using his new Walking On The Moon ehx flanger? 

 

[tommy p]

49 minutes ago, Steve Haynie said:

That was a good review.  Thank you! 

 

Was he using his new Walking On The Moon ehx flanger? 

 

That video was better than the show - seriously.

[Willie G. Moseley]

His compadre Robert Fripp is known for doing "introductory soundscapes" and since Fripp's abstract meanderings don't last too long, so it's relatively interesting. The longer that kind of stuff goes on (at any point in a show), expect it to be slathered with terms like "improvisational" or "experimental" or maybe "ambient"....convenient terms for taking up time with guitar strings. 

[stobro]

3 hours ago, Willie G. Moseley said:

His compadre Robert Fripp is known for doing "introductory soundscapes" and since Fripp's abstract meanderings don't last too long, so it's relatively interesting. The longer that kind of stuff goes on (at any point in a show), expect it to be slathered with terms like "improvisational" or "experimental" or maybe "ambient"....convenient terms for taking up time with guitar strings. 

Spinal Tap Jazz Odyssey?

[JGale]

 

[Brooks]

Man, I was thinking of driving up to VA to see that, glad I didn't.

This is a pretty good album;

 

[cmatthes]

6 hours ago, Brooks said:

Man, I was thinking of driving up to VA to see that, glad I didn't.

This is a pretty good album;

 

Same here, Brooks!  A good friend had a buddy bail at the last minute, and honestly, if he had reached out 15 minutes earlier, I would have been disappointedly hanging with Tommy P.   Kind of glad I didn't now, although I've always dug Andy's playing.

[tommy p]

9 hours ago, cmatthes said:

I would have been disappointedly hanging with Tommy P.

Hey!  I'm offended by that remark!  😆😆😆

[Biz Prof]

19 hours ago, JGale said:

 

"We're not about to go out and do some...free-form...jazz...exploration...in front of a festival crowd."

[gorch]

On 8/11/2023 at 3:09 PM, tommy p said:

don't point at those items, don't hold up your Sharpie, don't move toward the stage, NOTHING!  You can stand if you stay right in front of your seat."

In other words, don‘t complain.

Actually, I like his post Police music, even the pre Police recordings with Eberhard Schoener

[tommy p]

23 hours ago, gorch said:

In other words, don‘t complain.

Actually, I like his post Police music, even the pre Police recordings with Eberhard Schoener

How would asking for an autograph be complaining?  The attitude of the statements was more "The esteemed Mr. Summers does not mingle with the 'little people' " than "don't complain".  We ran into his merch girl after the show and asked if he ever came out after a show and she said rarely, and she told us that on that night he sat his guitar down and was whisked out of there before his amp could cool off.

I've listened to some of his solo stuff but I didn't really connect with it.  I think I like the Police so much not only because of Andy but also because of the cool bass lines, great melodies, and Stewart Copeland's drumming.  He's easily a Top 5 drummer for me.

[kizanski]

Again. Maybe this isn't the life for an 80 year old.  

[Jimbilly]

I 'saw' Fripp open for G3 once, I remember wondering when the music was going to start. I just found this quote from Satriani about that tour:

“Well, one of the most interesting characters was Robert Fripp, beyond a doubt,” he reflected. “When he joined up, he insisted that he not be listed, and he wanted to play before the show. 

 

“He said, 'Look, don’t turn the lights on. I’m going to sit behind all the amps, and I’m going to play music as people walk into the venue and find their seats. And don’t mention my name.' It’s what he wanted to do.