Posted by On October 15th, 2024 I went to see a quartet of musical demigods performing the music of ’80’s-era King Crimson at the Molson Canadian Centre at Casino New Brunswick*. I just happened to be in Moncton for a belated Thanksgiving visit** and I was equal parts shocked and thrilled to discover that such a high-calibre and esoteric tour had booked a stop just a short walk from my brother’s house on the outskirts of town.
The band was called BEAT and it was no tribute act, as half of the band had been half of the band. That is, BEAT frontman/guitar freakazoid Adrian Belew and bass/stick player Tony Levin had been actual members of King Crimson (and Frank Zappa’s band and Peter Gabriel’s band and David Bowie’s band and the Talking Heads, etcetera etcetera etcetera, comprising of approximately six hundred studio albums between the two of them) so two of the guys onstage were the real deal. But the other two were pretty “real-deal” themselves, and just because Steve Vai (who was also in one of Zappa’s bands and had stints playing with Whitesnake and David Lee Roth, not to mention his delicious role as Satan’s guitar player in the cult film Crossroads and his pouting appearance on nine hundred zillion guitar magazine covers) and Danny Carey (the highly-revered drummer for prog-rock icons Tool) weren’t original King Crimson alumni didn’t mean they’d be struggling with the material.
And while I was surprised that Vai, Belew, Levin, and Carey had fit a Moncton play into their schedule, I needn’t be. Moncton certainly has it’s share of musicians – and let’s be clear: every single person in the crowd was either a musician or the wife/girlfriend of a musician – and there is a strong Acadian contingent in the area (and the French do tend to have proggy leanings) so the room was packed, with probably 2,000 or so squeezed into the temporary chairs and bleachers in the casino’s large, nondescript square conference room.
When the band came out they hit the ground running, or maybe that should be “staggering”, launching into Neurotica, the first of many razor-tight time-shifting odd-meter musical masturbatory pieces that had the crowd gaping and riveted on every note. And there were lots of notes. I will freely admit that I didn’t recognize a single song throughout the entire concert – I am decidedly not a King Crimson fan – but I was gaping and riveted with the rest of them, most particularly because of Steve Vai.
To be honest, when I walked through the door I thought that I was “over” Steve Vai. I had shred my love of shred and seen through the sticky mist of hair metal long before, but as soon as he started playing – I mean from his very first, ultra-identifiable whammy-wiggly note – I was a drooling, slack-jawed, tongue-jabbering newbie-fan again, bathing in every soaring, over-the-top rifflurry of modal buffoonery. I mean, back in the day Steve Vai was my direct segue into the topsy-turvy musical landscapes of Frank Zappa and beyond and for that I will forever thank him. His debut album Flexable still astounds me for both its manic creativity and the stellar playing, and his next two albums are both clinics in ’80’s instrumental guitar rock. So there is much to admire, and to be honest I spent the first set marvelling at how much he had slowed down his playing over the years, opting to lean harder on thoughtful lines than sweeping arpeggios. Heck, he had slowed things down so much that I started to lull myself into the fiction that perhaps I had recalled Vai’s impossibiliums higher than I needed to, and now that I am an aged, seasoned musician I was seeing that his stuff wasn’t so unachievable after all, as good as it was…
…and then during the second set Steve Vai grew eleven extra fingers and tore his guitar to pieces like he was eating through a piñata with a pair of chainsaws. Yeeeaahhh…no, I can’t do that. I tell you, I ate it up like it was candy, and not just because of the nostalgia. Dude is a good guitar player man, one of the best in the world.
But remember how I mentioned that Steve Vai’s guitar playing was “ultra-identifiable”? Well, guess what? You let that Adrian Belew fellah loose and he sounds an awful lot like Steve Vai. Not necessarily in the “shredding” department but when it came to the wackiness, the tone, the squeaks, squonks and guttural dives, and especially the overall vibe, Belew was very Vai. Except it was obviously the other way around, and here I was seeing one of my guitar heroes standing next to one of his mentors. It was fun to watch.
I’ll tell you who else was fun to watch: this Danny Carey guy. Wow, what a drummer. He played with such a precise, relaxed fluidity, no matter how compound the time was. And his dynamics! It’s rare to hear a guy play so aggressively at so many different volumes. Sure you generally hear guys playing loud and louder, but loud, louder, quiet, and quieter? Almost never. And always with the same energy, the same soul, and the same perfection. It was a joy to watch.
I don’t want to leave any special mention of Tony Levin out of this too-long diatribe, but despite his skill and brilliance he was the least of the feast for this sense-collection. I love that he played the Chapman stick so much; he spent almost half the show playing the rare dozen-stringed plank of wood and the rest divided between a couple of basses and a little percussion table, but I was less than impressed when he put those long sticks on the fingers of his right hand so he sounded like he was beating the bass with drumsticks. I suppose it was slightly cool but it was more gimmicky than anything. Ah, what am I saying? Tony Levin was brilliant and he helped make this a great show.
I had to laugh at myself halfway through the first set when my wandering mind finally came up with the answer to who the music was reminding me of, and the answer was my old freakrock band Bob Loblaw. I laughed because it was during my Bob Loblaw era that I first became aware of King Crimson, as a lot of people told me that our band reminded them of King Crimson. It happened so often that I eventually went out and dropped a hard-won twenty dollar bill on a CD of King Crimson’s first record, In the Court of the Crimson King. And I hated it. Moreover, I couldn’t believe that people thought my band sounded like that. Sure, my guitar teacher Wayne played me King Crimson’s Discipline record (one of the ’80’s ones featuring Belew and Levin) and I quite liked it, but I still never listened to the band ever.
But sitting in the casino bleachers and listening to it live I finally understood the comparison. Constant time shifts, prolonged sections of noisy weirdnesses, playing along to pre-recorded sound effects and narrative loops…how very Bob Loblaw these guys were indeed!
I had to laugh again when I went to the bathroom at setbreak and found the lineup to the men’s room stretching all the way to the glass doors at the venue’s entrance. And the whole time I waited I saw a total of three women walk into the empty ladies room. I asked m’lady to guess and I thought she was over-estimating when she figured the crowd contained 5% women.
Speaking of those glass doors, the merch table had included a couple of unique items in a pair of gig-used drumheads that were signed by all the musicians. One was priced at $1,000 and the other was $1,200. When the show ended and I joined the throng of guys squeezing through those glass double-doors I couldn’t help but notice that not only was the merch table pushed right up against the edge of the exit doors, but those two drumheads were sitting alone and unobserved all the way down at the far end of the merch table just as close to the open doors as they could be. I can’t imagine that someone didn’t try to walk out with one at the end of the night.
For m’lady and I, when the end of the night came we were only a short stroll from decompression drinks back at my brother’s house. This was a fortunate happenstance indeed, for this being car-friendly Moncton we were surely the only patrons who walked out of the parking lot after the show.
(My gawd, I just can’t tell you how difficult I found this ticket story to write. I mean, usually at most a ticket story will take two or three hours to write, but this one took four or five days. And I hate it. And do you know why? Because I had already written a ticket story for this show, and I had been quite pleased with how it came out too. But then my computer crashed to death with no chance of retrieval, and while my regular backups restored 99.9% of my files when I got a new computer this story was in the .1% that was lost. And here I thought having a second stab at writing it would be better, if not easier. It’s like a second draft! But no, instead it ended up being a feeble flip-flop between trying to recapture the lost pixel magic of the original and giving it a fresh go. The result is a disjointed factoid-sounding amalgam of second-guessing, and it bugs me much more than it should, As did the whole computer crashing episode. Like I almost cried, and it was nothing but digital memories.
And that, my friends, is what is wrong with the world. It hurts to discover that I am complicit.)
*While I have long found the whole idea of naming rights rather distasteful, the fact that the venue bars were restricted to selling only Molson beer – with nary an IPA in sight – made this one extra-distasteful. Like, literally distasteful. Double-phooey on Casino NB and their buckets full of money.
**Truth be told (and these ticket myths are nothing if not truthful***), I did sorta kinda totally book the trip around this show, but the flights were also way cheaper than going for actual Thanksgiving weekend and I really, honestly, truthfully didn’t know about the Tommy Emmanuel show that was happening the next night at the Capitol Theatre****. Honest!
***Any and/or all “truths” may or may not be occasionally and/or consistently restricted, omitted or otherwise deemed invalid due to cerebral and/or legal limitations, statutes, laws, slaws, and monsters, both inclusive and etcetera’d, whether they be known, unknown, real, and/or imaginary. In these things we do solemnly swear with fingers and toes piously crossed, forever and ever, baymen.
****Really mom, this one was just a coincidence. Not only did I not know that acoustic guitar wizard Tommy Emmanuel would be playing while I was in town, by the time I booked my flight tickets for his concert had already been onsale for quite some time. I don’t know how the show got past me, but when it came to my attention and I managed to score two of the last remaining seats in the house (in the very last row of the balcony, no less) I was pretty damn excited. But that’s another story.
Todd Man Out 