To be candid, I probably would not buy a DVD of an art-rock band’s live performance. What would be most important to me is a quality stereo (2-ch) mix, because I’m going to turn off the tube and just listen anyway. Might as well just put it on a cd.
I just don’t see ‘live’ and ‘art-rock’ going together on a DVD. Probably because I’ve seen the apex, and I have never seen anything recorded on DVD that comes close to capturing the live performances of Genesis’ ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’**, any of the Yes tours with the phenomenal stages designed by Martin Dean. (His bro Roger did the artwork album covers for several Yes albums. You need to line up the albums and see the art in sequence. It tells a story.) For just shear power of the music on stage, Emerson Lake and Palmer or Camel were a tough acts. None of those shows has been faithfully presented in a video medium.
I really can’t remember all of the art-rock shows I have seen. One of the more memorable moments was when Renaissance opened in support of Rick Wakeman’s ‘King Henry’ tour. I saw it at Winterland in San Francisco. The venue was packed wall-to-wall, but when Annie Haslem started singing, every soul froze in-place, staring at the stage, mouths agape. Nobody moved (this was in the days before there was seating on the main floor). When Wakemen (ex-keyboardist for Yes), the headliner, was 15-mins into his show, half the people had already walked out. I left a few minutes later and there was just a scatter of people left there. He could not compete with the overwhelming power and beauty of Haslems’s vocals, and Renaissance’s performance. Shortly there after, an article appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (when it was a folded newspaper) about how Wakeman was blaming Renaissance for destroying his tour and he would never tour with them again, blah blah blah. Wakeman’s lesson: don’t tour with an opening act that is better than you.
I never saw Marillion live, only heard their albums. As much as I tried to see them all, there are other art-rock bands I know only from their vinyl; PFM, Druid, Hawkwind, Steve Hillage solo, Tai-Phong (a French/Vietnamese art-rock band) and Nektar to name a few. And I’ll toss Stomu Yamashta’s ‘Go’ Project into the art-rock mix, too. (Note: an Australian company recently secured the rights to release all three ‘Go’ albums on a double CD set. It is an amazing project, part art-rock, part jazz, part rock/soul, part electronic… Available thru Amazon.com) On the other hand, it is possible I did see some of them and (for whatever reason..humm) I can’t remember. I know I saw King Crimson open for Ten Years After, but the memory is a bit foggy for that one. Does Robert Fripp’s highly experimental Fripp-tronics (using a feedback loop between two reel2reel decks) count as art-rock?
** With 6.x multi-channel audio now available, there is absolutely no excuse for not releasing Pink Floyd’s DSOTM the way it was performed live, in 6-channel surround sound. For those that are not aware of it, there is also a movie that goes along with the music. That movie with 6-ch DTS surround would work! DSOTM was performed live, start to finish, without a break in the performance, and the movie followed the music (or the performance followed the movie) all the way thru. The encore was ‘Echoes’, about a 30-min piece. The opening set was 3 new songs, all three titled ‘Crazy’. One of the ‘Crazy’ songs, a 25-min+ piece, would be shortened, renamed, and appears on Floyd’s follow-up album as ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. The other two ‘Crazy’ songs appear on ‘The Wall’.
Nope! In my mind, Marillion is an art-rock band and I will always know them as such. Unfortunately, the art-rock era is gone. It’s just not logistically possible or financially feasible to bring that era into the multi-channel audio and digital video realm of today. No matter how it’s done, it will come up short. You just had to be there.
