From: malcolm@wrs.com (Malcolm Humes)
Subject: Re: Review : Richard Sinclair in San Francisco
Organization: Wind River Systems, Inc.
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 16:26:21 GMT

borella@cs.ucdavis.edu (Mike Borella) writes:
>Since I haven't seen any other articles on last weekend's Richard
>Sinclair show in San Francisco, I'll try to sum things up the best I
>could.

Oh good, I was going to try to write a real review, but now I can just
agree with yours and elaborate a bit...

>The venue was the Red Victorian Bed & Breakfast on Haight St.  It is a
>colorful place in a colorful neighborhood, which I recommend visiting
>if you're in the SF area.  Upon entering the Red Vic, I was a bit
>surprised - rumor had it that over 100 people were going to show up,
>but there were only 30 chairs in the place.  The stage was at the back
>of a large dining room.  Oh well.  We got there early and snatched a
>table in the front.  

It is a strange venue, what with guest books lying around next to the
tables, little kids running around and peeking out the window of their
playroom above the stage, and the venue encouraging us to wander upstairs
to check out the guest rooms - it seems to carry a lot of 60's memorabilia
on the walls and in spirit, so it was interesting to see Sinclair there. 
Rumor was that a lot of people would show, and the place can only hold
about 100 max but as Mike says there are only about 30 chairs there...
as it was I don't think anyone was extremely uncomfortable, except perhaps
because of the activists or the length of Richard's set. 

>The Red Vic hosts a fair amount of environmental activities and
>activists, so between bands there were speakers from 
...
>However, by the time Sinclair got on, most of us at my table
>were more than a bit bored with it all.

Interesting idea, huh, mixing progressive music and progressive politics? 
I sort of felt it was inapropriate to advertise it as a Sinclair show
and then force us to sit through 3 hours of proselytizing - I think 
most if not all of us there are supportive of rainforests, indian rights, 
ecological rights, etc. It got very tedious, and a little sad watching
folks lose their place in the middle of 5 page speeches about what the 
Green party stands for. All in all it added a lot of extra tedium to 
an evening that could have been about two hours more concise than it was. 

>It was pretty obvious that this was a laid back warm-up sort of
>performance for Richard.  He seemed to spend as much time adjusting
>the knobs on his amp as he did playing. 

Well, actually this show was near the tail end of two weeks of shows, 
and his last gig was the following night in Boston. Did anyone else catch
any of the other shows? 

>He seemed to spend as much time adjusting the knobs on his amp as he did 
>playing.

This didn't bother me, but the lack of audience interaction during this and 
other between songs moments did leave me feeling like there was a glass
wall between audience and performer. I think he was off in his own world, 
sharing it with us, but not in a very interactive way... I think the constant
tweaking was more to do with the constant switch between guitars, and 
adjusting his midi synth stuff. At one point I shouted out a request for 
Godsong, by Matching Mole, which I've heard Richard do live with Hatfield
in 1975 an 1990. That got a funny reaction and a few lines of it muttered and 
mutilated, which seemed to get a good laugh from the audience. But at times
I felt it almost didn't matter if there was an audience there or not.  

>However I was quite impressed
>by his proficiency on the guitar.  As a bassist in the aforementioned
>bands, he was an excellent musician, but his guitar work that night
>was brilliant. 

I agree! I knew he played a little guitar but I always heard him playing bass
in the bands he was in. He was a great guitar player. I was wondering how
good the solo bass stuff would be, and frankly I expected it to be the
weakest part of teh show, but when he picked up the bass he was superb, 
and I can't say it really sounded like his playing on record much, though
I heard strains of Waterloo Lilly creeping in and out. 

>Overall it was a good (but not great) show. 

To me the parts that hurt it were the long string of speakers opening, the
rude noises caused by the venue, and the length of Richard's set. It's 
hard to complain that someone played too much! But he went at least 30 
minute over time and they had to ask him to stop or he probably would
have played another hour. I would have been more comfortable if he'd 
taken an intermission instead of playing for nearly 2 hours straight. I 
couldn't believe the staff was sorting silverware for about 15 minutes
near the start of the show - nothing quite like listening to a guy on 
acoustic guitar with silverware crashing constantly behind you. It finally
annoyed me enough to ask them to stop and sort it later, and they did, 
but after the show ran past 11pm they started doing it again and making
a lot of extraneous noise. Despite all this I had a very good time and
it was a real pleasure to get to see and meet Richard. I wish I'd had a 
chance to talk to him more, adn I'm still waiting to hear more from
Jeff and Scott, who had the chance to hang out and chat with him and Heather
Kinnear before the show. 

> Sinclair was in fine
>form, and his playing is as good if not better, than ever.  But after
>two hours, it did get tiresome as the improvs became repetitive and
>the nonsense lyrics got old. 

Another reason I think an intermission would have helped. Hearing his voice
for one hour is enough to make everything sound a little similar, especially
when he kept scatting nonsense syllables and skipping a lot of the words to 
the tunes he was doing. 

>I wish that they
>had skipped the environmentalism for this evening because there were
>many prog heads from the net at the show that I would have liked
>chatting with, 

It was interesting meeting Mike McLatchey and seeing you, Peter Thelen, 
Jeff Melton, and Scott Heller all in one room and not having a minute
without someone talking or singing on stage so we could get to chat more. 
I wonder if any other net folks were there too? 

A high point of the show for me was hearing Ricahrd sing O Caroline, from 
Matching Mole's 1st lp - his Wyatt phrasings had a lot of the folks around 
me watching with dropped jaws. Also worth noting was that Richard played 
something from BEFORE A WORD IS SAID, a collaboration he did with Alan 
Gowen, Phil Miller and ? Tomkins, which was Gowen's last recording before he 
died. Richard said that Alan's wife is working on getting his music reissued 
on cd soon. I hope this happens. 

  - Malcolm @wrs.com 
Newsgroups: alt.music.progressive