Back In Italy

Hotel Bologna, Mestre, near Venice

This morning Kimber and I headed out for a spot of rest and relaxation before the main event tonight. Primarily this involved strolling through Venice.

Even though it was cold, it was a real treat to revisit some of the places Debra and I spent time in earlier this year. Kimber did very well to pretend to be interested in my teary-eyed reminiscences as we left the tourist trap of St. Mark’s Square and hit upon Via Garibaldi.

Back in the hotel room I sat back at the computer and worked on my notes for the talk on King Crimson.

It’s difficult telling people stuff they already know and have read about elsewhere but (with a bit of editing and focusing from the Kimberman) I proceeded to deliver an hour and bit on the subject “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About King Crimson.”

Though the interpreter, Paulo did exceptionally well keeping up with my presentation, it felt a little stilted having to break off every couple of minutes. Fairly early on into the thing, I was joined by Aldo Tagliapietra vocalist and guitarist with Le Orme who wanted to give his own account of his opinions about Crimson.

I played the remastered version of King Crimson's 1974 one-off only rendition of "Guts On My Side" to demonstrate how the cleaning up process works (which in this case it doesn't). Afterwards, two different people who were at the concert in Udine in 1974 come and tell me that they have better quality copies than the one that was sent into DGMLive. We exchange addresses and I hope that they do manage to send their copies in.

Afterwards Jakko and Mel took to the stage. I’d not spoken to Jakko in the days running up to the event so had no idea what the pair were going to play. Therefore the set was full of surprises. The highlight of the Crimson material was The Letters which Jakko and Mel played to perfection.

Beset by one or two equipment grumbles, Jakko was using a laptop to supply rhythms and some backing tracking. It sounded very organic and not at all artificial, filling out the core sound of the duo. Jakko’s material sounded excellent alongside the early Crim stuff, and it was all over far too quickly for my liking.

Whilst Jakko and Mel were doing the whole meet and greet thing...

...I was busy signing copies of the Italian translation of my KC biog, shaking hands with people and answering more questions from folks who’d not shouted out anything earlier in the Q&A section of my presentation.

Kimber even helped out a bit on the merch…

In the restaurant afterwards Kimber, Mel Jakko and myself reflected upon the day and the fact that, if they want to, Mel and Jakko have themselves a viable project to take out on the road. I very much hope they do.

It’d been a great night but a very, very long day.

And so to bed...