The executive producer of this collection of ten cassettes was Patricia Fripp, elder sister of Robert, and a motivational speaker who who moved to the States as a young woman. In line with others in her field, many of Patricia's sets of CDs and DVDs retail at several hundreds of dollars. So, next to these, the Robert set are almost a discount offering. Still, I had to take a deep breath in 2002, in days when I had a lot more disposable income, before I ordered it. My recall of what I paid is conveniently vague, but I think it was more than that daft Residents set, and exceeded only by the Neil Young Archives.
What drew me to these recordings was my experience of seeing one of Fripp's audience Q&A sessions, which captivated me more than his music that afternoon (from my vantage point out in the street, I could barely hear the music). You're probably thinking that, even so, listening to over six hours of these exchanges could be overkill. Especially when the topics revolve around the same shortlist of preoccupations as his diary: the appalling ethics of the music business, the travails of a touring musician, the grasping intent of "fans" who believe they have an entitlement to a photograph or autograph, the respite of books — and the overwhelming skew towards bearded, bespectacled, earnest young men in his audience.
Since I come perilously close to that demographic, aside from being only occasionally bearded and no longer young, I tend to disagree.
I listened twice all the way through back in 2002. The second time I made a mini-disc copy of the cassettes. This itself is a copyright violation, but I justified it — we "fans" always have a self-serving and self-righteous justification for our violations — on the grounds that my intent was solely to have a backup copy for personal use. These cassettes are valuable, yet cassette tape is one of the more fragile storage media in the long term. I've only had time to listen to an hour or so this time round, but it was an enjoyable hour.
Autograph fetishists may have been pleased to get a signed picture in with the set of tapes, but I wasn't bothered — and now I can't find mine. The new download version would have done me fine.
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