Tours Rather Than Records

I’ve noticed that when famous rock stars are asked to pick their favorite album from the ones they’ve recorded they very often will refer to a particular “tour”. They all their favorite tours but seem reluctant to name favorite albums. Us fans know the bands and their specific creative time periods from the albums they’ve released but if you see it from their point of you it’s different.

Most of us fans think of tours as being the shows meant to promote a specific record during the time periods between the release of records but to most musicians the opposite is true. The records are thought of by musicians as being the promotional items used to promote their live shows. Playing live is what professional musicians do all the time while recording is what they do when they can find the time between their tours. These days it’s the revenue from live performances and merchandise sales at these shows that supports the musicians as they rarely see much actual income from CD sales or Internet downloads.

A band might spend a few weeks in a recording studio making their next CD while they’ve spent months on the road promoting their last CD and writing and rehearsing the new CD’s material. In the big scheme of things making a record is a minor usage of time and energy while a tour can be the majority of one’s life in any given year.

In his last interview given to Playboy Magazine in 1980 John Lennon was asked to name his favorite Beatles album and he declined to do so. He explained he didn’t listen to his albums because he doesn’t hear them the way the fans hear them. When he listens to a Beatles album he doesn’t just hear the songs, he remembers what was going on at the time, the hard feelings and arguments with his coworkers and ex-wife, what was going on in the world at the time and how he wanted the songs to turn out differently than they did. He claimed he couldn’t enjoy listening to Beatles albums for that reason and it adds to the tragedy of his death that he wasn’t allowed enough time to pass that he could, as Paul McCartney did, forget the past and listen to those classic Beatles albums with fresh ears, the way the fans do. I think he would have like them.

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