| rob dickinson live rehersal video |
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| Tuesday, 21 March 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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go here to see video of rob dickinson rehearsing with a full band now if only i could get the damn thing to work! from rehersals.com-which by the way is a genius idea Readying his 'Fresh Wine' By Mychael Urban It's been a long time since Rob Dickinson put himself out there. The popular band he helped form and front, Catherine Wheel, released its final album in 2000, and prior to the release of his 2005 debut solo album, Fresh Wine for the Horses, Dickinson was a ghost. Dante Marchi, a vocalist who backed Dickinson during a January showcase at CenterStaging, the famed rehearsal studios in Burbank, Calif., put it best: "He's one of those, like, underground bad-asses that you hear about, and you never meet 'em." Dickinson, however, is re-introducing himself to the world through Fresh Wine, a supporting tour, and CenterStaging's rehearsals.com; he agreed to have his band's preparation for the aforementioned showcase and tour recorded by 12 robotic cameras and 48 overhead microphones, then produced for the World Wide Web. "Having yourself filmed rehearsing is a ballsy move," Dickinson said. "I mean, it's part of the nature of a performer that you don't necessarily want people to know where it all came from. You just want to be fantastic. You want to be glamorous and gorgeous and brilliant." Rehearsing, typically, is anything but glamorous and gorgeous. But even Dickinson concedes that having a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the process has elements of brilliance. "I can see how it's compelling," he said. "It's interesting because I have to separate myself as a performer from someone who is utterly compelled by things like this. I remember I saw a documentary on the making of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and it was absolutely compelling. So I can see how anybody who might be interested in my music would be fascinated with how it comes together. "And the way rehearsals.com have got it set up here, we had forgotten about the cameras within five minutes, and we were back into rehearsing as we normally do. Once you're in the moment, and once you're in the thick of a song and you're trying to work it, and you know intrinsically when it's good and when it's slightly off, everything else just disappears." Well, not everything. Certainly not Dickinson's desire to nail every aspect of his music's presentation. "Other people like to just rock out the songs, like, you know, this and that," said Bobby Anderson, one of the guitarists backing Dickinson at CenterStaging. "But with Rob it can be intense. He wants things exactly how he knows how they should sound in his head." "Rob is an artist who knows what he wants," said guitarist David Rolfe, who produced Fresh Wine. "He knows exactly what he's going for, which is rare. A lot of artists don't have the confidence that Rob has, and you spend a lot of time trying to bring that confidence out of them. Otherwise you're creating the artist. There's none of that coaxing the artist out of Rob. He is exactly what he does. "A guy like Rob has very definite ideas about how his stuff's supposed to sound." Adds Dickinson: "I don't collaborate. They just do what I tell 'em to do." Then he laughs. "I"m kidding," he insists. "I"m kidding. I"m kidding." In a sense, though, he's not. There was plenty of give and take with his band during the rehearsals.com session, and he and Rolfe seemed to have an unspoken language boiled down to looks and nods of approval or disapproval. But when it's your name on the album cover, it's obviously your show. "I"ve been doing this long enough to know when it sounds good," Dickinson said. "When I was with the Catherine Wheel, it was a very much a democracy, because we co-wrote some of the songs, and it was one for all and all for one, and we'd known each other since we were kids. ... These guys (his new band) have become my friends, but at the same time, they don't necessarily have a vested emotional interest in the material. At the end of the day, everyone packs their guitars away and goes home to their lives of doing other things. "I realize that no one else is going to do this for me." What Dickinson has done with Fresh Wine is avoid the traps that more commercially minded artists routinely fall into. "When Bob Dylan sang to you, when the Clash sang to you, even [Led] Zeppelin in their own way, in their own fantastical weird way, you really believed that they believed what they were singing," he explained. "And for me, it's palpably obvious when a band is going through the motions and is, I don't know, trying to hit the marks, trying to go for the market, trying to fill the niche, trying to get on the radio, trying to do whatever. And it never rings true. It never lasts. I"ve been in bands as a kid that tried to do all of that, and it's a road to nowhere. "If you commit to making music that you love and is true to you, it's very easy to make music. It doesn't become a battle. It just becomes part of you." For Marchi -- a longtime Catherine Wheel fan -- supporting Dickinson is anything but a battle. "It's a dream come true," he said. "What's amazing about Rob's record is it's one of those rare gems where you listen to the record and you go, "Wow, this is inspiring," I think one out of a hundred albums, or maybe one out of a thousand -- right now, in this day and age -- are inspiration records. He is actually a guy who made an inspirational record." And a ghost no more.
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