ABWH - Brother Of Mine (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA 1989)

This was huge fun to play, and nice having a rhythm guitar part to play off, of the sort that Howe or Holdsworth were never going to provide. Personally I think this is a little too fast, for which I blame myself entirely. The album version is around 103 beats per minute, this is more like 108 . Contemporary drummers on rock tours usually have some kind of a ‘clock’ (metronome) by their sides, so they can count the song in at least in an agreed tempo. They then may well be entirely governed by an automated track that they play along with through the entire song. In my era, we just played it at the tempo the drummer – primarily - thought appropriate. But there could be difficulties with the perception of tempo, depending upon what stimulants had been consumed by the participants. If everyone is in the same cloud of joint smoke, that’s sort of OK; it just means it’s going to take a while to get through the song. If everyone is on cocaine, that too is arguably OK – you’re going to get through it ve