WTF were they thinking?

[uwe]

I'll never complain about social media again, sometimes it prevents greater evil or at least plain dumb ideas.





I have no idea what possessed them to want to go out as a four-piece. Priest's music is built on their twin guitar barrage: (i) synchronized riffing to beef up their sound, (ii) harmony lead playing and where neither (i) nor (ii) apply (iii): a chugging rhythm guitar hammering out the power chords behind whatever the other guitar is doing. They're not ZZ Top where Billy Gibbons has the occasional secondary rhythm guitar track dialed in at live gigs. If you want to hear what two guitars do within Priest listen to Glenn Tipton (panned right) play the riff by himself twice at 0:40 before KK Downing (panned left) joins in at 0:52:



It's a bit like Purple going out touring without a keyboard player and telling fans what a great idea that is. 

So for once, a very helpful shit storm that was. 


PS: Speaking of senior citizens still playing metal ...

[gearHed289]

WTF indeed! KK has got to be losing his mind! (He's been whining ever since they brought in Sneap instead of him to replace Glenn. KK, you QUIT!) It is simply NOT Judas Priest without two guitars.

[uwe]

That was actually the ultimate insult to KK, considering to tour as a four piece and not invite him back. A typical Priest move. Whatever you think of him, he was together with Halford Priest's heart and soul and always a fan favorite. Tipton otoh was Priest's brain and musical director.

But from both KK's and Rob's bios I take it that Priest are a band where people don't really communicate with another and too many things are left unsaid. There is not much reflection going on, certainly not for band with that longevity where the main protagonists have been together for 40-50 years or so, it's all very shallow.

Halford makes light of KK's depature in his book in a way that just doesn't feel truthful (which grates all the more because he is not at all shy and even forthright to discuss the more difficult aspects of his homosexuality in a band that always knew what he was - he wasn't a late gay bloomer like Freddie Mercury, knowing about his homosexuality already as a child -, but wanted him to hush it up vis-à-vis the public).

And KK is constantly bitching about Tipton in his bio, first for pushing him more and more into the background (KK being a founding member while Tipton joined only shortly before their first album) and unfair soloing and songwriting allotment, then rather scathingly (KK took his job with Priest very serious) for a faltering live performance in the years leading up to KK's departure.

The book ends with a few meek words that he learned only about Tipton's Parkinson's disease after his departure from the band and while writing the final chapters of his book. You would think that this should be enough to make KK pause for a moment and ask the question whether Glenn's guitar playing and uneven live performance in later years suffered due to his progressive disease, but there is not even a half-sentence in the bio that touches on that question. That is right in line with KK's obliviousness in not noticing before that perhaps his co-lead guitarist, who was always the technically more accomplished of the two (KK brought the Brit grit and the Hendrixy flamboyance, but never had Tipton's up-and-down-the-fretboard fluidity), might have a condition if his playing starts to falter in a band as highly rehearsed as Priest. Instead he whines about Priest's touring schedules always being made to miraculously align with Tipton's vacation plans but not his. Or that Tipton started wearing blond highlights in his brown hair in an effort to emulate KK's trademark blond mane and hence success with the fairer sex. Really substantial, adult issues then ... 

Both my parents suffered from Parkinson or similar diseases - you do notice what's going on, even if you are not on a tour bus with them or night after night on stage or backstage. Even I as an audience member saw at one gig (when KK was still a member of the band) that a hunched Tipton was losing the elegant and nimble speed and fluidity he had always been known for. Never much of an improviser, he could always recreate with ease and perfection on stage what he played in the studio impeccably, but not on that night, he played several times real howlers. KK put that down to lack of discipline and a supposedly lazy rehearsing regime of Tipton - gimme a break, how little can you know a guy who's largely played the same riffs as you for decades on the other side of the stage and never missed a note?!

Priest were truly dysfunctional as a unit - after those two bios you do wonder how they ever got as far as they did. In a weird way, they were all committed to the band as a whole but totally unable to verbalize their individual feelings and expectations. Not that different to their dads really who went working in those Midlands factories, disenchanted and numbed, yet never finding words for it.