MNN: We're really curious about Fripp's Guitar School. We know that you met Bert Lams and Hideyo Moriya at one of Fripp's Guitar Schools. How did you end up going to Fripp's Guitar School?

Paul: I was studying music at the University of Utah and I had met a real great private instructor, Don Ayres, who taught at the University and also taught privately. He's like the Guitar King of Utah. I was studying with him privately for quite a while, I was studying a lot of different things. At that time I was primarily a rock guitarist but I was studying jazz, classical. He liked to do a lot of different things.

This guy had read an article in some magazine that said 'Robert Fripp Guitar Seminars in West Virginia' at this place an hour outside of Washington D.C. in Charlestown, West Virginia. In Charlestown was this school called The Claymont Society For Continuous Education and Robert had some kind of connection with them.

Don Ayres ended up going on the fourth course. He came back and he refused to tell me about it. He said I had to go. I suppose he didn't want to spoil my experience of what it might be like, but said it's something I really needed to do.

So I immediately got on the phone and called them. A month later I got this thing in the mail that said, "If you're interested in coming, you need to write this letter explaining to Robert why you want to come, state your intentions, your experience,' and this whole list of stuff that you had to write in a letter to Robert Fripp. I remember really struggling writing this letter, "Oh. Robert Fripp's going read this letter."

MNN: Kind of intimidating.

Paul: Yeah, I think it was kind of a weed-out process. It was kind of challenging to think what I would write in this letter. I was going to be accepted based on this letter.

MNN: Not on an audition?

Paul: No.

MNN: You were accepted by the letter and then you auditioned?

PR- Well, not really. What happened was I sent the letter in and I got a letter back saying that I was accepted to the course. I was invited to attend the 12th Guitar Craft Course. That was in March of 1986. I remember it was something like $650.

MNN: How long was the course?

Paul: The course was five and a half days. You go and they said just bring enough stuff, clothes and I remember it said, "loose-fitting clothing," I thought, "Boy! What are we going to be doing? Gymnastics or something?"

On the way to this course, some things went wrong. I bought my plane ticket and everything, I turned up in Washington D.C., I think it was National Airport, and there were no trains running that day because it was a holiday. So I was stuck there and I didn't know how to get to this place an hour away from there, So I was thinking, would I rent a car or what? Then I see these two other guys with guitars at the train station. We were like, 'You going to this thing?' The three of us rented a car together and drove down. On the way I got so nervous about it that I had to ask them to stop the car so I could hurl. Then we arrived at these buildings that they had rented for this. The course was actually in an old refurbished mansion built in 1820. So we were late because of the whole thing with the trains and everything and they were already having their first meeting. I remember I walked in and they opened the door and there's like 30 guitar players sitting on the floor and there's Robert Fripp sitting in the corner.

I just remembered he was beaming, all smiling and welcoming. I remember going in and sitting down and just feeling dizzy from going into that room. It was quite an intense feeling. There was a lot of different stuff piled into that one week. A lot of exercises specifically focused on right and left hand technique and a lot of exercises focused on this whole idea about being present within this moment now so that I can have contact with what's really going on.

For the music Robert would introduce these exercises. sort of counting exercises. You'd have this piece of music to play and within that piece, maybe there's a section with let's say five bars and seven beats and so you count while you're playing the piece. So silently, in the mind, the mind's doing the counting and basically what the exercise is for is really developing attention and focusing on the music, Something that when I was at the University, nobody did.

MNN: How many hours a day did you practice?

Paul: Oh. All day.

MNN: And was it all theory? Or was it theory combined with technique?

Paul: Actually there wasn't really that much talk about theory in the course in terms of musical structure or talking about what notes to play. It was more how to play with it than what to play. In fact, I don't know if there really was any talk about music theory at all at this point,

MNN: I think theory might have been the wrong word, but sitting down with tablature and intensely going through it.

Paul: No. there wasn't any reading or anything like that. Everything was presented, either Robert right in front of you or one of the two assistants on the course. There was like 28 or 30 of us-in total. There was an old ballroom in this mansion with a wooden floor, We'd sit in a big circle In this ballroom and Robert would introduce exercises with us all sitting in this circle. So he'd come around and stand right in front of you and play something or show you a particular technique standing right in front of you. It was unlike any kind of class I'd ever been in. It wasn't structured like any type of class.

MNN: Did you feel pressure? Here is Robert standing right in front of you. Did you feel nervous at all?

Paul: Sure. In fact that was part of it to kind of jar people out of their normal thinking and way of doing things. The song "Thrak", which is on the album Thrak, was based on an exercise from Guitar Craft. It was this exercise of five against seven. He'd got half the group playing these bars of five accenting on one and four and the other half of the group playing in seven accenting on one, four, and six. So the idea was for the group to play together but playing in two different time signatures, overlapping, so if you listen really closely you can hear this rhythm. There's a different overlapping of time signatures that happened. When you're standing there and Robert Fripp is standing in front of you, you try to count and play this and you're supposed to count 14 bars of five and everybody's freaking out. You know, nobody can do it and everybody's really struggling and Robert's really having fun. Like, "Come on, can't you guys count? You can't count to five?"

So it was a scary thing but I think it worked, I mean it jarred me.

MNN: Who were the two guys that picked you up and you rented a car with? It would have been perfect if it was Bert and Hideyo.

PR- One guy was named Lawn and one was named Chris Page from L.A. I haven't seen either of them for a long time. I ran into one of the guys a few years ago when we were playing a concert somewhere.

MNN: Were Bert and Hideyo at the same Guitar Craft?

Paul: No, that was called Level One, the introductory course. At the end of that course I did kind of a stupid thing which actually turned out to be a good thing. Robert was in his room practicing and one of the rules was do not disturb Robert when he was practicing. It was the day everybody was leaving and it was my only chance - I remember I had these transcriptions from my teacher that I wanted to show him. I don't know why I felt I had to show him. They were these transcriptions of "Discipline". and a few other tunes off the Discipline album that he'd made, written out immaculately and it was perfectly done. So for some reason I thought I had to show Robert this. I went and knocked on his door and Robert was like, "Who is it?" but with a "Don't disturb me" tone to his voice. Once I said my name, he was like, "Oh Okay. Come on in," and he invited me in and I showed him the thing. After I showed him, he said, "Oh, that's pretty good."He put them aside and said, "You need to come to the next course." He said something about, "I haven't said that to any of the other people In this course." The next course was like a month away and it was like $900 or something. So I went out of there saying, "Oh my God, how am I going to do this?"

Somehow I figured out to how to pay for it and I went. That's where I met Trey Gunn, That course was really intense practicing. I mean, we practiced all day long like 10 hours a day but it was just practicing. We'd practice, take a break for lunch, practice, take a break for dinner, practice. I think it was at that point where I began to learn what it meant to really practice and focus on practicing, Although it was only a two week time period. It was pretty intense.

During that course Robert mentioned he was going to have these courses in England and he had purchased this house and he invited a number of people to come and study there.

During that time, when I went on the first two courses, I was still studying at the University of Utah and I had a double major. I was studying music and organizational communications; actually it was just to make my parents happy because they were having trouble dealing with this. So after I came back from these two courses, I was in the University Jazz Guitar Ensemble and I couldn't hardly stand to be there after I'd seen something that was really real for me. It was hard to be back In this university and hove these guys working the way they were working. The difference was so amazing.

I dropped out of school after that and the next year, 1987, that's when I went to England, I went for the last half of 1987 and that's when I met Bert Lams and Hideyo Moriya. Then I went back to Robert's the following year, for almost the whole year, and during that time was more really intense practicing. But since It was stretched out over a long period of time it became a whole other thing to see how can you have all this practice and not lose your mind after living In this house with all these other guitar players. There weren't many women, maybe one guy's girlfriend or Trey Gunn's wife was there for a little while, but mostly it was just these 15 guys and one or two women.

During that time was when we started doing some performances as the League of Crafty Guitarists, Robert started arranging these tours where we went out on tour and toured in Europe and Canada, That's pretty much it, We did these tours with between 11 or 12 guitarists and one time I think we had close to 20 guitarists onstage. We'd go and play these pieces, some Robert had written and some the students had written.

MNN: We have a video of that from CNN and some video clips about the Crafty Guitarists on MTV News.

Paul: MTV News! Yeah, I remember we were all in this small studio and they panned the cameos around and everybody was really scared, We were petrified if you look at most of the videos, early videos of the League of Crafty Guitarists, everybody was petrified out of our minds. It's a double factor: it's the high standards that are set by Robert and Guitar Craft and also the fact that the guys, including myself had never done anything remotely like MTV News, So there we were with MTV News cameras in our faces and we're playing guitar with Robert, trying to keep up with Robert Fripp. You can imagine why we looked so petrified.

MNN: it seems as though with Robert and his Crafty Guitar techniques you're not supposed to have any emotion showing on your face. Everyone looks so rigid.

Paul: The thing is in the beginning, there's a lot of emphasis stressed on doing only what is necessary, efficiency of technique, the whole right and left hand technique in Guitar Craft is based on doing only the smallest motion when it's necessary. The idea is that people spend way more energy doing any kind of job or whatever in their daily lives that just wastes time and energy that can be focused in real intense ways. Take Robert as an example. You look at him and you see this guy not moving and showing no emotion but if you close your eyes and hear what he's playing, it's just ferocious and it's some of the most intense, deepest emotional stuff that you'll ever hear. So it's kind of strange. Robert's not at all concerned about what he looks like, He's more focused about the music. The main things that I picked up is really the part about focusing on the music. For me onstage, that's the main thing. I mean, if the music is exciting to me, I'd probably show it more than he does, I don't know. I'm not so worried about that.

MNN: Out of the three of you, Bert smiles a little bit, Hideyo really doesn't show any emotion, although everyone seemed to be having fun last night.

Paul: Last night was good.

MNN: What happened to "Train to Lamy" last night?

Paul: You'll get it tonight. We've been changing things around. We don't play the some thing every night. I think for Hideyo it has a lot to do with his Japanese background. Japanese people are extremely emotionless people. When we went and played Japan with Crimson, It was like polite applause and then this weird dead silence. So I think that comes from his background, being Japanese and growing up in that culture.

For Bert, it's more to do with the focusing on the music. He's studied classical for many years. Although when he was younger he was doing wild rock guitar. The story he tells is he wanted to take guitar more seriously and for him to do that in Brussels, Belgium, he had to go into this classical conservatory and play classical music. So he went to this conservatory for six years and studied classical guitar. He became the top in his class and he was the most happening classical guitarist in this class. So I think that's kind of his stage manner, a lot of it comes from that.

My experience has been playing in rock bands and stuff, so that's probably where that comes through. I probably have a little more expression.

MNN: Out of the three of you, Bert seems to take and play the lead most of the time, you're playing the bass part, while Hideyo is playing the rhythm. It does change around, but most of the time you seem to be playing the bass.

Paul: That's pretty close. There's definitely parts, even in certain pieces, where we trade off. There's a tune we play off our first album called "Melrose Avenue" where I start off playing the main rhythm, kind of melodic part, then a few bars later that part turns into the bass part and then Bert and Hideyo take over the melody. If you look at that "Toccata and Fugue" that we play, their parts are going up and down. There's one part where I'll be playing a lead part and Bert will be playing the bass figure.

If we were going to take the percentages of parts we play, you're probably right. For the classical stuff we do, Bert is probably the most agile. He could play the really, really, really tough stuff. He's the hotshot out of the three of us that can play the Beethoven piece, "Toccata and Fugue". Bert just burns and he's usually improvising it. It's a little bit different every night.

MNN: Why did you choose to work with Bert and Hideyo? Out of all the people that you worked with at school, why or how did you end up with Bert and Hideyo?

Paul: A few different things, part of it was a common interest that we each shared. One of the common interests being the interest in classical music and Bert being the specialist in that. That was one thing that was attractive for me and I suppose for Hideyo as well. Another thing was the availability in the way that the three of us were ready to start doing something. There was a point when we were touring with the League of Crafty Guitar School, we knew that that project would come to an end and we wanted to keep going. So the three of us decided to meet in Los Angeles a little while later.

Bert married and moved to L.A. and invited Hideyo and I to basically move into his house with he and his family and work for a period of time together. Within a month we were already starting to play clubs around L.A. Actually, we had a pretty impressive list of places we'd played in L.A., all the happening coffeehouses, The Troubadour, My Place In Santa Monica.

MNN: Didn't Robert Fripp open for you?

Paul: Well we did a few Soundscapes tours. What the Soundscapes tours are is Robert playing solo guitar stuff with his big rack of gear. We did a couple of tours where he'd come out before us and do his set and then we would do a set and then would alternate the set. So I don't know if you could really say that he opened up for us. He came out first, we come out after, and we'd end the show.

MNN: Was one of the shows at House of Blues in L.A.?

Paul: Yeah.

MNN: We sent some subscribers to that show. They were blown away.

Paul: I remember that show. remember it was pretty scary.

MNN: Were you a King Crimson fan before you went to the first Guitar School?

Paul: Yeah, There were a few different things that happened for me. When I was real young I had two older brothers that were guitar players. They're like eight and 10 years older than me. They had the very first King Crimson album. They probably bought it when it first came out.

One of the cool things about our house is that it was a two level house and my parents lived upstairs. I had four brothers and we all lived in the basement. There were two or three different stereos; my brothers liked to have really nice stereo systems. One of my childhood memories is having a lot of music cranked up loud, One of the albums was In The Court Of The Crimson King. I remember "Schizoid Man" and that stuff from when I was really young.

MNN: Didn't that kind of scare you at the time? (laughs)

Paul: Yeah, then I didn't really know what it was. Actually what made a bigger, impression with me was the cover of the guy with the big mouth on it, That's the thing I remember probably more than the music.

Later when I was studying with the guy, at the University of Utah, the second guitar lesson I went to, he put in the tape of Discipline and I'd never heard it before. He hit the play button and played the tune "Discipline" for me, I just remember all this guitar stuff coming out and thinking that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.

MNN: What were your favorite bands at the time?

Paul: When I was in high school my two favorite bands were Led Zeppelin and Rush. Those were the two, cool bands that I thought were the all time greatest. In fact, I pretty much learned guitar by playing along with albums from those two bands. Jethro Tull, too. Pink Floyd, stuff that you wouldn't expect a high school rock guitar player to learn.

MNN: How have the progressive rock fans reacted to your music?

Paul: I've been grateful for the audiences that we have had and also having the chance to play for the Crimson audiences because I think that the prog rock fans are, in general, probably more accepting of things that are new and different. I would also think that perhaps their ears are more open. What we're doing is not your normal mainstream stuff and we do all this weird stuff and throw different things in.

If we did only classical music or something like that, it would be a whole other thing. That sounds too boring. I love doing the combination.

Maybe one day we'll do something like just classical but for me the whole juxtaposition Of surf music with Beethoven with our own originals is really exciting. But I think that we're not really limited or that we're pegged in one certain classification.

MNN: Is this the first large scale tour that you've done?

Paul: It's probably the longest one, although we've done other big tours, too. We did the tour in Japan and Europe as the opening act for David Sylvian and Fripp before they had Pat Mastelotto.

We've done o lot of touring with Robert and most of those are pretty good size. In Europe the size of them is usually 500 to 1,000 people.

We've done other tours, maybe not this long. This year it seems like we've been on tour, including our own stuff and the Crimson stuff, since January.

MNN: Who decides what cover tunes you play?

Paul: Bert Lams usually suggests which classical tune to play. The last one, "Toccata and Fugue", was suggested by a classical composer friend of ours, Stan Funiccelli, who made the transcription of it. He's a classical guitarist who does modern classical composition. He made this really great transcription for us of the "Toccata and Fugue". At first we thought, "We don't want to play that piece. Everybody knows that piece." Then we started playing it and people went wild. Actually, we just learned the Toccata part of it and then after that we learned the whole thing

But the other covers, some of them were suggested by Robert. There's a tune we do on lnvitation called "Apache', which was a big hit by the Shadows who were a European guitar-based band. He suggested that one and showed us this dance step that goes with it. Hideyo comes up with more surf guitar, he's the Surf Guitar King!

MNN: Do any of you play other instruments?

Paul: Hideyo used to play the drums. I used to play the bass guitar. But now I don't think we're doing much else beside guitar.

MNN: Do any of you sing?

Paul: Hideyo is kind of the singer, We always joke about doing some weird cover and having Hideyo sing it.

MNN: Do you have enough material for another album? Do you write while on tour?

Paul: It's very hard to write on tour, We've worked on things on this tour, It's really hard to come up with stuff. Most of the time we only have few hours a day to work on it and most of that time is spent getting warmed up for the show. It's hard to divide that between writing or getting warmed up.

MNN: Who comes up with the song tiles? Steve Morse said it's more difficult to come up with song titles for instrumentals.

Paul: I got Steve Morse's autograph one time back when I was at the University of Utah, about 10 years ago.

We usually kind of make the person who wrote the piece come up with it. My tunes I name. It is hard to come up with song titles. There's a new tune that I just wrote that we're playing on this tour called "The Great Divide". In thinking of the title, what does this piece sound like to me? For me it was like looking across this huge expanse or being on top of something looking down and across.