Great news for yall that get to see a show on the new leg of the Roger Waters Us + Them tour:
There is one personnel change though it seems to be temporary: keyboardist Bo Koster, of My Morning Jacket, has replaced Drew Erickson, apparently due to an injury afflicting Erickson.
http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/latest/roger-waters-us-them-tour-returns-to-new-jersey-one-musician-c.html (http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/latest/roger-waters-us-them-tour-returns-to-new-jersey-one-musician-c.html)
How cool is that for Bo. Roger Waters sure has respect for MMJ, it's obvious. I'm sure the Jess and Holly (Lucius) thing all stems from Roger meeting them through MMJ also.
Wow, way to go Bo! Very cool to hear this news
Awesome, but this makes it less likely we'll get new Jacket anytime soon as it would most likely push back their Fall recording plans.
Maybe Jim will work on the long awaited Monsters of Folk sequel.... Wishful thinking.
heres' the thing though: it's a ringing endorsement from one of the founders of Pink Floyd himself, saying that Bo Koster is the most Rick Wright-esque keyboardist left on planet earth. Rick Wright was brilliant. Not just a psychedelic keyboardist, he could do it all from Indian modal scales on Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun, to funk lounge jams on Have a Cigar, to gospel organ howls on Young Lust, to the classical piano serenade of The Great Gig In The Sky, aka one of the most moving pieces of music that WILL be a folk standard played and sang for generations and remembered for time and all eternity. He can play anything and did when he was alive. And guess who's just like that and maybe even better?
OUR BO!!!
I talked to Bo at the afterparty, the night of MMJ's first gig with Waters at the Newport Folk Festival in 2015, and he was on cloud nine from the experience and let go some funny stories about the night before when Waters wanted to change everything up at the last minute, LOL.
I'm really happy that he's getting the chance to have that incredible experience with Roger's tour. But don't stay too long, now. There's work to be done in the MMJ studio :drum:
Bo was in action at the Roger Waters show at Hyde Park London on 6 July. Open air concert with around 60,000 fans. All the Pink Floyd classics with Bo in great form. Nobody could understand why I was so excited when Roger introduced the keyboardist!
Betsy and I just got back from a wonderful trip to Europe which included some musical adventures one of which was seeing RW+Bo in Rome at the Circus Maximus. Of course we know Bo can play the keys, but hearing him up on that stage with the biggest freaking video display ever behind him filled with PF images and sounds coming from all directions from one of the finest sound systems for live music ever in a place where crazy shiat happened thousands of years ago is about as much as a fella can take. Welcome to the machine, Bo.
Waters used to say Richard Wright was simply a keyboard player. He tried to dismiss his importance to Pink Floyd's sound. The fact that he chose Bo, the only person I know who could come close to Wright's keyboard wizardry, makes me believe he says things he does not believe, simply to spite someone.
I dunno if he's still like that, I think in the 80s he started going to therapy and seems to have mellowed out a bit. But he was definitely not the nicest person to his bandmates at their peak, and was particularly mean to Wright.