Kansas guitarist Richard Williams recently sat down with Radio Artifact and talked about how different live performance is from playing in the studio. Rich described his thought process and his feelings while playing live:
“I’m trying to keep up, look around, and the lights are changing, work with my foot pedals, and this, and that. And the stuff is hard to play, and there are so many computations you’re dealing with every second, you’re getting ready for the next. You know, I gotta be ready to step over here on the acoustics and mute this.
So… it’s a two-hour panic. [Laughs] But when I watch it, it looks effortless. It is an odd sensation.”
Williams also mentioned that he empathises with other musicians, emphasising the universality of the stage anxiety:
“But I think it’s a pretty common fear among musicians, when the wheels fall off the wagon again, and you just come to a grinding halt. And that’s the fear in your stomach every night for a thousand shows, yet nothing ever happens. It’s hard to explain, but it is real.”
Kansas guitarist is not the only musician who suffers from live performance anxiety despite doing that for a long time (fifty years, in Rich’s case). Sometimes it happens due to technical details and computations, sometimes it happens because of the large crowd. The Prince of Darkness once said:
“Every night before I go on tour, I get terrible stage fright until I cross that invisible line. Once I’m on, it’s shit or bust.”
In 2018, when Barbra Streisand appeared on an episode of ‘Carpool Karaoke,’ she mentioned that her stage fright got better over the years, especially since she forgot the lyrics during her performance in Central Park in 1967.
Getting anxious or not, Kansas will embark on the ‘Another Fork On The Road’ tour on September 12th to celebrate their 50th anniversary. You can check the tour dates and tickets here.
You can watch the whole interview below.
