Guitar China Takes a Stand on Dream Theatre Cancellation
You ever get the feeling that sometimes, things get lost in translation? specially when there is no trust?
I wrote a few days back about the Dream Theater show cancellation, being slightly ticked off that it happened so late. According to DT’s website, the Chinese party was at fault and thus things couldn’t happen.
Jiang Wei, the heart and soul of Guitar China, took to the web in defense of their company posting a detailed account of what happened and where things went wrong:
http://bbs.guitarchina.com/thread-1401648-1-1.html
Reading it, you just feel bad for both parties because it really seems like lack of trust did this: The band received approval for the ministry of culture for their gig, logistics were taken care off and it really just came down to one little fucked up detail to derail the train. They could have applied for the F–ing visa
I can see why Jiang Wei is giving up bringing in foreign bands…
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I’ve been following this as I was really looking forward to theshow.
I don’t think this was a lack of trust thing. They had an agreement, everything was fine, in the contract a date was set on when the band needed to have the appropriate visas. When that date came along and no visas were issued, DT made the announcement that there was visa issues and therefore cancelled the show. A few days later, the visas went through, and Guitar China told DT that everything’s ready to go, but for DT, the show was already cancelled. Now Guitar China is pissed because they paid 100,000 USD upfront which they will not get back.
Jiang Wei’s been extremely vocal about this, and people definitely sympathize with him. It’s like come onDT, ya the visas were a few days late but there’s still plenty of time, why can’t you give us a break?
It’s hard for me to believe that DT is doing this just to be asses, and i’m pretty sure it’s their managers idea.
well, “visa issues” seems to be always a good excuse for everything that goes wrong and the truth doesnt matter at all anyway. Show biz still is biz, it’s all about costs and profits in the end and a professional management will always try hard to make a done deal happen. And deposite payments wont be kept unreturned unless serious onesided misdeeds towards the agreed contracts. Both band/booking and local promoters are no kids to know what must be done in order to have a show. And for pro bands, it’s most likely not only for one gig to worthwhile the trip. I have seen other cancelations by smaller bands booked by Guitar China/Xoundforce where the band mentioned something about huge sport events to be the reason of “visa issues” where there wasnt any of such at all around the time. So, keep on blaming Culture Ministry and the Embassy and Chinese promoters may always walk out of “issues” while saving face, it’s just that the booking agents will remember what really went wrong and the next good idea may well be to “giving up bringing in foreign bands” … we will see what they do within the next years. I only hope that they dont send those bands to places again where even Chinese bands dont enjoy to play and make sure that a double-bass-drum-kit should actually have the same size and color for the bass drums … rock’n’roll!