KING CRIMSON

Okay.  14.  
I was still learning about the mysteries of rock then.  And all I knew of King Crimson was that they had some kind of legend about them.  So when I came across that weird-looking album with the screaming face in shades of magenta and blue, I put it on.

Whoa.

It comes crashing in with the most doom-laden, threatening attack I’ve ever heard.  

Let me digress on this for a mo’, and note that it has been at least 35 yrs since the moment I first heard “21st Century Schizoid Man”.  I’ve listened to it many times since (though very rarely in the last 33); I’ve heard many versions of it, both live versions by the original artistes and ( lame) cover versions by mettaloid meatheads.   I’ve also come to very infinite terms with artists/albums/tracks like “Sister Ray” and “Fun House” , The Birthday Party and Albert Ayler.  The original “Schizoid Man” still evokes a “holy shit!” response from me every time it kicks off.

It’s not hard to see why the metalloids would go for this one.  Crushing guitar riff, doom-laden lyrics so stripped of pretense or extraneous verbage - Blood rack barbed wire/Politicians' funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire – and the whole thing coming down in a welter of revved-up guitar/bass/drums/mellotron(!) noise that ends in one long, sustained sonic shriek.  

I’ve often wished I could go back in time and attend various gigs.  One I’d love to drop in on would be an early Crimson gig where they introduced this one, just to check the audience reaction. In 1969, only Ayler, the Velvets and the MC5 were doing anything like this.  

Yet KC were distinctly different.  Even in its most crazed moments, there’s a precision and control in their playing that’s startling.

Nothing else on the LP was like that.  The next track, “I Talk To The Wind” is a gentle, woodwind-driven bit of jazz pop with some amusing trippy-hippy lyrics (“I talk to the wind … my words are all carried away .. the wind does not hear … the wind cannot hear”), which gives way to a rather cinematic, doomy meditation on the end of the world (“the walls on which the prophets wrote are cracking at the seams”).  Side two kicks off with a limpid poem about a girl with a lot of faerie in her (“Sailing on the wind In a milk white gown/Dropping circle stones on a sun dial/Playing hide and seek with the ghosts of dawn/Waiting for a smile from a sun child”) which gives way to 10+ minutes of rather aimless noodling.  Then another cinematic, doomy ballad called “In the Court of the Crimson King”, full of medieval-pageantry imagery.  

To a 14-year-old kid with a head full of comic books, Conan, Lord of the Rings and D&D, this is heady stuff indeed.  This ended up being one of the first albums I bought in high school and for about a year I listened to it a lot for a couple of years.  

By the end of that couple of years I’d started tuning in to a late-Sunday radio show called “Stonetrek”, hosted by a minor local radio legend named Greg Stone.  Stone was a tireless promoter of prog-rock.  And, while my hat is off to him for championing non-commercial music – I have to confess my take-away from several months of Stonetrek was that (a) nothing else sounded like Court and (b) I really didn’t like prog.  

And I still don’t.
But I still liked Court.

Now, around the time I’m coming to this realization, I pick up a newspaper and see, listed as upcoming to The Old Waldorf, a sorta-famous SF showcase club, is King Crimson.

!!!!

Now this is a shock.  Because by then I knew that KC had continued for half-a-dozen albums or so after Court, then dissolved, and main man Robert Fripp had headed out to a solo career.  

Now they were playing (had played, actually) San Francisco?  Was it the original band (I knew by then KC had been through many lineup changes)?  How did this happen?

More shocks.  King Crimson would be appearing on the late-night show "Fridays", on Dec. 4 1981 (I looked it up).  Upcoming.

Dec. 4 1981 – late Friday night.  I watch in disbelief as they introduce King Crimson.  Hoping for a jaw-dropping onslaught of “Schizoid Man”.

No.  Uh-uh.  

First, some nerdy-looking dude in a polo shirt is rattling a percussion instrument I’ve never seen before and grinning.  Then the camera pans to this piratical-looking skinhead warbling on a Chapman stick (which I don’t know at the time is a Chapman stick – I don’t know what the hell it is!).  Cut then to the guitar-playing frontman.  He looks like Reddy Kilowatt.  He’s wearing a pink(!!!) suit.  He’s bleating in a voice exactly, I mean exactly, like David Byrne’s (which is not a compliment) and he shakes and shimmies around the stage while twisting weird-ass noises out of his guitar.  Meanwhile, off to the side, clad in a black suit and tie and looking like a banker, is Fripp, seated behind a bunch of machinery and rather delicately picking away.  The music is a kind of hyped-up, edgy funk.  The lyrics are nonsense.  This is supposed to be King Crimson?  Where’s the quasi-medieval-fantasy-doom stuff?  Where’s the mellotron?  Why does it sound more like Talking Heads?  What the fuck is this shit!!?!!??

I decided I hated it.  I decided Fripp was an asshole.  Other kids at school (bear in mind, at my high school listening to The Cars made you a radical and Duran Duran made you an outright freakjob) expressed even more disdain than I for this King Crimson crap.

Except that, despite hating it, some part of me kinda dug it.  

I mean, I was in heavy denial for a long time, but it stayed with me, haunted me.  Long after Court had been pushed way to the back of my record collection (where it stayed till purged out sometime in the early 90’s).  Long after I’d moved on from any interest in prog or Fripp.  Long after I’d heard more of Adrian Belew’s solo albums than I ever cared to, I remember that Fridays performance.

And Crimson retained a certain cache.  I recall talking to a friend in the 80’s – an older guy who shared my tastes all the way for Velvets/Stooges/MC5-type stuff.  We both agreed we hated prog with a passion.  But when I admitted kinda digging the first King Crimson album, even Jim had to say “well … King Crimson was always an exception….”

So what am I to say all these years later?

Well, I still hate prog.  Or not so much hate it, because in fact, like metal, prog has blasted out in so many directions that it can’t be easily mashed under one umbrella.  I do really, really loathe the souped-up bombastic neo-classical bullshit of Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer, which is not only insufferable but seems inevitably to appeal mostly to hapless nerds who think listening to such glop-ola makes them more sophisticated and intelligent than us ignorami who prefer yer basic rawk and roll.  There’s a reason why people like this get beat up a lot as kids.

Of the rest – well, I’ve heard a lot.  And it just leaves me cold.  While there’s some impressive, even admirable musicianship going on, there’s nothing there for me to plug into.  Sorry.  That don’t move me.

But, King Crimson, well…

Court.  I find the long Greg Lake ballads pretty dull.  But I wouldn’t go so far as to call them bad.  More just overlong and slow.  Maybe the best comment would be that they represent outstanding specimens of a kind of rock song I don’t get behind.  I like “I Talk To The Wind” as a bit of slightly eerie late 60’s jazz-pop.  I like “Moonchild” even though it’s pretty much all noodling (hey, it’s kinda cool noodling).  And “Schizoid Man” remain just as powerful as when I first heard it.

And the “Fridays” appearance?  I now rate it as one of the great moments of televised rock and roll.  Musically, the `81 edition of KC was clearly doing something as radical and innovative for 1981 as Court was for 1969.  I dislike Belew’s singing as much – perhaps even more – than I did then.  But he’s a true frontman.  Odd, charismatic and he moves.  This is how you front a rock and roll band, dude.

The other thing that leaps out at me watching these again.  Yeah, the Crimson guys were all immaculate players.  And yeah, to my punk-bred thinking that’s a flashing alarm.  But there’s a key difference.  Watch.  To be sure, these guys are strutting their stuff, showing off their chops.  And yet none of it is self indulgent.  Everything is in the service of the song.  More than that, look at `em.  These guys are having the time of their life.  Check out the grin on Fripp’s face as Belew wrests pachyderm trumpets out of his guit.

What am I driving at?  Here you have quartet of pristine, ultra-high-chops musicians playing music that’s assuredly complex, intellectual and nominally “difficult”.  But also music that’s very driving, locks into groove you can shake your ass to, and rocks.  And they’re having a blast doing it.  Yeah, that is rock and roll, dude.

I may not have much use for prog, but like my old friend Jim said, King Crimson was always an exception.

DGM Live Talk official site for KC and its members/offshoots
Elephant Talk ultra-comprehensive fan site
King Crimson Allmusic
King Crimson Wiki
King Crimson RYM
Greg Stone is still active, though I'm not sure he has a show on the air at this time.  There's a discussion group for Stonetrek, too.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Prog-Rock Underground (But Were Afraid to Ask)  - rock crit Jim DeRogatis goes against the rock-crit grain by actually liking prog, and gives a reasonable introduction here
Progressive Rock Hall of Infamy - hilarious blog by a guy who, like me, isn’t a prog fan but does like KC.  Not recommended if you’re a sensitive prog-head.  On the other hand, if you’re a prog-head who can take a joke, you might have fun here…

Essential Listening

You’ve read my thoughts on Court above.  Same goes for Discipline, the best of the 80’s Crimson albums (hardcore fans will disagree.  I find the two followups far less interesting).  Beyond that, I honestly don’t care for most of Crimson’s albums, though partisans mostly swear by Lark’s Tongue in Aspic and Red.  The only ones that call me back for further listening are Islands, which is heavily free-jazz-influenced and therefore to my tastes, the live album Earthbound from the Islands tour, which is reviled by most Crimsonistas for sound and performance but I like – and it has the most ass-kicking version of “Schizoid Man” you’re ever likely to hear, veering dangerously close to MC5/Fun House-ish freejazz intensity.  I also like the fairly normal rock songs on Fripp’s solo album Exposure.

I am not up at all on Fripp or King Crimson’s post 80’s work, so can’t comment

Essential Viewing

There are several live DVD’s out there – none of which I can comment on except that I will say the Belew-led KC seems to have always been worth a look. 

Essential Reading

In the Court of King Crimson by Sid Smith – which I haven’t read, but which seems to have won the approval of fans.