I used to know this guy in high school who was an asshole.
Well, okay, I knew a lot of assholes in high school ... so did you I imagine. But this guy was a real asshole. Many years later as I came to learn about narcissistic personality disorder I realized that fit him to a "T". That is to say he was an NPD. I suppose I should feel sorry for him. But I've known a lot of NPD's since then. And I hate `em. Despicable people.
Fortunately, this particular one was out of my life 40+ years ago, where he shall forever remain. But anyway, he liked Hawkwind. Which was reason enough for me to pay no attention to them for years and years and years. Add in that they're associated with "prog" (not my thing) and have had little or no critical cache (oops) and there ya go. I didn't actually listen to Hawkwind till a couple years ago.
What led me to them was that they have developed a certain cache, particularly among musicians I dig (such as the guys from Rocket from the Tombs). Plus Lemmy was a member, and how cool is that? So one night a few years back I did indeed download Space Ritual. And it did indeed begin to grow on me. To the point where I have now become a fan of Hawkwind.
To illustrate what I find compelling (and different) about Hawkwind, allow me to steal some quotes from "schmitt", a member of Rate Your Music who has an interesting, annotated list which can be read here:
While it may seem strange today -
especially in the US, where they are all but forgotten outside of a
dwindling cult - back in the early 70s Hawkwind was, to many observers,
the most exciting rock band around. In an era where rock music seemed
less adventurous than ever, here was one band, at least, still holding
on to the spirit of '67, trying to expand the parameters of the genre.,,,
Psychedelia had virtually disappeared from the US by 1970. In
England, it morphed into space-rock, a genre Pink Floyd invented in 1967
on their debut LP, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. ""Astronomy Domine" establishes the basic underpinnings of space-rock," Greg Shaw wrote in a March '73 article in Phonograph Record,
"steady, monotonous drumming, suggesting the relentless velocity of
space travel, and sharp, hard-edge rhythm guitar chording, representing
the unthinkably strong, firm metallic power of a space craft. Outer
space ambience is provided with the addition of weird organ sounds and
the de rigeur synthesizer whooshes. All of it combines to create the impression, still somewhat romanticized, of travel through space." To many critics, including Shaw, Pink Floyd was never the same after
Syd Barret's departure in 1968. "Pink Floyd seemed to become
preoccupied with mental space, and I rather lost interest," Shaw wrote
in 1973.
For Shaw, it was Hawkwind's second LP, In Search of Space,
that really accelerated the "basic raw space drive" of Pink Floyd's
early sound. "Tireless tomtom drumming, simple two-chord guitar rhythm,
voices intoning the title lyrics and the whole thing surrounded by a
universe of swirling, shooshing synthesizer noise. The whole album's
like that, and it's great." Lester Bangs, who reviewed the album in the
6/22/72 issue of Rolling Stone, agreed. "If you're glad that most of
that stuff is part of the past now, you'll probably think this album is a
pile of dogshit," he wrote. "If, on the other hand, you remember the
absolute glee of filling your skull with all those squawks and shrieks
and backwards-tapes and telegraphic open-tuned bridges between
indescribable inner worlds conjured best neither by this music nor
psychedeliteful elixirs but rather by a fortuitous combination of the
two - if that was one of your favorite eras in the decline of Western
Civilization, then you'd better glom onto this album... which may not be
rock 'n' roll, but certainly beats "Fire 'n' Rain.""
Shaw, Bangs and schmitt couldn't have it more right. And if you're thinking Hawkwind is starting to sound like their almost more in Velvets or Stooges territory, you'd be right. The early Hawkwind albums are indeed non-stop assaults of hypnotic, pounding grooves, slamming guitar and voices chanting sparse lyrics over and over the din, while weird electronic sounds add color and spectacle. Early Hawkwind ultimately has more in common with The Ramones than with prog. And it rocks.
Add in their reputation for drug use, crashing rock festivals uninvited, inviting audience participation and filling their stage with nutty light shows and big-titted, body-painted nude dance named Stacia and, well, here's a band right up my alley!
Hawkwind has been through a fairly dizzying array of members and some significant stylistic changes. Their best stuff was made by the "classic" lineup of Dave Brock (the band's mainstay), Nik Turner on sax, Robert Calvert on vox, Del Dettmar on keys, Simon King on the traps and Lemmy Kilmister hisself of bass. SST's Joe Carducci accurately described them thus: "Brock's guitar provided a heavily distorted wall of sound that rose
and fell as if it were some bonehead bass line. Lemmy's bass with its
high end distortion would roam around carrying the melody with it. Nick
Turner [sic] played two or maybe three note patterns on the sax that
would fade in and then fade out like old Nick was only orbiting this
planet. Terry Ollis or Simon King on drums would keep up a straight
pulsing pattern. Dik Mik, Del Dettmar and Simon House might then add odd
spiraling electronic noises - strictly low tech action - or they might
have to help the roadies keep Brock and Turner propped up. Bob Calvert
or Michael Moorcock might be found jabbering on about Vikings and space
maidens over the top of it all. And all together it sounded great - a
soaring, psychedelic hard rock drone. The fourth album, a live double
titled, Space Ritual, is a viable substitute for actually getting wasted yourself."
For me, it's the early stuff that counts - Hawkwind (their first, much maligned by fans but I think it's one of their most consistently engaging), In Search of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido and finally the epochal Space Ritual. After Ritual, their sound begins to change. Hall of the Mountain Grill and Warrior On the Edge of Time have a lighter feel and sound, and move closer to typical prog rock, albeit with less noodling. I should note that true Hawkwind followers rate those two to be among their finest, so use yer own judgment. The later 70's sees them moving in an almost "new wave"/pop direction; in the 80's the sound is more like pop-metal. The 90's were marked by a return to something closer to the classic sound. I'm still exploring. Starfarer's Hawkind Album Guide will help guide the interested through their dizzying catalog.
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.
