by David Weigel
In 1967, Lake’s band the Shame released a cover of the Janis Ian song “Too Old to Go ’Way Little Girl.” The sixteen-year-old Ian had written a dark advice column to any woman her age: “Now, there is no escaping, and you’d enjoy a raping / just to find out the facts of life.”
The Shame fixed all that. The key line became “There’s no denyin’ you’re gonna end up cryin’ ”—a better fit for a vocal that told the girl to get past her prudery, Lake drawling out every mention of “sexxx” and “guuuuuys” and “your dirty miiiiiiind.” This couldn’t have been further from the harmless, cricketer-friendly vocals of Peter Giles.
Fripp made his Solomonic pitch. Lake had to join the band; something had to be sacrificed. Maybe Lake could replace Peter Giles on bass and vocals. Maybe he could replace Fripp on guitar.
Peter Giles didn’t see this as a bargain at all. “That thing of Fripp offering to leave is just a ploy, basically,” he’d say later. “It would have happened quite naturally. Fripp is very cute with political moves.” And Michael Giles was plenty ready to jettison his brother and form a different band. “As much as I love him,” he’d remember, “we were never some kind of inseparable brotherhood that had a design on the world.”4
By November 30, when BBC2 viewers were being introduced to the cheerful insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, the rump of that band was already starting to practice with Greg Lake. There were no tears for Peter Giles after hearing Lake tackle songs like “Drop In.” The band had traded precious talk-singing for pure swagger. “I couldn’t sing like that,” Michael Giles pronounced. “Robert couldn’t sing at all. Peter couldn’t sing like that. None of us had that sound or power.”5
On January 13, 1969, the new band found rehearsal space in the basement of the Fulham Palace café in London, with—and this was important—plenty of room for a mellotron. And there was the right sort of space and ambience for Peter Sinfield as he fiddled with a few lightbulbs and timed them to flash at key points in the songs and sets. “The basics were there,” Fripp wrote in his diary. “Sinfield’s lightshows embryonic . . . [he] builds stage lights out of baking foil and plywood.”6
But it worked. “It’s something to this day that I still tell people doing lighting productions,” Greg Lake remembered to band biographer Sid Smith. “I say, ‘Do we need all these fucking lights up there?’ And they say, ‘Oh yeah,’ because of this reason, and I tell the King Crimson story. One light bulb in the right place is worth 100 varilights going off at the wrong time.”7
“Most clubs have a light bulb, and that’s it—joke lights,” Peter Sinfield told me. “So we thought we’d take our own around with us. We have always had a good light show, with the mood changing with the music, doing what a light show should.”8
Nine days into the Fulham Palace café rehearsals, Sinfield made a second major contribution to the band. It obviously couldn’t be called “Giles, Giles and Fripp,” given the sudden and unexpected Giles shortage. Sinfield reached into his notebook and pulled out “King Crimson,” a term he had come up with to fill in when “Satan” didn’t fit a rhyme. “I wanted something that had some power to it, like Led Zeppelin,” Sinfield told Paul Stump. “Anything was better than Giles, Giles and Fripp. King Crimson had an arrogance to it.”9
The name was adopted straightaway. “Invited audience to rehearsals,” wrote Fripp on January 27. “Success. This band will be bigger than we anticipated.”10
At the end of February, King Crimson hopped a train three hours north to Newcastle for their first gigs—seven nights at a three-story venue called Change Is. Every week, the club would switch out a theme—“love” or “fun” or something—and adopt a new one. The week of Crimson’s residence, the theme was “horror.”
That wasn’t preparation enough for Crimson’s performance, all riffs and improvisations, Gustav Holst and fairy-dancing lights. When the band returned for its second set, club manager Ron Markham made a special introduction that Fripp found amusing enough to save in his diary. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Markham, “Giles, Giles and Fripp who for reasons best known to themselves have changed their name to King Crimson, will have a freak-out without the aid of pot, LSD or any other drugs.”11
AMERICAN AND BRITISH youth music had grown together from the moment the Beatles landed at JFK. In 1969, the two sounds finally started to grow apart. This was the year that the Grateful Dead grafted country and roots sounds into its music on songs like “St. Stephen,” presaging the next three decades of their career as a jam band. Jefferson Airplane and Love were recording their own down-to-earth anthems. Bob Dylan, recovered from his motorcycle accident, debuted (and never used again) a completely new vocal timbre for songs like “Lay, Lady, Lay.” The Beach Boys, having sequestered all evidence of the Smile debacle, covered the folk standard “Cotton Fields” and waxed it as a single. The Bay Area’s own Creedence Clearwater Revival became the biggest band in America with three albums of nascent country rock.
The British bands did not go this route. They were helped by the continued growth of specialty labels. Deram kept raking it in from the Moodies and Procol Harum. In 1969 Deram was joined by Harvest, a division of EMI that focused on “progressive” music, and by Chrysalis, started by ambitious promoters Terry Ellis and Chris Wright. Ellis and Wright came straight from the college circuit, booking bands for student unions, seeing a greater and untapped financial potential.
“We got Ten Years After and involved ourselves with bands that we really like and whom we knew were talented, in spite of what everybody else thought,” Ellis told Top Pops and Music Now in 1969. “Their career built up, not because of any hype, but because the places where we managed to persuade the promoters to book them—they went in, played, and all the kids went potty. That, for us, was the beginning of the ‘Underground’ scene. We thought we would get the whole organization under one roof.”12
Harvest ran the same play, from inside the industry. Malcolm Jones, a trainee at EMI, had brought Pink Floyd to the label. His higher-ups had counted their profits. There was money to be made in the “underground” scene, and the best way to collect it was with a microlabel with a crunchy name. The first six months also saw the debut of Deep Purple, the first post–Soft Machine record by Kevin Ayers, and a sizable Pink Floyd hit in Ummagumma. “By the end of the year,” Jones crowed to a reporter, “75 percent of the album charts will be progressive music.”
The bands would be there for it anyway, even if not all of them could write hit records. Hit singles weren’t the point; bands that could move albums and sell out British venues were inking deals and being covered intimately by the music press. A&R (artists and repertoire) men pulled promising bands from the school union circuit and from the London clubs, two scenes that overlapped from month to month. None of them had Genesis’s connections, but it hardly mattered when A&R men were racing to sell the “underground.”
Van der Graaf Generator benefited from the chase. The school union gigs had built a real following for the band, and a smattering of media attention. At the end of 1967, Peter Hammill, Judge Smith, and Nick Pearne recorded a demo for interested parties, with “Sunshine” on one side and an Icelandic myth called “Firebrand” on the other. Within months the demo had ended up with Mercury Records, and the band was being lobbied hard in London clubs. In May 1968, the three bandmates signed a contract as their manager, a fellow student, watched.
“They spent a whole morning giving their life story to John Sipple, the head of Mercury World Publicity, and also went to Littlehampton for the day to have their photographs taken,” reported the Manchester Independent. “The Generator bought a new 120 watt amplifier and a Vox guitar which they call Meurglys, after Ganelon’s sword in ‘Roland,’ which is covered with fur so that it looks like a flying squirrel with strings attached.”13
But that band fell apart a week later. A chance conversation at a bus stop ended up bringing Hugh Banton aboard as an organist. The new band was “discovered” by Tony Stratton-Smith, fresh
off his deals with Genesis. Five months after the Mercury signing, a new version of the band recorded a first single: “People You Were Going To” backed by “Firebrand.” Mercury, understandably, objected to releasing this single by their artists on some other label.
The parties reached an impasse. Van der Graaf Generator broke up, again. Hammill headed into London’s Trident Studios to record a solo album. Sort of. “Having the opportunity to make an album,” he told a radio interviewer, “I got everyone from the band together again.”14 Hammill fulfilled his Mercury deal by getting the label to rename and remarket his record as the first VdGG album, then let him free.
The band that couldn’t stop collapsing was able to put out The Aerosol Grey Machine, a name that Hammill had dreamed up after the drinks at some VdGG gigs kept getting spiked with acid. “Peter joked that I should have an aerosol grey machine which would have the opposite effect to psychedelics and make everything artificially grey,” explained Smith.15
A cover was mocked up, a grim female hippie tilting her head as she sprayed shades of gray out of a can, obscuring a backdrop of trees and grass. That was scrapped for something more generically psychedelic—not that it mattered.
The album was released in the United States and Europe. There would be no release in Britain. Mercury’s investment was largely squandered—a down payment on a band that sold nearly no records for them. The label had paid for men barely into their twenties to experiment, and to record the songs that had clicked for student unions in the north. All the labels were taking that risk; any group like this could be the next Pink Floyd, couldn’t it?
“The sheer adversity faced in order to produce the music fired me and the others up to do the rest of the stuff,” Hammill wrote later, when The Aerosol Grey Machine was released on compact disc. “It therefore follows that without this there would be nothing. I would not have attitude if I had not had to get through this. I’ll be honest with you; there are moments on these recordings when I now sound to myself like a real twenty-year-old, know-it-all, know-nothing prat. I was so. But those moments are blips along the track of attempting to make music; that’s nothing I can bring myself to feel embarrassed about.”16
KING CRIMSON FELL into place during that week at Change Is. Greg Lake and Robert Fripp hadn’t spent this much time together since the guitarist had done sporadic roadie work for the singer, years earlier in Bournemouth. Once they became bandmates, Lake tutored Fripp in the ways of stardom.
“When I got to the band,” said Lake, “I seem to remember that Robert was dressed in a red maroon pullover, grey flannel trousers, black Oxford shoes—he was dressed to go to grammar school!”17
“Greg said we should go into the club and line up the birds,” Fripp remembered to one biographer. “He looked on me, somewhat rightly, as an inept puller” and “took it on himself to give me some help in strategy and maneuvers.”18 Lake was an excellent teacher, with ego to spare and share; Fripp did pull birds at the Newcastle shows.
The band returned to London. Lake took his guitarist to Portobello Road, outfitting him with “black magic” gear that would be toned down to a modest hippie jacket. Fripp discovered the reward for his carousing in Newcastle: a ripe case of gonorrhea.
Crimson made its London debut on April 9, 1969, at the Speakeasy, gigging steadily through the spring and folding into the scene. They started talking to the Moody Blues about touring with them—an embryonic band backing up the country’s symphonic hit makers. It didn’t pan out. “I think they [the Moodies] were terrified,” said Michael Giles. “There was a power and an energy coming off Crimson that couldn’t be denied.”19
None of the musicians who popped up at the shows even attempted to deny it. King Crimson settled into a sound and image. Fripp, never comfortable standing up to play guitar, decided at the band’s May 14 gig that he would play seated on a stool. “You can’t sit down,” warned an exasperated Greg Lake. “You’ll look like a mushroom!”20
Fripp was unmoved. “My considered opinion,” he’d tell an audience at a later concert, “was that the mushroom is a fertility symbol in many cultures.”21 So the guitarist sat down, and he won immediate validation from one of the only people whose opinion mattered. Jimi Hendrix was at the show, “jumping up and down,” and pronouncing Crimson “the best group in the world.”22
After the show, Hendrix approached Fripp wearing a white suit with a matching sling on his right arm. “One of the most luminous people I’ve ever met,” remembered Fripp. “And he said to me: Shake my left hand, man, it’s closer to my heart.”23
The Rolling Stones were set to play an outdoor concert at Hyde Park on July 5. King Crimson, just six-odd months into its existence, was booked to support them. On July 3, the Stones’ multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones was discovered at the bottom of his pool. There was a moment of panic about whether the show would go forward. The panic subsided and nothing was canceled, as funereal portraits of Jones were placed at either side of the Hyde Park stage. King Crimson would have forty minutes to play to the largest audience they’d ever seen.
“Here’s a band that’s going to go a long way,” promised the announcer. Seven seconds later the band crashed into the first chords of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” all majors and sharps in 4/4 time, the entire band swinging like a fist. They played the ascending riff three times, each iteration ending with a higher, more discordant bending of Fripp’s guitar strings. The riff ended, and Fripp played flattened C chords as Lake howled Sinfield’s lyrics.
With the last line, Lake switched from a howl to a croon—then back to the riff, and to one more verse. After ninety seconds, the band charged into a faster sort of jazz number based on an old Ian McDonald melody that he’d titled “Three Score and Four.” The players ran through their solos for three minutes as Michael Giles sweated out a backbeat. Then another crash, another chorus. In just over six minutes it was over, and the crowd was theirs.
King Crimson held the stage for forty minutes at Hyde Park, playing highly structured songs—“The Court of the Crimson King,” “Epitaph”—and songs that served to scaffold their incredibly quick solos. Lake didn’t even get vocal parts for the last thirteen minutes. The brief “Mantra” consisted largely of a tender McDonald flute melody. “Travel Weary Capricorn” was a showcase for Giles—a song so evocative of basement jazz that the impressions of “Schizoid Man” started to fade.
But the jazz number ended with a strangled-cat solo from Fripp, as Lake and Giles laid down a thudding beat. This was “Mars,” a travel-sized cover of Gustav Holst’s piece from The Planets. A mellotron carried the melody as the band relentlessly bent the classical piece into a Satanic groove. It ended with air-raid sirens, played by the band’s management. And that was the show. “Standing ovation,” recorded Fripp in his diary. “Mammoth Success, of importance which will take time to appreciate. We’ll look back to see this day in years to come and fully realise its significance.”24
Sinfield was far less satisfied. The open-air festival setting had thwarted his main live contribution to the band, the light show. The next night, back at the Marquee, Sinfield was in control again, and the band was able to refine the sound it was simultaneously trying to capture in the studio. “They’ve learnt when to clap,” recorded Fripp in the diary.25
King Crimson played thirteen gigs at the Marquee in 1969; they played on the night three American astronauts first stepped across the Moon. “I’m sure we’d like to wish them the best of luck,”26 announced Lake. The band played “Epitaph,” and the teenaged Lake’s voice hit the walls, with something about “the wall on which the prophets wrote” and “the instruments of death.”
By July’s end, King Crimson were recording their album. It was the second attempt, after sessions with Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke produced a fat lot of nothing. “Our energy was trying to be transformed into another Moody Blues,” complained Michael Giles, “with lots of strumming guitars, one on top of the other, all heavily compressed with no dynamics.�
��27
On the second go, the band recorded itself. The record would contain five songs, all but one of them road-tested at most of their shows. “21st Century Schizoid Man” was given a slower burn, starting with half a minute of ambient noise—wind blown through a pipe organ. The stomp of the song was essentially what crowds had been hearing at the Marquee. Lake’s vocal had been heavily distorted, though, and he’d reigned it in, ending each verse and chorus on a low note.
The record followed a rhythm, a sprint/rest alternation between pomp and pastoral music. “I Talk to the Wind” twinned Lake’s lead vocal—again not showing off his range—with a Michael Giles harmony, cooing over Ian McDonald’s flute and some light guitar fills by Fripp. Both “Epitaph” and “The Court of the Crimson King,” mainstays of the live shows, were anchored by mellotron samples of orchestras.
Nestled in between was “Moonchild,” a largely experimental song. It began with a gentle waltz that evoked George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” every bar ending on a menacing note. The waltz faded away; the band began a lengthy improvisation, a slow walk through jazz figures that, at one point, involved Fripp quoting the melody from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Surrey with a Fringe on Top.”
The whole job took about two months. Barry Godber, an artist who had met Peter Sinfield when they were boring themselves senseless in the computer industry, was given tapes of the music and asked to paint a cover. He came back with two watercolors that occupied both sides of a gatefold LP sleeve, with no room for a band name or album title.
On the front was a red face, the color of pulp and muscle, screaming as it turned to look at some threat from behind. The inside presented another face, less terrifying at first glance, embedded in a red moon and throwing shapes with his hands like Christ in an icon. The face smiled, revealing a set of white fangs. There they were: the Schizoid Man and the Crimson King.