The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  On October 10, In the Court of the Crimson King hit British shops. On October 11, King Crimson played its final city concert at the London College of Printing. The gear was set up, and most of the band was in place. No one could locate Greg Lake. Ian McDonald’s girlfriend, Charlotte Bates, was deputized to find him. “We had to go get him in the end,” she remembered, “and he was bonking in the changing room. Greg was a great big ego, a big penis on legs.”28

  But none of that interfered with the pivot to America. King Crimson flew across the Atlantic at the end of October, just as EG Records was ramping up their promos. The label approached Pete Townshend about blurbing the album. His praise was so fulsome that the eventual full-page ad, which ran in music magazines on either side of the Atlantic, consisted entirely of Godber’s art and of “What Pete Townshend Thinks about King Crimson,” which was, in part:

  A friend listening to the album from a room below says, “Is that a new WHO album?” Deeply I’m ashamed that it isn’t, but I’m also glad somehow. That kind of intensity is music not Rock. Twenty first century schizoid man is everything multitracked a billion times, and when you listen you get a billion times the impact. Has to be the heaviest riff that has been middle frequencied onto that black vinyl disc since Mahlers’ [sic] 8th.29

  Thus King Crimson was flogged to the masses as its members flew to America’s East Coast. “We’ll lose money on our way across from the east coast to the West,” Fripp told Beat Instrumental in an oddly honest pretour interview. “As soon as you call yourself a rock band, for instance, you limit yourself.”30

  The tour wore them down, and quickly. “It’s all that hanging about in hotels and airports, backstage—it’s a strange place,” Michael Giles would recall. “I used to think of it, and still do, like it’s the lions coming into the circus through those tunneled cages and then let loose and they’ve got to perform and then they’re taken away again.”31

  The “circus” dragged on through November, taking Crimson from Boston to Chicago to Detroit to Florida. Band members included speed or marijuana in their diets, depending on whether work or travel was the order of the day. Giles was talking about turning Crimson into a studio band. Fripp was ignoring him.

  The band played five nights in a row at the Whisky a Go Go and were panned by the LA Times as “artists, shrewd manipulators of myriad rock and other techniques” who happened to be “boring almost beyond description.”32

  Giles and McDonald were fraying, pining for their girlfriends. For the first and not the last time, the US was rending King Crimson apart. “We were blowing audiences’ minds,” said McDonald, “and the thing was turning into this monster that was growing and maybe at the time I wasn’t equipped to deal with it.” Fripp said, “My stomach disappeared. King Crimson was everything to me. To keep the band together, I offered to leave instead but Ian said that the band was more me than them.”33

  “King Crimson will probably be condemned by some for pompousness, but that criticism isn’t really valid,” argued John Morthland in Rolling Stone. “They have combined aspects of many musical forms to create a surreal work of force and originality. Besides which they’re good musicians.” There was one caveat. “How effectively this music can be on stage is, admittedly, a big question. The answer is probably not too well.”34

  The review ran weeks after King Crimson had effectively ceased to exist as a live band. They wouldn’t appear on stage again for more than a year.

  “That band died during the recording of the first album,” Fripp would tell an interviewer a few years later. “It had gathered such a momentum that the impetus of the corpse twitched on until it finally fell over in San Francisco in December 1969. It was just down the road in a small motel just off Sunset Strip when Ian and Mike decided to leave. They leapt about the hotel in fits of excitement and glee that they had snuffed this burden of responsibility. I envied them considerably because I couldn’t do the same.”35

  THE MUSIC PRESS caught on slowly to King Crimson’s problems. Fripp had long established himself as the band leader, the scientist revealing his equations in loping interviews. Lake was the voice of the band. By the end of 1969, the “underground” and the official scene had been altered completely by the mere presence and terrifying success of Fripp and company. Bill Bruford, then the drummer for Yes, saw the band perform at 4:30 a.m. one night, and left obsessed. Steve Hackett, a guitarist who would later join Genesis, saw one of the London gigs and marveled at the presentation.

  “Yes and King Crimson were very much rival bands,” said Yes guitarist Peter Banks. “When King Crimson came around, and we saw them perform, we were absolutely stunned. I remember Bill saying, ‘I want to join that band,’ which of course he later did.”36

  And Yes was having a good year. The band had signed to Atlantic, and in the spring they had recorded an album of six original songs and two covers. They didn’t really sound like King Crimson, or try to. Chris Squire’s bass was mixed far louder than Greg Lake’s, chugging the rhythm of “Beyond and Before,” rendering the Beatles’ “Every Little Thing” into a nearly unrecognizable jam. Anderson’s lyrics carried none of Sinfield’s mysticism; they were quirky, but grounded. There was no opacity to them. When Anderson got dark, as on the war ballad “Harold Land,” he told a literal story of a veteran who lost all sense of reality while on the front.

  In the Court made Yes’s sound seem several evolutionary cycles behind. “It kind of blew our thunder completely,” groused Peter Banks. “Also, their album did very well, in contrast to ours, which didn’t.”37

  King Crimson was, at that very moment, in a state of collapse—as was the Nice. Keith Emerson’s band had just recorded its second symphony, one that moved further away from rock structure than the old Ars Longa Vita Brevis had. Nineteen minutes long, entirely instrumental, it was arranged for an orchestra and would be played live by one. Emerson’s ambitions were larger than the band could support. After one rehearsal, Emerson and Davison retreated to the Speakeasy, and the keyboard player’s suggestions turned the meeting into “a ‘fuck you,’ ‘fuck you, too’ kind of conversation.”38

  Emerson sought out new talent, starting with Lake. He met him first in the dressing room after a San Francisco band showcase, when Crimson was at its most fractious. Emerson would remember Lake “majestically enthroned in the only overstuffed tatty armchair of his band’s dressing room, snapping fingers at the nearest subject to light his cigarettes,” and had a first conversation that consisted of Lake lecturing on “the clarity of sound” and why “some of the notes you play seem blurred.”39

  The keyboard player was undeterred. Over the long Christmas holidays, he met again with Lake at the bassist’s cottage. “He was still indecisive,” Emerson would remember, “almost evasive about discussing King Crimson’s future, centering discussions around what I was doing and how I could do it better.”40

  Weeks later, at 3 a.m., Lake rang up Emerson with an offer. “Listen, I’ve been thinking. We should get the band together.” Emerson trekked back to Lake’s house, ready to cut the deal over a bottle of red.

  “You’ve got to work with professionals,” explained Lake to the star who’d spent nearly three times as long in the music industry. “That’s the key word—‘Professionals,’ and the reason The Nice fell apart bad management.”

  “Hold on a second,” said Emerson. “The Nice fell apart because of their changing artistic attitudes. It’s got nothing to do with set-ups. I happen to think that Tony Stratton-Smith is a very fine, very fair manager.”

  “Maybe he was okay for The Nice,” shrugged Lake. “We have to move on.”41

  Lake suggested the management of EG Records, carrying straight on from King Crimson. This wasn’t the only thing he copied from his old band. He cut a deal with Fripp—a sort of kick-starter for the music he would make with his new, genius partner. “The actual phrase used by Greg was ‘for my art,’ ” said Fripp.42

  “Robert had asked me if I wanted to continue the gro
up under the name of King Crimson,” Lake would say, “and I think I would have done had it been just one of the two of Ian and Mike who had left.”43

  Fripp didn’t have that choice. The band still had a deal, and a burgeoning audience won over by 1969’s best album. “King Crimson was too important to let die,” thought Fripp.44

  His band—and it was quickly becoming, by default and intent, his band—only lacked material. “Cat Food” was a dada rumination on fast-food culture that had been cobbled together on the chemically enhanced bus ride between the Detroit and Chicago gigs. Lake stayed on to provide vocals. Fripp had been a fan of Keith Tippett, a freestyle pianist, and invited him into the band. The King Crimson sound changed completely, to the disquiet of the other players. “Without the piano it might have actually done something,” said Peter Giles. “Fair enough. Fripp stuck to his guns, even though the guns were pointing in the wrong direction.”45

  That direction was set not just by Fripp, but by the prodigal McDonald and Giles. Back in England after the tour, as they hammered out songs for the second album, Fripp and Sinfield had visited McDonald with some unfinished tracks. “My feeling at the time,” remembered the multi-instrumentalist, “was that they were trying to get free ideas and I just kept my mouth shut.”46

  Fripp never agreed with that. “If half of the most exciting band of the year leave as it takes off,” he asked an interviewer, rhetorically, “which they later acknowledge as a mistake, how could they be trusted/relied upon again?”47

  Soon, McDonald was collaborating with Giles on an album of their own, taking with them some of the melodies they’d written for King Crimson. “Some people have likened it to middle-period Beatles,” Giles told an interviewer who’d heard the new album. “Fine by me, because that’s what we wanted to get, the sort of music which doesn’t come from technique but which works on a warmer level.”48

  McDonald and Giles had taken melodies with them, starting with a side-long suite that became “Birdman.” Fripp “had hoped that this would be the centerpiece of the second Crimson album.” A brief, sweet, and lilting ballad became “Flight of the Ibis.” The lyrics were pure sentimentality.49

  The same melody had ended up with Fripp and Sinfield, and in the light-show poet’s hands it became a story of blissful roadie seduction.

  The album’s cover art was gatefold, a photo of the bandmates and their current girlfriends traipsing through a garden, colors touched up to psychedelic standards. This was cheerful, an increasingly stark contrast to the goings-on in Fripp’s studios. The sophomore King Crimson album, In the Wake of Poseidon, was filled out by revisions of material that the old band had worked in concert. “The Devil’s Triangle,” which closed the record, came about after the band was prevented from putting that cover of Holst’s “Mars” on vinyl. The new song sounded like Holst’s music trampled by demons, the melody oozing from a mellotron. The song closed with a sample of the old band’s harmonies from In the Court of the Crimson King.50

  Fripp faced a challenge. He was open and available to the press; the press was avidly interested in whatever King Crimson did. Yet the quality of the new music was impossible to spin. The band stopped touring; indeed, it wouldn’t tour again until more than a year after the American run ended.

  Sinfield was more confident, sure that inspiration would come again, remembering what had risen from the bones of Giles, Giles and Fripp. “Within a year of its release and demission, somebody had stirred a cauldron, pointed a bone, painted a throne, and crowned a king,” said the lyricist to Fripp. “You’ll work it out.”51

  But with what band? The Poseidon sessions were filled out when saxophonist Mel Collins was brought in, and—eventually—when singer Gordon Haskell agreed to take the place of Greg Lake. Haskell had been friends with Fripp since the Bournemouth days, when the two of them sat next to each other in class. “Robert got me started,” Haskell said later. “He played me Django Reinhardt, but I preferred American music. Looking back, Robert was drawn to European music, and I was my father’s son; he was American-Greek.”52

  The differences between the singer and the guitarist had only widened since. Haskell had clocked time on the London scene, playing for a while with the Fleur de Lys and recording a strings-drenched solo album—Sail in My Boat—that he later condemned as juvenilia. “I was easily manipulated,” he would later admit.53 Haskell’s inborn mistrust of the music machine synced up quite well with Fripp’s. But Haskell originally turned down the offer to join King Crimson. The band was too weird.

  When he relented, the band found new ways to make him skeptical. “They took 12 hours to get a drum sound and it was still shite,” Haskell remembered. “You know, Otis Redding’s band took two minutes to get a drum sound and that was perfect. Fripp and Sinfield didn’t know what they were looking for.”54

  Not on drums, not in any way—at least not in Haskell’s opinion, shared by others being asked to remake the band. Trombonist Nick Evans was disturbed to see how “our parts were added in small sections, maybe four or eight bars at a time” and placed like ink strokes across the tracks as Fripp required them.55

  And the choices really were Fripp’s to make. After McDonald and Giles quit, and Lake followed, what had been a 22.5 percent royalty share for Fripp became 60 percent. He was an impresario now, even if his new singer was utterly unmoved by Keith Tippett and couldn’t understand what the point was, musically, of the pianist’s fingerings on songs like “Cat Food.”

  “That sounds just like a cat walking across a piano,” Haskell told Fripp.

  “Yeah,” said the impresario, “but Keith knows what he’s doing. A cat doesn’t.”

  “Yes,” sighed Haskell, “but it sounds the same!”56

  Haskell stuck with the band. Poseidon was done, and the “Cat Food” single would feed the press and public attention. The new King Crimson would have time to congeal—and to war internally. After one row, Fripp snapped at Haskell to remind him of who had the most to gain from being in this band. “How many hits have you had, then?”57

  The singer just steamed. “It’s got to sound ‘innovative,’ ” Haskell would carp to an interviewer decades later. “They shouldn’t have used drums—they should have used my dick.”58

  Haskell was angrier than Fripp knew. “I can honestly say I always felt the same as a slave, as I was and have always been intuitive,” Haskell would remember. “I knew we were slaves in a fascist country intuitively, but failed to articulate it—so I continually was self-effacing when I should have been a warrior and stood my ground. I was so unbelievably pleasant. Stupid, really. And I ought to have ripped a few heads off.”59

  Fripp and Haskell were bound to combust eventually. The singer didn’t know what Fripp was playing at. Fripp, in talks with the band and the press, broadcast the confidence of complete control. “The ideal size for a band would be 15 people because you could then have the musicians who could interpret any song you wanted to play, but that is impossible,” Fripp told Music Now’s Tony Norman. “The Beatles had it down to an art. When you heard one of their songs for the first time, your interest was immediately aroused. But then with things like Sgt. Pepper you can hear them three years later and still be hearing something new. That is what we are trying to do. We want our albums to last.”60

  Haskell simply didn’t hear that in the music. “Indoor Games” had the structure of a pop song but elements that spun it sideways. The trumpet that drove most of the melody ended each bar on a jarring up note. The conclusion blended this sound with a raining synthesized effect. “They were all such pricks,” Haskell would say. “No studio experience at all. I had spent three years in studios, with superb musicians, world class.”61

  But in the studio, confronted with “Indoor Games,” Haskell was tasked with a simple tune wedded to an abstruse Sinfield lyric. He never stopped struggling with it. He couldn’t take it seriously. “I was in a booth on my own with the lyric sheet in front of me and the lyric ended with ‘Hey Ho.’ When I saw the l
ine come up I thought ‘I don’t know how to sing this.’ I thought this was fucking insane so I just went ‘Hey Ho!’ Who says ‘Hey Ho?’ ” So he burst out laughing. “It was the worst thing I’d ever heard up to that point and there I was actually doing it.”62 On the track, the context happily removed, Haskell’s spite sounded rather jovial. The cackle stayed in.

  Outside the studio, Fripp put a positive spin on things. “Cirkus,” a song with the structure and lyrics of a Renaissance ballad and the tones of a horror film, had terribly challenged the new singer. “Gordon Haskell is struggling heroically to be a singer in a context where such endeavor is a functional impossibility,” Fripp explained. “An accompaniment which declines to accompany, and lyrics sufficient to set the psyches of strong men flapping.”63

  Even that nicety suggested that Haskell couldn’t stay. The breaking point came when the band rehearsed “classic” Crimson songs—material that was a year old, or less, but remnants of an entirely different band. Haskell’s wry, adenoidal voice could simply not wave and soar the way Greg Lake’s could. He wanted “Schizoid Man” shifted down, into his range.

  “I’m not going on stage and making a cunt of myself,” he snapped.

  “Do you want to leave?” asked an exasperated Fripp.

  “I do,” said Haskell, in his telling of the story. “I’m not going to go onstage and sing something I don’t believe in. It’s bullshit.”

  Haskell remembered storming out; he remembered Fripp telling him, “You’ll still get your royalties.”64 Then he remembered seeing the whole dispute in the music press.

  “He knew how to grab a headline,” groused Haskell. “It must have been the first thing he did that night of the row, and after promising to pay me my share of Lizard—clearly a blatant lie, as I have never received a penny. Typical fascist behavior. He struck me as an utter buffoon.”

  The Lizard incarnation of King Crimson would never play live. Haskell would never forget the darkness of the tryst. He and Fripp would meet again, on fair and friendly terms; he would get another crack at a solo album, It Is and It Isn’t, approved by Ahmet Ertegun himself after a spontaneous performance in the Atlantic guru’s hotel room. “Excitement, vindication, proof of my sanity,” Haskell remembered.