by Will Romano
The moment was surreal—and also shortlived. Rumors of the band coming back together were quickly quashed. Gilmour went on to release On an Island in 2006 (his first solo album since 1984’s About Face). Mason’s name crops up on reissues from time to time (from such disparate acts as Robert Wyatt, Gong, and the Damned), and Wright appeared on On an Island.
In the spring of 2006, Gilmour hit the road (with Wright on keyboards), spawning the double album Live in Gdansk, as Waters and Mason teamed up for a competing tour. The divided halves of Floyd, though trolling around separately, each performed The Dark Side of the Moon, stirring rumors once again of a band reunion. Sadly, it was never to be: Wright died in September 2008.
Some still hold out hope that the two prodigious songwriters of Floyd—Gilmour and Waters—can sit across a table and discuss life, love, and their hopes and fears and get down to recording new material once and for all.
“As I’ve said, I respect the band a lot for what they’ve accomplished,” explains Peter Jenner, “but the only thing I can’t respect is the way they can’t bury the hatchets and do another record about growing old, [about] the disillusionment of age, which I think would be great, because a lot of their fans are growing old as well. Not all are, but a lot of us are. And we’d like to see it happen.”
So much of Pink Floyd’s history is steeped in achieving the unthinkable: In the summer of 2010, Gilmour and Waters reunited onstage in England for a benefit show. At press time, the pair had promised to perform together again on Waters’ solo tour later in the year, stoking speculation of a Floyd resurgence. Can Waters and Gilmour perform one more minor miracle?
(Ian Dickson/Getty Images)
CRIMSON
Twentieth Century Schizoid Band
IF THERE’S ONE GROUP THAT EXEMPLIFIES THE progressive rock era—its willingness to change the parameters of accepted rock, its constant search for new inspiration—it’s King Crimson.
Given the impact of the band’s debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, one could argue that Crimson single-handedly had more to do with creating the entire genre of prog rock than any other band in Britain.
“King Crimson emerged at a particular moment when there was a cultural effervescence that really carried anyone and everyone along with it,” says Greg Lake, bassist and vocalist for the band in the early days. “King Crimson emerged at that very moment when the cork popped.”
As if reaching us on some subconscious level, the musical and lyrical elements of the early King Crimson seemed to crystallize and codify what is now defined as prog rock, despite the changes in musical direction and personnel, in an attempt to remain fresh while maintaining a discernible identity.
“People seemed to have latched onto Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield’s style, this kind of purple prose,” says founding member Ian McDonald, the band’s wind player and Mellotronist. “It seems lyric writers needed to work in this kind of wordy style, using medieval imagery of knights and dragons and things, in order to call themselves progressive.”
Musicians from soon-to-be-highly-influential bands looked up to Crimson—people such as Steve Hackett from Genesis and Peter Banks and Bill Bruford of Yes (the latter would join Crimson in the early 1970s).
“We thought we were pretty hot stuff until Crimson came along,” says Yes’s original guitarist Peter Banks. “They were so much better than us that we literally said, ‘We have to rehearse a lot more.’”
BEGINNINGS
Crimson has it roots in Bournemouth-area bands, most notably the trio, Giles, Giles and Fripp (featuring bassist Peter Giles sharing vocal duties with his brother, drummer Michael Giles, and guitarist/piano player Robert Fripp), which recorded The Cheerful Insanity of . . . for Decca’s Deram sublabel in 1968.
Multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and then-girlfriend and former Fairport Convention vocalist Judy Dyble placed an ad in the popular music weekly Melody Maker for “Musicians Wanted,” in the hopes of forming a band. “Giles, Giles and Fripp had put an album out, but that hadn’t done anything, really,” says McDonald. “Peter Giles answered the ad, saying, ‘Why don’t you come see us. We’re a three-piece band.’ And it went from there.’”
The chemistry seemed to be right, and the quintet cut recordings at Brondesbury Road, in London, on Peter Giles’s two-track in the band’s flat “It was quite primitive, but nonetheless we got some quite nice recordings done,” says McDonald.
After the sessions, Dyble left, but not before cutting an early version of “I Talk to the Wind,” which would later appear on Crimson’s A Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson in 1975. (Material from this time period would be used as the basis for songs on the band’s debut as well as for 1970’s In the Wake of Poseidon, 1971’s Islands, and even Peter Sinfield. 1973 solo record, Still.)
McDonald, who had appeared on one official Giles, Giles and Fripp release, a single for “Thursday Morning” (the final chapter of “The Saga of Rodney Toadey” from The Cheerful Insanity of . . .), remained and the band pressed on.
“We wanted to move to another level, and that basically meant getting a front man for the Giles brothers,” says McDonald.
That front man turned out to be vocalist Greg Lake, a friend of Fripp from the Bournemouth area, a onetime member of the Gods and Shy Limbs, who’d apply cross-picking technique to the bass guitar that he’d learned from instructor Don Strike (the same music teacher Fripp went to).
“When Greg took over the lead vocal and the bass, that’s when we had King Crimson,” says McDonald. “I brought my pal Peter Sinfield in, although he and the band had already met, and he became the lyricist and somewhat of a mentor and visionary while handling the lighting and PA.”
Once Lake and Sinfield were onboard, bassist Peter Giles was sent packing (though he’d reappear with Crimson on In the Wake of Poseidon). “We needed a front man, a lead singer,” says McDonald. “Between Giles, Giles, Fripp, and myself there really wasn’t a strong front man or singer. That was [Greg’s] job. He just happened to play bass as well. Pete was arguably the more accomplished bass player . . . but we had to make the change.”
It was an odd assortment of people, but it worked. “There are some strange characters,” says Pete Sinfield. “I’m a sort of this funny mixture of clown and harlequin and incredibly emotional queen-of-the-night sort of person. I’m an only child, very shy; my mother was bisexual, and I have a bohemian background. Three of them [Fripp, Lake, Giles] came from the Bournemouth area—a very middle-class area of southern England. But Greg’s parents were very, very poor.
“I remember Greg talking to me one time about his upbringing,” Sinfield continues. “He lived in a prefab, cheap housing unit. He said he used to see the people next door to him with peaches in these throwaway tins. Greg said he never had peaches in his house. That put a certain sort of drive into him that he was going to rise above all of this and have peaches for his tea.”
“That was my childhood, poverty, basically,” says Lake. “But when I became about twelve years old, one Christmas my mother and father asked me what I wanted and I said that I’d like to have a guitar. They bought me this cheap guitar on the condition that I took lessons. I did, and I met Robert Fripp in the process.”
“Ian McDonald is this blue person most of the time with these emotionally cheerful spots,” resumes Sinfield. “The interesting thing about Ian is that his parents shoved him off because they didn’t quite know what to do with him.”
“It’s true,” says McDonald. “I was in a military band from the age of sixteen to twenty-one. I had trouble from my father, especially through my school years. I didn’t do well in school and got kicked out. Finally, my parents put me away in the army when I was a teen, because they didn’t know what to do with me. I spent one year at the Royal Military School of Music and basically learned to read music and a certain amount of orchestration and also used tuned percussion.”
Unraveling Fripp is a book in and of itself. For one thing, Fripp has attempted to eschew
the blues-based electric rock guitar tradition by drawing not only from American jazz and blues but European folk and art-music /classical traditions. It’s why his guitar playing sounds and feels different from, say, Peter Green’s or Eric Clapton’s. Geniuses both. But Fripp’s talents lay elsewhere. Even his thought processes seem to be different.
“I remember going to his flat, way back in 1969, and I saw all of these paperback books, because he’s a big reader, like me, but every one of them had its own plastic bag,” says Sinfield. “I prefer a well-thumbed library book. But if you put those two personalities together, it’s an interesting combination, because you get the precision of Robert and the funky, who-gives-a-shit thing from me.”
“I knew Fripp pretty well,” says Yes’s Banks. “Fripp used to come and watch [Yes] play at the Marquee [before Crimson started]. He later moved into the apartment house I was in, that used to be the Yes apartment in Fulham in London. So many musicians lived in that piace—50A Munster Road. He seemed a bit like a schoolteacher. Not exactly patronizing but highly intelligent. I don’t know anybody else quite like him. What I would say about him is that when we would ever have a discussion, he could never be wrong. He had a great knack of convincing you that he was right.”
“Bob was amazing,” adds onetime Crimson drummer Andrew McCulloch. “He was left-handed but taught himself to play right-handed. He was always a very studious worker.”
Fripp once described himself as the grandson of a miner who died at fifty-nine, and the son of a father who told him to “leave school at sixteen to help feed his brothers and sisters.”5
This could not have been easy for young Bob Fripp. Anyone who has grown up in a family with a similar dynamic knows it’s about sacrifice and maturation—traits omitted by some of Fripp’s detractors.
“Robert is a lovely man,” says David Enthoven, the “E” in E. G., Crimson’s former management company. “Much misunderstood man. But I had a lot of fun with him. Got drunk with him. I’m still pleased to call him a friend.”
“Robert has a reputation of being quite prickly, but that reputation comes from the music press—and he’s prickly with the music press, because he sees them as rather irrelevant to what he does,” says Porcupine Tree founder Steven Wilson, who remixed and remastered some of the Crimson catalog.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Prior to joining the erstwhile Giles, Giles and Fripp, Sinfield and McDonald had worked together with future band roadie Dik Fraser on bass. (Sinfield and McDonald had written material, including “The Court of the Crimson King,” from which the band got its name.)
Few rock bands had such a close relationship with lyricists. Keith Reid with Procol Harum, Robert Hunter with the Grateful Dead, and Pete Brown with Cream were perhaps the most high-profile examples.
“I must have been amusing and/or valuable to them,” says Sinfield. “It became increasingly so, because this was a bunch of professional, almost cynical, musicians. King Crimson were great players: They really should have been jazzers, but what they lacked, without blowing my trumpet too much, was imagination.”
“The original King Crimson agreed on more or less everything on musical terms,” says McDonald. “You always hear of stories of bands bickering and people trying to get their little bit on the record . . . but we never really had any of that. We were all in the same place, which was pretty great. We all knew what the band was. It was unspoken.”
MOVING OUT
Crimson moved out of their Brondesbury rehearsal space and hit Fulham Road in London, where they set up shop. The band performed its first show at the Speakeasy in London in April 1969, and continued on playing the London scene, eventually earning a residency at the Marquee.
Their Hyde Park performance, supporting the Rolling Stones, in July 1969, was held before half a million people, and solidified the band’s appeal while increasing their visibility. “[Yes] never played with them, luckily,” says Banks, who saw Crimson at their Speakeasy gig. “They were much better than us.”
“I saw [Crimson‘s] early gigs in London and I went down there with Bill [Bruford], and we just stood there,” says bassist Ray Bennett, later of Flash, featuring Peter Banks. “He was saying something to the effect of, ‘This is what I wanted [Yes] to sound like.’”
Former Pink Floyd comanagers Peter Jenner and Andrew King were promoters of the Hyde Park shows and remember how Crimson accelerated to the front of the line and got such a primo gig opening for the Stones.
“David Enthoven managed them and wanted to get them on the bill [at Hyde Park],” remembers Jenner. “Andrew [King] and I thought everyone wanted to be on the bill with the Stones and that we could make a lot of money for it. We said to David, ‘It’ll cost you a lot....’ So he sent over an envelope with a lot of money in it and I was so embarrassed that we sent it back to him.
... He has never forgotten that.” “Absolutely 100 percent true,” says Enthoven. “Pete Jenner and I have been firm friends ever since. Jenner is a man of great integrity”
As it turns out, Crimson didn’t need to bribe, beg, steal, or borrow. The band’s live performances were growing in popularity, intensity, and power. “We had a residency at the Marquee, and we played there once a week and that was how our reputation started to grow,” says McDonald. “We used to get a good crowd. But when we did Hyde Park, opening for the Stones, and then played the Marquee after that show, the place was absolutely jammed. Steve Hackett, who I knew even before he joined Genesis, was amazed at what we were doing. He noticed that it wasn’t all just trashing and noise. There was a lot of delicate music as well.”
Drummer Michael Giles, left, and Ian McDonald recording the McDonald and Giles album at Island Studios, 1970. (Courtesy of Virgin Records)
“At paranoia’s poison door”: the iconic schizoid face of Crimson’s 1969 debut.
The Crimsos were beginning to trust each other, and even went as far as switching instruments with one another on occasion. “You Could play almost anything that came to mind and know that the other players would be with you, hearing and supporting it,” says McDonald. “Even to the point where, perversely, they would sort of leave you out there on the edge by Yourself.”
“With Crimson, performances were a matter of interreaction,” says Lake. “That’s when, as a bass player, if I play particularly passionately, I fire up the drummer, force him to play better. Or it’s when he does a drum fill that forces you to play a bass lick that you just wouldn’t have thought of.”
“One night at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, the improvisation descended into silence,” says McDonald. “Then it became a game of chicken as far as who was going to break the silence first. The audience didn’t know what was going on.”
Crimson’s slowly unfurling, Mellotron-drenched interpretation of Gustav Holst’s “Mars” from the Planets suite was a major live piece. “It started off very quietly with the snare drum tapping out this 5/4 rhythm over the course of seven or eight minutes,” says McDonald. “It built up until it became this wall of noise, very dark, very heavy.”
The tape-based beast, the Mellotron, often gave the band its eerie and powerful sound by achieving a huge crescendo of approximated string (and other) noises. “Keeping Mellotrons in tune and recording them was a masochist exercise,” remembers Sinfield. “It was impossible, really. I only ever heard ‘The Court of the Crimson King’ in tune twice in sixty gigs, I think, whether it was outdoors or indoors.”
SCHIZOID MEN
For the band’s debut, the quartet and Sinfield had initially tapped producer Tony Clarke, mostly due to his experience recording the Mellotron with the Moody Blues. But after reels of recorded tapes resulted in very little usable material, Crimson decided to produce their debut themselves. It was a risk, and Enthoven and partner John Gaydon went into debt to finance the damn thing.
So obsessed were management with getting a finished product that Enthoven talked Wessex Studios into allowing the band to use the facilities for free on the promi
se that the money would be paid back when the band secured a record deal.
“That was a dangerous thing to do,” says Enthoven. “It was complete madness. We took huge risks—mortgaged the house and whatever.”
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. In the Court of the Crimson King is arguably not only one of the most important records in the history of progressive rock but in rock music in general.
Even before the music begins, the record opens with a mysterious hum—a mechanical sound that evokes space travel. “That abstract wind sort of sound is the pipe organ,” says McDonald. “I put my arms across the keyboard and rolled my forearm up and down over it, overloading the wind organ that was pumping air, making this wheezing, gasping sound.”
John Landis, director of the movie An American Werewolf in London, once remarked about the classic Universal monster movie The Wolf Man, saying that the setting was disorienting: It could be Western or Central or Eastern Europe, motivating viewers to ask, ‘Where are we? What century is this?’
“Now that you mention it, [21st Century] Schizoid Man’ does set up an atmosphere of, ‘Where are we?’” says McDonald. “Of, ‘I’m not quite sure of what this is. Is that sound mechanical or natural?’”
Despite its links to the past (and future), “Schizoid Man” was written squarely in the present. Fripp, perhaps jokingly, once stated during an early live Crimson performance (in San Francisco in December 1969) that Spiro Agnew, the disgraced vice president under U.S. president Richard Nixon dubbed a “traveling salesman for the administration,” was the model for the “21st Century Man.”6