by Will Romano
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973)
Red (1974)
The original four-piece lineup in 1969. Left to right: Lake, Giles, Fripp, and McDonald (Courtesy of Rolling Stone London edition/Discipline Global Mobile)
Songs such as “Sailor’s Tale,” “The Letters” (which evolved from the Giles, Giles and Fripp song “Why Don’t You Just Drop In”), “Ladies of the Road,” the title track, “Prelude: Song of the Gulls” (parroting another GG&F track, “Suite No. 1”), and “Formentera Lady” were perhaps more consistent than the material on Lizard, but not as explorative.
“The band were influenced by jazz, really,” Ian Wallace told the author in a 2003 interview. “We were leaning toward John Coltrane and Miles Davis and even free jazz. We allowed ourselves to go anywhere we wanted.”
As the music became more elastic, tension grew within the ranks. Fripp and Sinfield weren’t seeing eye to eye on the band’s musical and lyrical direction: Fripp even began questioning Sinfield’s passion for the music.
“The famous falling-out between Robert and me was really because we had a new band, new musicians, and I wanted the sound to be more Mediterranean and Robert wanted it to be more urban and aggressive and gritty,” says Sinfield.
“Robert had decided that he could no longer work with Peter,” said Wallace. “He came to the other three of us and said, ‘It is either me or him.’ That was it, you know?”
Sinfield was out. (He later recorded a solo record, 1973’s jazzy-orchestral Still, featuring past, current, and then-future members of Crimson.) It seems Islands was the appropriate title for a record, which, in 1971, reflected the division between the band’s members.
After a 1971 U.S. tour, Crimson reconvened for a rehearsal/writing session. “[W]e did a tour of the United States, the first [this band did] of the U.S., and it went really well,” Wallace remembered. “Robert said, ‘I want this band to be an equal split; I want equal input creatively and writing-wise.’”
“We came back from an American tour and we had six weeks off before the next tour of America,” says Collins. “The idea, Robert said, was that we would write and come up with some material [for] the next album. I had written a few bits and pieces. Some ideas. When we got back into rehearsals, Robert just sat on his stool and refused to play anything I had written. He said, ‘It’s not Crimson.’”
“Mel just ran from the room,” remembered Wallace. “He had just been blasted down. I was just so exasperated at that point, I stood up and put my sticks on the drums and said, ‘I’m outta here.’”
“To be honest, the thing with Fripp just destroyed me,” Collins says. “I had left the rehearsal room in tears. I said something to Robert like, ‘Thank you, Robert. You’ve done it again.’ So the band was no longer.”
“David Enthoven, the manager, called us up and said, ‘We have a two-month tour of the States starting in February, we’ve got contractual obligations, would you just do this?’” Wallace said. “We did and we really enjoyed ourselves. We actually got to one point where it was like, ‘This is really good. We want to continue.’ But Robert had already made his plans to get Bill [Bruford] and John [Wetton] and that was it.”
Multi-instrumentalist McDonald was key to Crimson’s early success. (Courtesy of Ian McDonald)
BRUFORD/WETTON/ MUIR CROSS ERA
Save for a release of the live Earthbound, documenting (though with poor sound quality) the exploits of the Burrell-Collins-Wallace lineup, the dark years were over, and a new creative age was to begin.
King Crimson Mach III, very much like the original Crimson, operated on an improvisational basis (especially during live performances), delivering avant—hard rock throughout the early and mid-’70s.
Drummer Bill Bruford had held the drum throne in the supergroup Yes just prior to joining Crimson. That Yes’s Close to the Edge had eaten a lot of time and tedious studio work only served to frustrate Bruford, a notoriously restless musician who was more interested in musical spontaneity than musical calculation. Crimson called.
John Wetton had been known as the hot bass player in England ever since his days with Mogul Thrash and Family, and a brief stint with Renaissance (three shows).
“I’ve known Robert since I was fifteen years old,” Wetton said in a 1995 interview the author conducted. “I was one of those musicians who had technique that was beyond my comprehension. I could play and I guess it was somewhere around [1972] that I bumped into Robert Fripp. We talked about forming a band. It was going to be King Crimson Three.”
The final third of the rhythm section was filled by Jamie Muir. An avant-garde percussionist, Muir was prone to performing outlandish stage acts (he’d bite down on blood capsules to great vampiric effect) while banging on found instruments and noisemakers of all sorts. He commanded strange atonal percussive blasts, helping to direct and transform this new King Crimson from minor-key jazz-oriented band to experimental heavy metal outfit.
David Cross, violinist and Mellotron player, provided a keyboardist foil for Fripp’s guitar. Cross was one of some half dozen important rock violinists working at the time. “Crimson was a very natural place to be because there weren’t any boundaries beyond our own lack of vision,” says Cross, who claims to have picked up the violin at age seven, because his father was an accomplished piano player. (“In Freudian terms, it was probably a decision not to get into a major competition with my father,” explains the violinist.)
The last component of this new Crimson was lyricist Richard Palmer-James, who’d been a school friend of Wetton in their preteen days. He was likely tapped because no one else in the band could write lyrics or was interested in doing so.
Perhaps in a strange way, the potential and promise of the 1970–‘72 Crimson was finally fulfilled. As dense as some of the material was from 1972–’75, there was a transparency in the songwriting.
“The period with Ian Wallace and Boz Burrell was quite difficult,” says Enthoven. “That [band] was more dope-driven, where the Fripp, Bruford, and Wetton band was really music-driven. Some nights it was really great, and some nights it was shite. But for me that was an exciting period, because it really became experimental music.”
It was this lineup that produced one of the milestones of Crimson’s career and, indeed, the entire 1970s progressive era: Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (a title suggested by Muir), featuring “Book of Saturday,” the passionate and melancholy “Exiles” (some of the most beautiful work the band had done up to that point), the Middle Eastern/West African—informed “The Talking Drum,” “Easy Money,” and the two-part title track (Part One being a Asian-music-tinged sleeper; Part Two, an art-metal, Stravinskyesque workout in 10/8.)
The album is littered with uncredited laughs (one spurt of laughter is obviously sped up, sounding like a tiny demon cackling), snippets of film dialogue, recurring musical themes, the sound of insect buzzing, and animal noises, as if there were some subtext running through the music. Did these fine Englishmen really harbor dark, deep visions?
“In King Crimson, we did outrageous things with . . . the rhythmic intensity,” Bruford said. “Of what the instruments were supposed to do, or not supposed to do. What harmony [we] were supposed to have or not supposed to have.”
On its surface, the music behaves much like jazz, but it is not jazz in tonality. It is more “jazz” in its spirit and free-form approach. Fripp has admitted that he expanded his musical palate at this point in time to bring in European classical influences and psychedelic blues.7
“In King Crimson’s case, I think a lot of it was coming from Stravinsky,” says Fred Frith of Henry Cow, a contemporary of King Crimson. “You can hear actual lifts of Rite of Spring in [”Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two“]. The rhythm section is actually playing a passage directly taken from Rite. I use it when I’m talking about rock and classical music to my students.”
STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK
In early 1973, Crimson Mach III claimed its first casualty: Muir experienced a spir
itual transformation and decided to quit the band. He went on to lead a monastic life as a Buddhist monk throughout the ’70s and resurfaced in the London experimental music scene, most specifically playing with avant-garde jazz guitarist Derek Bailey and much later, in the 1990s, with former Crimson drummer Michael Giles.
Muir’s exit couldn’t have come at a worse time: Crimson was set to record its next album, eventually titled Starless and Bible Black, a title reportedly inspired by Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood.
“I remember playing a piece for [Bruford] on a record by [British pianist] Stan Tracey,” says explains former Yes man Peter Banks. “The album was Jazz Suite: Inspired by Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ [recorded in 1965], and the second track was called ‘Starless and Bible Black.’ I remember Bill going, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful.’ It’s still one of my favorite pieces of all time. Years later I noticed there was a King Crimson album called Starless and Bible Black.”
Short on material, Crimson pulled from their live performances at the time. (The instrumental “Fracture,” for instance, a centerpiece of the second side of the original LP, was recorded in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, with the crowd noise surgically removed.)
Two studio tracks, “The Great Deceiver” (with its multitracked guitar madness) and “Lament,” make up some of the strongest material of the entire early- to mid-1970s Crimson material. The former, referencing a journey Fripp made to the Vatican and the commercialization he witnessed there, comes rushing at you like a folk-metal Eastern European gypsy sonic tidal wave.
“The process was always very democratic in terms of writing,” explains David Cross. “Everybody in the band was a very powerful, creative musician with a lot to offer. The best stuff, to me, was when there was a lot of give and take, whether that was in terms of formal ideas that people actually brought in, or whether it was less formal in terms of the improvisation and allowing someone to speak musically.”
“Lament” is tragicomedy. The first verse tells of an artist who once dreamed of a time when his words would flow out like poetry and his music would touch people. (The musical concept was underscored by Cross’s lamenting violin work and Mellotron strings, framing the song as a kind of mock rhapsody.)
By the second verse, the “bubble’s burst,” and the aging musician confesses to his romantic partner that his life has not turned out the way he thought it would, as the music dissipates into an aggressive 7/8 groove, which underscores the musician’s disorientation.
The following “Trio” and “We’ll Let You Know,” both improvisational, were recorded live in Glasgow, and both dispense with a normal song structure.
“The main reason it’s called ‘Trio’ is because there are only three of us playing,” says David Cross. “Bill didn’t play on that.... On that particular night he just folded his arms and didn’t play, which is, of course, as big a contribution as anything. Also, the term trio is a kind of dance in 3/4—a minuet. It’s the contrasting section to a piece of music, and I think that contrast, which is what a minuet was always used for, was in our minds at the time.”
“The Night Watch” (based on Rembrandt’s seventeenth-century painting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, also known as The Night Watch) is one of the most starkly beautiful songs in the Crimson canon (check the violin and guitar playing in unison starting at approximately 0:47, after a provocative wash of cymbals take us back through the mists of time). It, too, was recorded live (appropriately, in Amsterdam), with vocals later overdubbed in the studio.
Despite the twentieth-century electrified raucousness, the music seems to hold on to some baroque tradition, preserving it, as a curator of an art gallery would.
“There seemed to be a sense that anybody trying to create, particularly at that point, had a sense that whatever came to the fore that was new needed to incorporate what had gone before, as well,” says Cross. “The desire to make a connection with one’s roots is important.”
“The Mincer,” which closes side one of the original LP, is an amorphous squeaker that doesn’t so much end as run out of time. (Supposedly, the band ran out of tape, and we can hear the instability of the medium as the tape spools to an end. Crimson were definitely crowding the canvas.)
“Fracture,” the eleven-minute closer, begins softly and creeps up in volume as we hear Fripp performing what seems to be the famous Don Strike cross-picking style. The slow, twisted guitar figures and the later, low-volume guitar dribblings sound like something more akin to a polka than to rock.
Wetton is locked in with Bruford, even as he seems poised to usurp the entire rhythm section and Fripp’s guitar work. Bruford is both chaotic and controlled, playing gongs, thunder sheets, cowbells, and glockenspiel, among other percussive equipment.
Cross says he drew on his backgrounds in meditation and theater for the band’s nightly improvisations. “The drama training was very useful,” Cross says. “In drama [class] we had been doing stuff like method acting, which was emotional recall.... While I was in Crimson, I was trying to induce a certain state of mind without the use of any artificial drugs. [You’d get] yourself into a place where [you’d feel] things rather than think about them. That was a useful place to be when trying to make music.”
CROSS TO BEAR
Crimson was a dream come true for a while, but as an American tour wore on in 1974, it became apparent that Cross was no longer meshing well with the volume and ethos of King Crimson—the violinist was simply overmatched by the growing swell of noise coming off the drums and guitar and bass amps. Both Fripp and Cross were wondering if Crimson was the venue for a violin player. Crimson Mach III had claimed another victim.
“I was having lots of difficulties of not being able to hear myself properly and problems with tuning,” Cross says. “I don’t think I was able to deliver as much as I’d hoped I might.”
Ironically, the tour ended in Central Park, New York, on July 1, a show Wetton says still holds special meaning for him: “If ever there was a blueprint for a concert for me, that was it,” said Wetton. “It was everything. It was just perfect for me.”
Of the performance, Fripp has said that he registered a tingling down his spine for the first time since the 1969.8
Crimson were clearly on the verge of something, and where they were headed would provide prog metal bands, even Crimson itself, influence and fertile musical ground for decades to come.
RED
Unfortunately for the members of Crimson, Fripp was going through a spiritual transformation in 1974 (similar to the one Jamie Muir had two years prior), in which he, as he described it, needed to lose his ego to truly be self-aware. He experienced his spiritual eureka moment upon reading the teachings of British scientist /mystic/author/spiritual teacher and World War I veteran John Godolphin (J. G.) Bennett, a pupil of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian panspiritual teacher, author, philosopher, and musician whose doctrine was alight with Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Kabbalah, Sufism, and more.9
Embattled by little financial success in the band, fried from constant personnel changes since the band’s inception, and faced with yet another record to produce (the soon-to-be-recorded Red), by the mid-1970s, Fripp needed to recharge his spiritual batteries. He withdrew and enrolled in the International Academy of Continuous Education, far from the music industry.
“I think that was the best thing he could have done to sort himself out, in a way,” says sax man Mel Collins. “It straightened Robert out a bit. I couldn’ t tell you in a million years what was at the root of the issues, but I think a lot of it had to do with ego and insecurity ... and his control [issues]. It becomes impossible to work with that kind of situation.”
Fripp hadn’t completely divorced himself from his musical life. He reconvened with the band—now a power trio of sorts—at Olympic Studios to record Crimson’s final album of the 1970s, Red.
One would hesitate to call Red a reunion album, but it does shutt
le various elements of Crimson past into the present. David Cross, as well as earlier members of Crimson’s lineup—Ian McDonald, Mel Collins (who happened to be doing a session with Humble Pie at Olympic at the time), cornet player Mark Charig, and oboist Robin Miller—appear.
From the very opening of Red, we’re kicked in the teeth by the aggressive instrumental “Red,” featuring Fripp’s escalating lead line and an ominous uncredited cello playing. Next is the dynamic “Fallen Angel” (a succinct cradle-to-grave account of an urban gang member’s life and death), then “One More Red Nightmare” (featuring Bruford’s thrashing of an upside-down, trashy 20-inch Zilco crash cymbal), “Providence” (a live track from the band’s previous tour featuring Cross on violin), and the twelve-minute-plus “Starless,” a song of immense power and emotion, acting like something of a culmination of the band’s jazz-metal art-rock.
“I think Red is the best of the next wave of Crimson,” says McDonald. “Robert defined the band and found his voice, as far as I’m concerned, guitar-wise.”
Red may be considered the pinnacle of the band’s artistic achievements in the 1970s, but it was not an easy record to make. Convinced that he could not truly understand or know anything about the world around him—or even have an opinion of it—Fripp was led by humility and inaction throughout the sessions for Red. It was Wetton and Bruford who helped bring the album to the finish line.
“At the time we were recording [Red], Robert Fripp said he wanted to take a backseat, because he wasn’t sure where this [band] was going,” Wetton said. “Bill Bruford and myself knew exactly where it was going. We ... took the front seat on it and pushed for that very up-front, [Zileo]-cymbal, in-your-face guitar [sound]. Yeah, definitely. We did that. You can hear it from the first track. This band is not fucking about.”