by Will Romano
Fripp admitted that the new Crimson lineup was the one he had been waiting to establish for four years: longtime Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Levin (the New Yorker also played Chapman Stick; Bill Bruford; and Kentucky native Adrian Belew, who had seemed destined to play the hotel circuit as a member of the cover band Sweetheart until Frank Zappa rescued him from a life of buffet lines and room service. Belew had also recorded and toured with David Bowie, having cut the live Stage and 1979’s Lodger and appeared on two Talking Heads records (as well as being part of their large stage band), most notably, 1980’s Remain in Light.
“To sing or not to sing? question that’s haunted Crimson guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew for decades.
Having Bruford return was a no-brainer—he was a link to Crimson’s past glory, a recognizable face to longtime fans, and his artistic approach could meet the unique challenges facing a drummer intending to become a member of Crimson.
“Bill was pivotal in that Robert needed him but at the same time resented him, in my opinion,” says Patrick “Paddy” Spinks, Crimson manager from 1980 to 1985. “Bill was an astonishing and creative drummer who also put on a show onstage. The friction between them was part of the success of that King Crimson. Subsequent versions of KC never had that same dynamic, in my opinion.”
The intensity level would grow between band members as creative ideas clashed. Specifically, the differences mounting between Belew and Fripp boiled down to a disagreement over what should and should not be deemed Crimson material.
Belew’s strong sense of melody and willingness to write lyrics (a task that was previously left to some outside the band) helped to transform Crimson from intricate instrumental band to progressive band with pop music sensibilities. Belew also brought a keen sense of sonic experimentation via guitar effects, which matched the strides in music technology being employed by Levin and electronic drummer Bruford, all of which enriched Crimson’s guitar-driven blend of pop/neo-industrial/post-punk/Euro art/new wave/ethno prog rock.
DISCIPLINE
In one sense, every musician in Crimson was a small, independent mobile intelligent unit and each smoothly interfaced with the others, making the band work. Because of the freedom each member was allowed, a kind of Fripp-esque self-discipline was required for the music not to turn to chaos.
Fripp was excited by the prospect of getting back together with a band, and the quartet began working up new material in 1980. Dubbing themselves “Discipline,” the band debuted in a tiny basement nightclub, Moles, in Bath, England. Despite the audience being on top of the band, the show was a success—or at least it was enough of a positive sign that Discipline should continue.
“I started working with Robert with the League of Gentlemen in 1980 and continued as he formed Discipline as the ‘rehearsal’ King Crimson,” says Spinks. “Robert wanted to find out if the lineup of Discipline was worthy of being called King Crimson.”
Sensing that Discipline contained an adventurous soul similar to that of the original Crimson, Fripp made a command decision to allow this new band to carry on the Crimson legacy. The time was right for Crimson to officially return—or perhaps Crimson were right for the times.
“It was quickly obvious that this was King Crimson,” says Spinks. “I encouraged Robert to call the band King Crimson, as it would always be easier to market. But I can’t say that it helped. Robert makes up his own mind.”
Whatever the band was called, or going to be called, not everyone took to Crimson’s cross-genre music right away. Some older fans didn’t understand how this new Crimson fit in with the ’70s band they loved so much.
On the surface Crimson were radically different from that behemoth: Instead of delivering bombastic emotional crests and grand overtures, they exposed audiences to hypnotic, cyclical, knotty patterns; interlocking dual guitar parts that were only hinted at when David Cross was in Crimson; gradual shifts in pitch, inflection, accent, and synchronization; as well as world/African/Balinese musical influences.
Some fans didn’t understand, couldn’t process, or didn’t very much like what they were hearing at first: Where was the violinist? Why no Mellotron? No saxophone?
“I remember the first Discipline tour—it was probably Germany—and someone threw meat on the stage,” says Spinks. “The crowd was expecting ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ and got angry when they did not get it.”
“Robert said that when the band started again in 1980 and did the album Discipline, they were booed off the stage, playing that record,” relates Stick player/Warr guitarist Trey Gunn, who’d become a member of Crimson in the 1990s. “While I was never booed, I’ve definitely experienced that thing of ‘The audience cannot go with us.’ That’s what it means to be on the edge.”
Crimson continued to push in all directions, meeting the growing field of electronics head-on. Instead of using hanging gongs and racks of metallic percussion, Bruford combined electronic and acoustic drums, including tube drums, a gong bass drum, Simmons pads, and a very effective wooden rhythm box called a tongue or log drum (its dark pitch is heard in “The Sheltering Sky” and “Discipline”), which Bruford said “is a Californian toy that I picked up in a tourist shop for twenty-five dollars.”
Likewise, throughout his time with Crimson in the 1980s, Belew used a Roland guitar synthesizer, the GR-300, while running other effects to garner textures and tones that manufacturers never intended or had ever dreamed of. In this sense, Belew was doing with the guitar what the great keyboard pioneers had accomplished in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before mass-market synthesizers were available: conducting research and development with disregard for standard factory-issue sounds.
“Crimson has to keep reinventing itself,” Adrian Belew told the author in 2001. “In the 1980s, that quartet with Tony Levin, Bill Bruford, Robert, and myself—we were the first guys to try all those tools. Bill was one of the first electronic drummers I ever heard of. Tony Levin was the first Stick player I’d heard of, and Robert and I were using the guitar synthesizer.”
All three albums Crimson released in the 1980s (1981’s Discipline, 1982’s Beat, 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair) seem connected by slender musical threads. They chart a course from a monologue (Discipline)—the need for someone testify (as was the case for the reformed Crimson; it had a reason to exist, to say something to an audience)—to a passion and dialogue between two people (Beat), to broadcast, industry, and mass appeal (Three of a Perfect Pair). Fripp once explained that the symbols on the front and back covers of Three of a Perfect Pair could be interpreted as an evolution from a relationship between a man and woman to the family unit.
BRIAN ENO: OBLIQUE STRATEGIES
During the mid- and late 1970s, in collaborations with David Bowie and the German ambient/rock outfit Cluster, Brian Eno moved further into ambient territory, having released such groundbreaking work as Music for Films and Music for Airports, on an artistic kick that was, arguably, established with 1975’s Discreet Music and his second, more settling collaboration with Fripp, Evening Star.
The music Eno performed and recorded with Roxy Music provided a great launching point for his latter, impressionistic work. (By contrast, the post-Eno Roxy Music, of the early and mid-1970s—the Eddie Jobson years—achieved a glam/art-rock mixture on records Stranded, Country Life, and, to a degree, 1975’s Siren, featuring number-one British hit “Love is the Drug.”)
After Eno’s own quasi-proggy period, exemplified by June 1, 1974 (featuring the all-star cast of Nico, Mike Oldfield, Kevin Ayers, John Cale, and Robert Wyatt), Wyatt’s Ruth Is Stranger than Richard; his own Here Come the Warm Jets, Another Green World, and Before and After Science; Phil Manzanera’s 801’s Live; and 1974’s symphonic parody, Plays the Popular Classics, with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Eno turned his ambitions toward ambient explorations.
In some of the recording sessions for the abovementioned records, Eno employed a custom deck of cards, dubbed Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, reportedly i
nspired by the ancient Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching.
Developed by Eno and painter friend Peter Schmidt, OS cards present possible resolutions to creative dilemmas through instructions such as “Don’t be afraid of things because they are easy to do,” “Be extravagant,” “Ask your body,” “Emphasize differences,” “Is there something missing?”
“He would break out these Oblique Strategies cards, hi-tech tarot cards, to figure out his next move,” says bassist Percy Jones (Brand X). “It was totally different from what you were used to in terms of a session. It must have been the element of chance involved that interested him. It was almost like he was letting the music grow on its own to some degree.
“A similar anecdote with [Eno],” Jones continues, “was when he gave everybody in the studio a piece of paper and we had to write down a number from one to ninety-nine or something. Then he said, ‘Number three: Percy, you play an F sharp. Number four: Phil, you hit the crash. Number five: Fred Frith, you play a C minor.’ He went through this list, like ninety-something of these things. It got to the point where Phil [Collins] was throwing beer cans across the room, trying to hit a bicycle wheel in time. Nothing came out of that, though, but it just shows the length Eno was willing to go in the studio.”
Fripp & Eno: (No Pussyfooting) (1973).
“The first time I met Brian, he said he was not a great musician,” explains drummer Dave Mattacks (ex—Fairport Convention), who appears on Before and After Science. “I wouldn’t say working with him was the antithesis of capturing a good performance off the floor, but it was certainly the other side of that understanding. You’re deconstructing sound to an excessive degree, and, without sounding like some woolly-headed liberal, the ends justified the means. He really zeroes in on the textural aspect, creating a mood. That later work with U2 and Daniel Lanois is a perfect example.”
“More than most,” says guitarist Fred Frith (Henry Cow, Art Bears), who appears on Eno’s Before and After Science, “[Eno] was able to set aside the things he could already do in favor of learning something new about himself.”
Fripp himself has said, rather honestly, that the band’s contract with Warner Brothers was for three records—the label perhaps wanted more from the band, but Fripp/Crimson would only agree to the minimum requirement of three albums stipulated in the agreement.
The first record to appear, Discipline, leans more toward the cyclical and orderly (with guitar processing capturing the sounds of nature, acting as the fly in the ointment) than does Beat, which is looser, more deranged, and adds more overt ethnic musical influences. By comparison, the strongest material on 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair includes the art of industrial noise via electronic drum and fretless synth guitar, among other instruments and devices (e.g., “Man with an Open Heart,” “Dig Me,” “Industry,” “Nuages (That Which Passes, Passes Like Clouds),” “No Warning”).
Discipline remains the most potent and coherent of the three, however, and is arguably the record the band tried to top for the next three years. It is also the only record of the three, for the most part, from which material was performed live prior to recording.
The lead track, “Elephant Talk”—likely the first song most fans heard from this new Crimson—stomps on Crimson Old with animalistic ferocity. (The song itself recalls the natural habitat of the African plain, conjured, for example in the elephantine trumpeting and insect buzzing created via an Electro-Harmonix Polychorus effects unit.)
“Frame by Frame” (which is a phrase Belew used to express his frustration with what he perceived to be as Fripp’s intellectualizing of every little detail of life and music) ratchets up the intensity level. The antagonistic Belew-Fripp partnership is represented musically by a tapestry of interlocking and divergent guitar lines.
“The original riff was written by Robert,” Belew said. “It’s a seven-note riff. The idea was that both guitarists play the riff, and then one guitarist takes one note away each cycle. What you get is something like a strange delay that’s gone awry.”
Belew sings a melody line over this complex musical matrix, as if he were writing for the Top 40, which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing (as it creates great tension). “It has always been my decision to sing or not to sing, so to speak,” Belew said. “I mean, you have to make a judgment call as to whether the music is so strong that singing would be an interference or interruption, or if the music is a spot to start from. It is never really perfect. We don’t write songs the way most people do, sitting down and drumming out three or four chords and writing a melody over that. ‘Frame by Frame’ doesn’t seem like something you’d sing over, but I figured out a way to do it and thought, ‘Yes, I should sing over it.”’
Ultimately, Belew and Fripp complemented each other well, conversing to create a dialogue, flipping roles as per the requirements of the musical setting: While Brit Fripp plays with the utmost precision, spinning hypnotic guitar lines, American Belew spews whimsical and cyber-processed noise chaos.
Other songs on Discipline underscore the band’s global music approach. “The Sheltering Sky” (a title taken from the Paul Bowles novel of the same name, involving an American couple’s journey through the Sahara with a friend) slips from African to Asian avant—rock pop. “Matte Kudasai,” based on a Japanese phrase meaning “please wait for me,” falls somewhere between Asian and American blues music. (Check Belew’s slide playing/seagull effects.) “Thela Hun Ginjeet,” an anagram of “Heat in the Jungle,” features Belew’s account of being accosted by armed Rasta toughs.
The title track behaves much in the same way “Frame by Frame” does, operating on the basis of interlocking guitar parts. It seems to be guided by one of the basic tenets of Balinese music, which is the idea of cyclical patterns, a feeling of a piece of music having no true beginning or end (much like the Celtic knot emblazoned on the cover of Discipline, which also speaks to the teachings of Gurdjieff and Bennett; the cover, not surprisingly, was created by John Kyrk, a disciple of J. G. Bennett.)
Interlocking and interweaving guitar lines and Bruford’s 17/8 and 17/4 rhythmic patterns (spread across tongue drum/log drum, kick, and rototom) create a tension but not much release, highlighting the influence of cyclical music on Fripp and Crimson.
“Indiscipline” is philosophically and musically the other side of the coin to the title track: The dynamics of the piece, the searing and screaming effects-processed guitar lines, and the general sonic mess it makes, as well as its irreverence (i.e., humor), are the antithesis of the orderly, serious manner in which the title track progresses, reinforcing this concept of duality and schizophrenia at the very heart of what made the band tick.
BEAT
Crimson were looking for constant inspiration and stimuli, having accepted that they were working outside the normal parameters of accepted rock music. Because of this, the limits of their musical vocabularies and comfort zones were constantly being tested.
“Mostly the music ... [is] like a mathematical puzzle, so you have to learn it correctly,” Belew said. “The real rough part for everyone comes in the designing and finding out what to play in the music. We paint ourselves into a corner and try to figure out how to get out. I always use this analogy: It’s like someone gave you a box of twenty-four crayons and poured out three or four of them and says, ‘Now here’s what you get to use.’ All the other things that you might normally bring to someone else’s music or to your own music just won’t work.”
This approach may have been why the band’s second album, Beat, was inspired by the wayward, rambling, and bohemian lifestyle of the Beat poets. Beat engages the listener in a way Discipline doesn’t. It feels interactive, yet it’s difficult to tell if this sensation arises due to the romanticism of the lyrics (in some cases) or the narrative framing of the songs.
The song “Sartori in Tangier” references the Moroccan port that played host to Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the latter of whom wrote his nonlinear novel Naked L
unch in Tangier in a drug haze. (“Satori” is a Zen Buddha phrase for the process by which one begins to understand the nature of the mind and self, experiencing sudden enlightenment. Satori in Paris was a Kerouac novel. Interestingly, Crimson use the word sartori and not satori.)
The record seems to be informed by the confused and “cut-up” fashion in which Naked Lunch was constructed: References in the lyrics appear later in the album’s song sequence. Each of the songs seems to be describing separate scenarios (“Sartori in Tangier” and “Requiem” are instrumentals) and yet all seem connected, as if each were part of a larger unified story.
“Neurotica” is a rambling, fantastically confused account of a wild city, initially inspired by Manhattan (we hear sirens, the scream of a subway train as it whizzes by, a police whistle, among other noises), as if we were viewing these seemingly random images through the eyes of a narrator drugged out of his mind.
The opener, “Neal and Jack and Me,” is not just an ode to the band’s life on the road; it’s a reference to Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac and their experiences, which were the basis for Kerouac’s On the Road. (The emotional “Heartbeat” was the title of the autobiography of Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife.)
Fripp: investing a new genre?
BEYOND KING CRIMSON: ROBERT FRIPP, EXPOSED
By the late 1970s, guitarist Robert Fripp had been recalled to the music business by Eno and Bowie, having fully emerged from the ruins of King Crimson and his self-imposed sabbatical, to undertake a new beginning.