King Crimson

Throughout history, only a small number of bands have remained together for the span of decades. The few who have - the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, etc. - have tended to stagnate at about the 10-15 year mark, assuming they were even worth listening to in the first place. King Crimson is therefore fairly unique in this regard, because they're still approximately as energetic and creative as they were in their 1969 debut, if not moreso.

Of course, they've cheated rather flagrantly along the way, having been disbanded for 16 of the 32 years of their existence. And there's the small matter that the band which wrote "Epitaph" in 1969 is very definitely not the same band which wrote "ProzaKc Blues" in 2000. In fact, the only factor which the various and sundry lineups of people working under the name "King Crimson" have in common is the arrogant, pretentious and distressingly skillful guitar deity known to the world as Robert Fripp.

Crimson began life as a 5-piece band with an emphasis on mellotrons and saxamaphone - hey, it was 1969; everyone was goofy back then. Their first album, In the Court of the Crimson King, made for a rather brain-jarring experience with its technical precision and dark atmospheres. Not to mention the amusingly artsy-fartsy Pete Sinfeld lyrics and the sleep-inducing ending to Moonchild. But despite smashing their way into the music scene not with a bang but with a scream of terror, a terrible excess of self-indulgence quickly turned subsequent albums into ferociously boring exercises in musical squalor. Much of this schizophrenia can be attributed to a band that wanted to play blues and a leader who was tone-deaf and thus incapable of playing a blues scale. If you ever wonder why Crimson's music sounds the way it does, you can probably ascribe it to Fripp's inability to hear music correctly. Yeah, so Beethoven worked around it, but after listening to THRaKaTaK it's rather obvious that Fripp isn't exactly the next Ludwig V.

After a few albums of increasingly banal crap by a growing cast of confused musicians, Fripp dissolved the band and started over with a new five piece - this time with an emphasis on heavy metal, percussive improv and violin. While this line-up started out rather pretentiously as well, the extra weight was gradually culled over the follow-up albums until the band was reduced to a sexy trio of Fripp, drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford, and bassist/vocalist John Wetton, who would go on to embarrass us all in the company of some ex-Yes members in a depressing venture known as Asia.

Alas, the sheer hyper-goodness of the "Red" lineup imploded by the improbable physics of such a perfect collection of talent, and Crimson spent the second half of the '70s as a memory. Fripp went off to butcher Peter Gabriel's second album and play with the Talking Heads, which is presumably where he met ex-Zappa/Bowie/Heads guitarist Adrian Belew. The two teamed up with Chapman Stick guru Tony Levin and old favorite Bruford to create a band called Discipline. Suddenly, Fripp was struck by a dose of inspiration! "Let's leverage the marketing potential of this group by calling the album Discipline and the band King Crimson!" he said. "But Fripp," cried Belew. "Is this proactive thinking outside the box or merely a failed attempt at creating synergy where none exists?" "Young Adrian," replied the curmudgeonly Fripp with as much patience as he could muster, "we are implementing a paradigm shift of non-trivial proportions."

And thus was King Crimson reformed, holding exactly nothing in common with the previous band to bear that name. Instead of frightening, dense heavy metal, the new King Crimson performed rather brittle sounding modern rock with a touch of industry and more than a little bit of influence from Belew's former employers (for instance, there's the fact that his voice sounds like he's auditioning for a David Byrne-alike contest). But after three albums under the imperial control of Robert Fripp, the rest of the band went mad and the group dissolved for a decade.

In the mid-90s, Fripp decided to cultivate some extra income and began churning out Crimson box sets. But hark! thought he. What better way to cultivate interest in our back catalog than by generating new music? And thus was incarnated the fourth coming of the Crimson King, one which was even willing to play 21st Century Schizoid Man on stage. This particular iteration of the band has set all sorts of records by managing not to break up within 3 years.

Where are they now?

  • Currently King Crimson releases a new live album about every six days, putting them almost on par with Pearl Jam.
  • Robert Fripp went on to become president of the Robert Fripp fan club, where he is adored by lots of people whom he regularly mocks and insults.
  • Adrian Belew discovered that Golbez was really his brother David Byrne. After defeating Zeromus, the two said their farewells and David went on a journey of redemption aboard a wandering moon as one of the last of the Lunarians.
  • Bill Bruford returned to the mothership and shared his newly found knowledge of electronic drums with his people, who then went on to conquer the planet by using ships which couldn't be hacked by PowerBooks.
  • Greg Lake continues to churn out horrible ballads and ostentatious bastardizations of classical music with Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer.
  • Tony Levin continues to kick thirty-onederful flavors of butt on the Chapman Stick as a sideman for every worthwhile solo artist on earth.
  • Jamie Muir, former percussionist, is now a monk. Really.

Essential Listening

Robert Fripp defines studio albums as a love letter and live performances as a hot date. So I'll skip most of the studio releases and focus on their live albums, with one exception:

Red | 1974

Crimson's final statement for the 1970s, Red is pretty much the best album ever recorded. Really. There's not a single false note on this disc, and it even has a smidgeon of indie cred - Kurt Cobain once said he wanted to move Nirvana's sound in the direction of what the Crims accomplished here. And while Starless may not be the single most incredible song ever written by human hand, it's darned close.

Heavy ConstrKction | 2000

Heavy ConstruKCtion is everything that its companion studio album isn't: listenable, for starters. Two of this set's three discs are largely renditions of studio material by the band's current 4-member line-up, which largely works well (although songs from THRAK sound rather skeletal). The third disc is completely improvisational, and comes off far better than 1996's depressingly pointless THRaKaTaK, although the flip-caps probably should have been enough to warn discerning listeners from that exercise in despair in the first place. This album demonstrates that for the first time since 1973, Crimson is a great improvisation unit again, their uncharted adventures finally comparing to older jams like Asbury Park.

Absent Lovers | 1998

Much less sterile than the 80s' studio albums, Absent Lovers covers the gamut of Discipline through Three of a Perfect Pair with panache and energy. Worth the price just to hear a version of Larks Tongues in Aspic Pt. 3 that isn't flaccid and boring.

Nightwatch | 1998

Drawn largely from performances upon which half of Starless and Bible Black was based, Nightwatch is a sort of extended rerelease with extra whipped cream and cherries on top. Crimson was at their best in the period immediately before the release of Red, composing both sublime studio works and belting out incredibly powerful live performances and amazing improv. This album captures that pretty effectively, so a music buff not owning it is tantamount to, I dunno, an RPG fan not having played Final Fantasy VII.

Other Discography Stuff

In the Court of the Crimson King | 1969

King Crimson's preamble - an opening statement unleashed upon the world while everyone else was smoking dope and having sex at Woodstock. Whilst Crosby Stills and Nash warbled about love and flowers, King Crimson spat out a vicious declamation about burning children drenched in napalm and insane monarchs. Almost a timeless album but for the horrible 10 minute "jam" with no musical merit whatsoever that was inexplicably tacked onto the end of the already dated-sounding Moonchild. Come for the scary cover, stay for the novelty of listening to Greg Lake sing with competence.

In the Wake of Poseidon | 1970

Mmm, leftovers. A warmed over version of the music from the band's first album. Beat Emerson, Lake and Palmer to the "bad rock versions of classical music" punch with "Devil's Triangle," based on Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War." Something to be proud of, for certain.

Islands | 1970

By this point, Greg Lake had left for good to form ELP, and Fripp apparently decided to partake of a pissing match to see whose music could be the most bloated and pretentious. I'd say the dubious prize goes to Crimson here, as ELP at least had a rockin' interpretation of Bela Bartok to kick off their debut whereas Lizard had a horribly contrived and dull song about a jilted lover and her poisoned pen.

Lizard | 1971

Even Yes' Jon Anderson can't save this album from exhibiting 12 kinds of suck. Oh wait, Jon Anderson's work here is suck variety #8. Supposedly the song "Happy Family" is about the breakup of the Beatles; if so, I can at least admire this lineup of the band for taking their betters' example and calling it quits in the face of overwhelming suckitude.

Earthbound | 1971

Bad perfomances of bad songs gifted with bad recordings. Oh yeah, this is the stuff. There's a reason this was excised from the Crimson catalog many years ago.

Larks' Tongues in Aspic | 1972

Still dripping with pretention, this is the first incarnation of Crimson to wield the talent to back it up. Former Yes drummer Bill Bruford joins with Jamie Muir to create some impressively chaotic and complex backing for virtuosic improvisation, tight arrangements and David Cross' stirring violin. John Wetton plays bass to rattle fillings and manages to be the first Crimson vocalist whose utterances weren't a complete nuisance, adding a dusky beauty to songs like "Book of Saturday." And, in true Objectivist style, Fripp is Fripp. If Muir could have left out the obnoxious sound effects and Larks Tongues in Aspic Pt. 1 had been a little more thematically structured, this would be a great one. As it is, the Talking Drum/LTIA Pt. 2 crescendo still kicks all sort of patootie.

Starless and Bible Black | 1973

A secret that the liner notes don't tell you: much of this album was recorded live in Amsterdam, which is why it sounds so freaking energetic. Only "Starless" and "The Mincer" don't quite match the album's overall quality, but both the stirring beauty of The Nightwatch and the swirling tension-and-release of Fracture make up for it. If you're getting the sensation I really like this incarnation of the band, you're bloody well right.

USA | 1974

A live album recorded, of all places, in the USA. Solid all around, but currently unavailable on CD, having been superceded by The Great Deceiver set and Nightwatch. Oh, such a tragic orphan.

Discipline | 1981

Which one of these is not like the other? Crimson's new semi post-punk sound flies in the face of their previous approach, but it works once you adjust your brain to the initial sterility of their punctilious perfectionism. It's hard not to listen to the interlocking guitars of the title instrumental and be shockingly impressed by how much it resembles the Celtic knot on the cover, unless you have absolutely no appreciation of musical talent. Which could explain much of what plays on the radio, but I'd rather not get into that.

Beat | 1982

The least popular of the band's '80s trilogy, this recording is vastly more accessible than the other two works from the same time. Which is probably why it's unpopular - remember, to prog-heads, "listenable" is "bad." So as you listen to the frightfully danceable Sleepmless or the bass-heavy Sartori in Tangier, remember that what you're listening to actually sucks, and not even the album's overstated fondness for the beat generation can save it. You fool.

Three of a Perfect Pair | 1984

The third of Crimson's '80s trilogy, this one finds Belew wielding his Talking Heads infuence like a blunt instrument. Side one (you know, back from when albums were released on vinyl?) is almost completely built around ripping off the Heads, while side two is more experimental and at times vaguely industrial (as you might expect from a track called "Industry"). Sadly, the album ends on a boring, spineless note as closing track Larks' Tongues in Aspic Pt. 3 commits the ultimate sin and fades down rather than ending conclusively, which may in fact have been a first in Crimson's history.

VROOOM | 1994

A teaser EP intended to give fans a small taste of the new line-up's early work-in-progress. I'm a dork, so I have the version of this that was signed by the entire band.

THRAK | 1995

A vastly more sophisticated take on the sounds presented in VROOOM. This second onomatopaeically-titled disc is probably the single most diverse recording ever produced by the band, covering the gamut from freeform industrial noise to a samba ballad to ambient sound. And we all know how bad diversity is. The only real problem here is that the band is six members large, and the "let's take turns" mentality of the '80s is completely gone, making the sound into a big hideous mess at times.

B'BOOM | 1995

A live interpretation of the tunes from THRAK &cetera, which is pretty much what you'd expect: noisy, often energetic, and frequently sort of muddled and confusing. Especially Red - songs written for a three-piece band should never be performed by a six-piece. It's like Lynyrd Skynyrd covering an early Beatles song: wrong on numerous levels.

THRaKaTaK | 1996

A nice idea - an album chronicling the various live free-form improvisations which resulted from the mid-song jam in THRAK over the course of a tour - is cut down at the knees by virtue of the fact that only a very few of these improvs are actually worth listening to. The most interesting thing happening here is that Adrian Belew sometimes makes his guitar sound like a piano. Unfortunately someone noodling aimlessly on a piano is just as boring as someone noodling aimlessly on a guitar, so the end result is equally embarrassing for all concerned.

Epitaph | 1997

The first of numerous live retro-compilations, this covers Crimson's early years. Atrocious sound quality, a mixed bag in terms of performance and a tiresome overabundence of certain tracks (you can only hear 21st Century Schizoid Man so many times before wanting to puke) make this more of a completist's trinket than a great album. Or maybe I'm just biased.

Cirkus: A Young Person's Guide to King Crimson | 1999

This album embodies the notion of the schizoid man - it draws live material from the earliest stages of the band in the late '60s all the way through their 1998 performances. Which would probably work for a band that had basically remained unchanged in all that time, such as the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd, but here it's like trying to watch a conversation between a 50-year-old stoned hippie and a stressed 20-something yuppie in need of a latte fix. An idea which has its charms for various subversive reasons, but probably wasn't such a great idea for a two-disc album.

ProjeKCts | 1999

A series of exploratory jams with different line-ups of the group, which generally teeter between brilliant and insipid. Fripp, you self-indulgent dork. The ProjeKcts also introduced the inane, Ultimecia-like gimmick of turning mid-word letter C's into KCs. Har, har.

The ConstruKCtion of Light | 2000

Crimson ditches two members here in an effort to construKct a tighter and more cohesive sound, but unfortunately they also appear to have saKcked anyone with the slightest Kclue of how to engineer and produce an album. The musiKc, while solid enough in Kcomposition, utterly fails to have any sort of soniKc appeal thanks to the amazingly thin and Kcompressed quality it was inKcomprehensibly given in the produKction process. It's sort of like listening to THRAK through an AM radio, which is roughly as painful as one might expeKct. And whoever thought FraKctured was a good idea needs a punch in the teeth.

Originally published February 27, 2001