| << Chapter 4 |
Progressive Ears Presents
ROBERT FRIPP - FROM CRIMSON KING TO CRAFTY MASTER by Eric Tamm |
Chapter 6 >> |
|
Chapter Five: King Crimson II
To repeat excessively is to enter into loss; this we term the zero of the signified. -- Roland Barthes After the breakup of King Crimson I in December 1969 a period of some two and a half years ensued during which Fripp struggled to keep Crimson alive and in some sense intact as a recording band, performing outfit, and concept. To make the almost continual personnel changes of this and the following period easier to visualize, I have concocted the chart below.
Looking at the period 1970 to early 1972 - King Crimson II as we are calling it - at a distance of nearly two decades, this writer has rather violently mixed feelings about it. It didn't take Fripp long to figure out that somehow the music had lost its course. As early as 1973 he was talking about King Crimson II like this: "The time was spent preparing for the present, I suppose. This band [King Crimson III] is right for the present, just as the first band was right for its own time. The interim period was something I wouldn't want to undergo again." And in 1978 he admitted being "embarrassed" by KC II: "I went into catatonia for three weeks on a tour with that incarnation of the band. It was one of the most horrible periods of my life." During the period itself, with musicians entering and exiting the Court at a rapid pace, with ideas flying by, attempts being made to catch them, improvisational situations being tried out, albums being made, Fripp did his best to put the best face on it. In 1971 he said, "The beauty of of the set-up in Crimson is that it can handle" having a flexible personnel around a "core" of more or less permanent members - the core, getting right down to it, being Fripp and Sinfield, and ultimately Fripp alone. At the least, Fripp was able to indulge his perennial fascination with "the way musicians work together as a unit. You see, I view King Crimson as the microcosm of the macrocosm." By which one feels he meant that being in an evolving, complex, unpredictable, perilous yet potential-laden musical situation like King Crimson was verily analogous to being alive on planet Earth, or like being in some alchemical laboratory (the microcosm) for the purpose of investigating life itself (the macrocosm). Fripp would also issue elliptical, contradictory, unfathomable statements concerning his exact role in King Crimson. On the one hand, it was obvious by the end of 1972 that he was the only person who had been in all of the band's incarnations, that in some sense King Crimson was Robert Fripp plus whoever, that it was his band. Yet he seemed to shrink from assuming unambiguously the mantle of authority, which he felt belonged not to him but to King Crimson itself, the concept, the idea, the force, the music, not to one or several particular merely human personalities. In 1973 he would say things like, "I form bands, but I'm not a leader. There are far more subtle ways of influencing people and getting things done than being a band leader. Although I can be a band leader, it's not a function I cherish. Who needs it?" In the Wake of Poseidon and Lizard In January 1970, after the departure of McDonald and Giles, King Crimson was temporarily a trio consisting of Fripp, Lake, and Sinfield. (McDonald and Giles went on to make their self-titled duo album, released in 1971; McDonald was subsequently one of the founding members of Foreigner in 1976.) The trio cancelled future gigs and set about composing, rehearsing, and looking for new members to fill out the group, with vague plans to resume live performances. In order to sustain public interest in the band, King Crimson released the single "Cat Food / Groon" on March 13. CAT FOOD (by Fripp-Sinfield-McDonald). Well. I guess this is what Bartok would sound like if asked to write music for a Garfield movie - or Hendrix playing Disneyland - or something. On one level it's just a joke: Schizoid Man meets Felix the Cat at a Thelonious Monk concert: perhaps Fripp had to let it be known that there really was a jester dancing or at least lurking somewhere 'round the shadowy halls and dark pillars of the Court of the Crimson King. Because one wouldn't have known from the first album that anyone in the band had anything remotely approaching a sense of humor: the music embodied humorless dread and melancholy. So "Cat Food" - it may have been black humor, studied humor, sick humor, but it defied anyone to take it too seriously. Jazz pianist Keith Tippett, McDonald, and Fripp all have delightful moments of playing. Michael Giles (drums) and Peter Giles (bass) are the skittish rhythm section; Greg Lake sang it. GROON (by Fripp) is a different sort of number entirely, performed solely by Giles, Giles, and Fripp on bass, drums, and guitar. This is more the kind of music Fripp would later become firmly identified with - "Groon" is almost a precursor of King Crimson III, moments on Exposure, even (to stretch it a bit) the League of Gentlemen. "Groon" is also a rather "pure" specimen of jazz-rock - being a kind of latter-day electrified be-bop. Fast, frenetic guitar and drum work. Practically atonal. That peculiar quality of improvisational abandon simultaneous with strict planning and coordinated execution. King Crimson's only gig in 1970 was an appearance on BBC TV's "Top of the Pops" program on March 25, performing "Cat Food" with the lineup listed in the above chart. By the end of the month Crimson had auditioned several drummers with the intent of finding a permanent replacement for Michael Giles but had succeeded only in enlisting the services of Circus's flute and reed player Mel Collins. In early April, bassist/vocalist Greg Lake decided to leave the Court and form a band with the Nice's Keith Emerson: this was, of course, the nucleus of the mighty Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. In the meantime, Fripp and the whole motley crew mentioned in the last couple of pages, in various combinations, had been busy recording In the Wake of Poseidon, King Crimson's second album, which was released in May. IN THE WAKE OF POSEIDON • Robert Fripp: guitar, mellotron, & devices • Greg Lake: vocals • Michael Giles: drums • Peter Giles: bass • Keith Tippet: piano • Mel Collins: saxes and flute • Gordon Haskell: vocal on "Cadence and Cascade" • Peter Sinfield: words It was palpably evident that Poseidon's musical models were those of In the Court of the Crimson King. With the exception of Side Two's "The Devil's Triangle," Poseidon didn't seem to break any new ground, although some critics saw it as a refinement over the first album. The overall form of Poseidon's Side One almost exactly paralleled that of the first record: fierce blowout, soft ballad, mellotron epic - with the gentle vocal introduction of "Peace" here in place of the night-sounds-cum-prelude to "Schizoid Man." (In itself there's nothing the matter, of course, with using the same form more than once - in Beethoven's nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, and many other pieces, the Viennese master almost invariably resorted to sonata form.) The modal plea for "Peace" recurs as a guitar instrumental at the beginning of Side Two, and crops up with Greg Lake singing it once more at the very end. The recurring "Peace" theme serves to unify the album conceptually as well as musically - a nod to Bartok's multi-movement arch forms as well as to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The problem is, it's very difficult to make a Beatles-type album (which, at some level, in some manner, Fripp was explicitly trying to do) without the melodic gift of a Paul McCartney, who, for all the petulant criticism foisted on him through the years, always brought to Lennon's existential sermons and rock'n'rootsy authenticity a kind of effortless grace and sheer joyful musicality. Fripp has never quite found his McCartney/counterpart, and hence has had to construct his music on Herculean effort alone, pure force of will, mind over recalcitrant musical matter. (And no, I'm not saying King Crimson should have tried to sound more like the Beatles.) Poseidon's expansive, fold-out cover featured a painting by Tammo de Jongh called "12 Archetypes" - trickster, anima, child, magician, and so on - and was perhaps an indication of an interest on Fripp's part in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, like Fripp, was concerned with forging some fusion of magic and reason, intellect and intuition, inner and outer, art and science). As on the jacket of In the Court of the Crimson King, Sinfield's lyrics were printed in their entirety, though (at least on my copy) the silver ink and semi-glossy background made them onerously difficult to read. Side One PEACE-A BEGINNING (by Fripp and Sinfield). Medieval chant-like. Lake's voice grows out of deep reverb into clear focus until suddenly (let's hope you haven't turned up your stereo too high, the better to hear the delicate harmonics resound - how many times have I done that in soft King Crimson passages, only to be rudely, deeply, profoundly shocked and irritated) you are slammed over the head with ... PICTURES OF A CITY including 42ND AT TREADMILL (by Fripp and Sinfield). Lurching jazz rock blues instrumental introduction/ritornello, two verses of urban/diabolical Sinfieldisms spat out by Lake, frenetic instrumental (Bartok plays the blues), a soft cozmik blues section, crescendo to final sung verse (final line "lost soul lost trace lost in hell," viz., the realm of Beelzebub, the Devil, a.k.a. King Crimson), final atonal freakout à la "Schizoid Man," leads directly without a break into ... CADENCE AND CASCADE (by Fripp and Sinfield). Gentle acoustic guitar caresses in .. unambiguously ... E Major!! First King Crimson song really in major. Hence into the realm of light (but not for long). Tasteful flute embellishments by Mel Collins ... IN THE WAKE OF POSEIDON including LIBRA'S THEME (by Fripp and Sinfield). Mellotron minor epic. Verse chord progression almost identical to counterpart on CCK, "Epitaph." Harlequins, queens, Mother Earth, bishops, hags, slaves, heroes, Magi, Plato, and Jesus Christ himself populate Sinfield's imaginary landscape. I don't know. The images are extremely evocative, but it does seem to me that you have to do more than mention all these figures - you have to contend with them. As it is, it seems a bit like name-dropping, redeemed if at all only by the weight and majesty of the music and by the frightening contemporary implication: "Whilst all around our mother earth - waits balanced on the scales." Also - I've gone back and forth about this so many times - the sound, the "production values," the overall impression ... well, Fripp and Sinfield self-produced this record (CCK was "Produced by King Crimson") ... and I'm not sure they fully brought out the potential grandeur of a song like "In the Wake of Poseidon." Something thin about it, not enough bottom, not enough reverberation. It's not as though I wanted King Crimson to sound like Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, but you have to admit that a real production pro like Jimmy Page gave Led Zeppelin's records a sound that made Cream's records pale by comparison, even if Cream was arguably the more talented group. Very, very few bands have ever had the perspective, the knowledge, the ears, the experience, to produce themselves in the recording studio; it's not like it's a diminution of your musicianship to be produced by someone else - look at the Beatles with George Martin. (BUT ... take those late Beatle albums, and listen to what John Lennon had to say about them in December 1970: "But ... but they're always dead, you know. They'd gotten to that sort of dead Beatles sound, or dead recorded sound.") Fripp was walking a tightrope: not wanting to over-produce, wanting to capture some of the spontaneity of a live performance; but simultaneously wanting to present a perfected product on the par of Revolver or almost any of the mid-to-late Beatle albums. A lot of it, I am convinced, has to do with the bass player, the bass line, the kind of overall resonance that the bottom end brings to the music: McCartney almost always got it just right for the Beatles; Peter Giles and Greg Lake never had the exact touch necessary for what I would pompously call the "ideal" King Crimson sound - Fripp was to find that touch later, albeit with quite a different kind of music, with John Wetton, and still later with Tony Levin in the 1980s - but there is something about the bass in KC I and KC II that vitiates the primal energy and expansiveness of the music. BUT ... paradoxically (ever dealing in paradoxes when you deal with King Crimson), it is precisely that lack of a firmly, manly produced/dispatched bass on Poseidon that makes the album more listenable today, less dated-sounding, than so many other "progressive rock" artifacts of the period, ELP and Procol Harum being prime examples. It is as if Fripp was consciously or unconsciously stripping the production job down to a minimum, relying on music rather than sound, emphasizing structure over color, meaning over expression. One more thing: harmony. Poseidon's title track is so conventional harmonically that it makes one doubt Fripp's expressed conviction about mingling Afro-American sound ideals with Western tonal/harmonic developments as exemplified in Bartok: once was enough, made the point ("Epitaph"); twice ("In the Wake of Poseidon") was too much; it was redundant from a harmonic point of view. Fripp was soon to break out of this harmonic straitjacket, however. Side Two PEACE-A THEME (by Fripp and Sinfield). For acoustic guitars, same germinal melodies as at beginning of Side One. CAT FOOD (by Fripp, Sinfield, McDonald). Longer than single version (the jam stretches out at the end). THE DEVIL'S TRIANGLE (by Fripp). "Bolero" rhythm - in 5. Fripp's penchant for odd meters like 5 and 7 begins here. In all, the four sections of "The Devil's Triangle" represent Fripp's most ambitious and adventurous composition to this point in his career. The most original, the most idiosyncratic, the strangest, the purest. And from a harmonic point of view, the most advanced, almost completely dispensing with the concept of conventional chord progressions in favor of an unpredictable yet fresh and interesting, if ominous and disturbing, series of dissonances. "The Devil's Triangle" relies on musical ideas rather than simply raw energy, athletic musicianship, or sound color. Including: MERDAY MORN (by Fripp and McDonald). More bolero, working toward a climax. HAND OF SCEIRON (by Fripp). Windstorm. GARDEN OF WORM (by Fripp). Metronome clicks. Bolero rhythm returns, faster, more intense. Leads into deranged circus music with overlapping metric planes. Works into a metric free noise section, lots of thrashing by all the players. Reminiscence of "In the Court of the Crimson King" filters into the chaos. Flute calls reverberate, lead into... PEACE-AN END (by Fripp and Sinfield). Voice and guitar combined: how symmetrical, how elemental, how developmental. At the final end, Lake's voice goes back into reverb from whence, at the beginning of the album, it came. Strangely unresolved harmony. There's no rest for the wicked, or so the saying goes, and indeed no sooner was Poseidon in the can and released than Robert Fripp buckled down to work on King Crimson's next LP, Lizard - the first Crimson album whose music was entirely written by Fripp (actually there has been only one other, the following Islands). The core lineup of the studio group remained Fripp, Sinfield, Collins, and Haskell (who took over full bass and vocal duties); Andy McCulloch, who like Haskell hailed from Fripp's part of the country, was added on drums, and various other musicians worked as sidemen. Fripp was by now referring to King Crimson as a "pool" of contributors, or as "a way of getting people together to play music and a way of thinking about things." Sinfield described Crimson as "a pyramid or cone with Bob Fripp and me sitting on the top. Underneath are various musicians and friends upon whom we can call, who form a very solid foundation." Rumors of possible touring circulated, but on the eve of Lizard's release on December 11, 1970, Haskell and McCulloch quit the band, and Crimson was left sans bassist, vocalist, and drummer. Said Fripp: "I suppose Crimson is a way of life. It's a very intense thing and I think Gordon [Haskell] realized that." During the latter stages of Lizard's production Fripp was also rehearsing and performing with Keith Tippett's fifty-piece band, Centipede. LIZARD • Robert Fripp: guitar, mellotron, electric keyboards and devices • Mel Collins: flute and saxes • Gordon Haskell: bass guitar and vocals • Andy McCulloch: drums • Peter Sinfield: words and pictures with: • Robin Miller: oboe and cor anglais • Mark Charig: cornet • Nick Evans: trombone • Keith Tippet: piano and electric piano • Jon Anderson of Yes: vocals on "Prince Rupert Awakes" What kind of music "is" this, what genre, what type - what the hell are we actually listening to here? Are we supposed to draw any connecting lines between this music and Jim Morrison and the Doors ("Celebration of the Lizard," "I am the lizard king - I can do anything") ... lizard king, Crimson King, Morrison's book The Lords and the New Creatures, etc., ... between this music and Freud? The multiplicity of levels evident in Beatles music continued to be an ideal that haunted Fripp in composing Lizard, even if he wasn't interested in copying the Beatles' style per se. "The only thing that worries me," he said, "is that perhaps it [Lizard] won't be given enough of a chance. We've made it so that the 24th time things'll really begin to go Zap. At the same time, when the album starts it should really hit you, so that you'll think perhaps there's something worth getting into." The problem here - I said something like this already - is that the Beatles managed to make their music likeable and infectious and seductive and entrancing on the first hearing; by the twenty-fourth hearing you were into the subtleties, but you listened to it twenty-four times because you wanted to. Fewer listeners, it is probably safe to say, were (or are today) willing to listen twenty-four times to an LP's worth of what is often, on "Lizard," an unfamiliar, unappealing, unattractive, high-strung, neurotic, almost perversely difficult sounding surface, in order to get to that magic place of cognizance where the zapping fun begins. And yet ... does Lizard begin to make sense after twenty-four hearings? I'm probably only up to about fifteen or twenty, but in my experience, the answer would have to be yes. It becomes a question, however, of how much you are going to demand of your listening audience, and in this matter Fripp tends to opt for a "no pain, no gain" approach. Jung had said, after all, "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," and if so in life, then why should it be otherwise in art? At this point, though, yet another meta-musical quandary rears its beguiling head. As Brian Eno once put it, "Almost any arbitrary collision of events listened to enough times comes to seem very meaningful. (There's an interesting and useful bit of information for a composer, I can tell you.)" (This morning, not thinking about writing this, not thinking about Lizard, not thinking about anything in particular, I woke up at about six. It was dark and stormy outside and I was unaccountably sucked over to my sequencer for some mysterious reason - I wanted to hear some tones. I punched in a few random diatonic notes, which repeated every ten seconds or so. My seven-year-old daughter Lilia, coming into the living room, was perplexed that there should be this ethereal music with no one playing the synthesizer. I showed her that the tape recorders weren't running, and told her it was ghosts. She didn't believe it. "There must be some trick," she said. So I showed her what the trick was, and she wanted to try it. She played the opening phrase of Handel's Christmas carol "Joy to the World," a descending octave scale, which proceeded to repeat in a loop. About five minutes later I stumbled over and punched in a few more tones, which turned out to be not the ones I wanted, but I let them stand. This "music" went on and on and on, through breakfast and watering the plants and the rest of it, and by half an hour later the sound had come to seem endowed with a shimmering depth of significance.) The sound of King Crimson grew yet more astringent and dissonant on Lizard, and rock critics, who generally agreed that if nothing else, this must be the work of a genius, began to be confused and put off. The issue was becoming one of, How much of that kind of genius do we need or want in rock and roll, roots music, the music of the people? Lizard lacked even a real git-down potboiler like "Schizoid Man", how far could the limits of rock be stretched without its preciously nasty essence being irretrievably lost? Side One CIRKUS including ENTRY OF THE CHAMELEONS; INDOOR GAMES; HAPPY FAMILY. Three nervous, sputtering fantasy songs (with remnants of the Court of the Crimson King mellotron epic on the first) led off the album. The textures were incredibly complex, the rhythms were skittish and jumpy, and the dissonances resulting from a seemingly random intersection of contrapuntal planes were grating. The whole effect owed as much to avant-garde jazz as to rock. Sinfield came up with some snarlingly suggestive imagery in "Indoor Games" ("Dusting plastic garlic plants / They snigger in the draught"), while "Happy Family" is a rollicking if intentionally awkward pain of a paean on the breakup of the Beatles (who also appear imaginatively portrayed in one of the many panels on the album's immaculately beautiful cover painting by Gini Barris, painstakingly executed in the style of medieval manuscript illuminations). LADY OF THE DANCING WATERS. Fripp at his most lyrical - the vocal line is a bona fide tune, and really quite affecting, embellished by Collins' fluttering flute arabesques. Yes, beauty, sheer beauty, classical grace, romantic yearning, were part of the whole King Crimson formula, and here those qualities are given almost completely unambiguous, non-ironic embodiment - Nick Evans' subtle trombone slides being the one stinger in an otherwise straightforward and sincere pastorale. Side Two (the "Lizard" Suite proper) PRINCE RUPERT AWAKES. Sinfield's diffuse and inscrutable lyrics are miraculously redeemed by Jon Anderson's highly polished, professional, and lovely vocal, and by another genuinely melodic strain from Fripp's imagination (in a way it was becoming a question of how long Fripp was going to continue to be constrained by Sinfield's precious, raucous, sometimes preciously raucous or raucously precious poetics). "Prince Rupert Awakes" contains the only instance I can call to mind of a minor chord with a major seventh in the rock repertory (maybe Stevie Wonder or Peter Gabriel threw one in somewhere). Leads without a break into ... BOLERO-THE PEACOCK'S TALE. A structured improvisation which leads from bolero classical-style to bolero big-band style and back again, making effective contrasts between major and minor modes at climactic points of formal articulation. THE BATTLE OF GLASS TEARS Including DAWN SONG. Vocal prelude setting up a medieval/mythological battle scene, which unfolds in ... LAST SKIRMISH. Mellotrons, horns, flutes, bass, guitar, and drums clash and pulsate in pugilistic cacophony in one of Fripp's several musical Armageddons of the period. PRINCE RUPERT'S LAMENT. This I presume is the section of ominously repeated bass notes over which Fripp engages in one of his patented (or soon to be patented) fuzz-sustained guitar workouts, sounding here somewhat like a rock and roll bagpipe. BIG TOP. No, your record player's speed control isn't on the blink - that's Robert Fripp playing with his mellotron's pitch. This brief interlude (which turns out to be the album's coda) is one of many instances (refer back to Lizard's opening track, "Cirkus," for example) of early Crimson probing the depths of that stock situation of B-movie or "Twilight Zone" fame: a happy family circus, nice on the surface but, as it develops, with something very WEIRD, very EVIL going on behind the scenes. A grand overreaching metaphor for the sterile-surface-covering-sadistic-subconscious-Western-society idea? (I have assumed that Robert Fripp basically wrote Lizard's music, and Peter Sinfield the words. In actual fact, of course, everyone who played on the record had some part in the music's creation, since so far as I know Fripp did not, Zappa-like, write out every last note and nuance of expression, but rather strove to elicit from given players the type of semi-improvised passages he deemed fitting for a given piece. Furthermore, Sinfield had a significant musical role as well, at least in theory: he was quoted as saying, "It's got to the stage where nothing on 'Lizard' was passed without my approval." Fripp described to me the making of Lizard as a "power struggle" between him and Sinfield. With the personal and creative relationship between them deteriorating, Fripp was finding it increasingly difficult to write music to Sinfield’s words. This tension, which Fripp feels comes through much of the music on Lizard, would soon come to a head.) Islands and Earthbound The period immediately after the release of Lizard was what Fripp has called "a time of desperation." King Crimson was looking for bassists and singers, and considered Bryan Ferry, among many others. After Fripp had auditioned some thirty bass players, Boz Burrell was chosen in February 1971. Or rather, it appears that having been selected as King Crimson's singer, Boz (who was not a bassist) was one day noodling around on a bass and Fripp decided it would be possible to teach him to play the instrument, more or less from scratch. With the lineup of Fripp, Sinfield, Collins, Boz, and Ian Wallace (drums), King Crimson rehearsed through March and by April were ready to start performing, it had been almost a year and a half since the end of the American tour in December 1969, when King Crimson I broke up, and Fripp was nervous but exceeding eager. After four April dates at the Zoom Club in Frankfurt, the band began a long and grueling tour schedule (1971 - Britain: May, fourteen gigs; June and July, two gigs; August, seven gigs; September, six gigs; October, eighteen gigs. Canada and U.S.A.: November, twelve gigs; December, six gigs. 1972 - U.S.A.: February, twelve gigs; March, nineteen gigs; April, one gig). The touring band drew on King Crimson's by now fairly substantial repertoire. (Historical footnote on the pecking order among British progressive rock bands in late 1971: at two concerts at the Academy of Music in New York on November 24 and 25, Yes opened, King Crimson played second, and the headliner was Procol Harum. The Variety reviewer, who noted the undue time necessary for equipment changes between sets by the three quasi-symphonic behemoths, allowed that Procol Harum was "in fine form" but "was put to the test by having to follow strong sets by Yes and the overpowering King Crimson," who, he felt, "should headline next time out." When King Crimson returned to the Academy of Music on February 12, 1972, they were indeed the headliners - supported by Redbone and the Flying Burrito Brothers.) In the meantime, work was in progress on the studio album Islands, which was completed by October and released on December 3, 1971, almost exactly a year after "Lizard." All of the album's six pieces were by Fripp or by Fripp and Sinfield. Fripp used the contributions of nine musicians to get the sound he wanted, but if King Crimson was a way of doing things, for Islands that way involved following Fripp's instructions to the letter. As drummer Wallace has testified, "Fripp was in one of his weird periods. You had to play everything the way he did it. There was no room to stretch out." As for Sinfield's lyrics - well, let me let another writer carry out the execution. Don Heckman, reviewing Islands in Stereo Review: "What is there to say, after all, about lyrics that go 'Time's grey hand won't catch me while the sun shine down / Untie and unlatch me while the stars shine,' or 'Love's web is spun, cats prowl, mice run / Wreathe snatch-hand briars where owls know my eyes'? ... With Yeats and Thomas and Keats and Lord knows how many other superb English poets available to me, I bloody well don't intend to waste my time with absurdities like this." One of the strangest "rock" albums ever released, Islands presents stark, unreasonable contrasts: the three excessively precious and poetic ballad-type songs "Formentera Lady," "The Letters," and "Islands" (all of which nevertheless continue to use highly imaginative textures); the fantastic raunchy profundity of the guitar showcase instrumental "Sailor's Tale"; the X-rated "Ladies of the Road"; the pure if not puerile classicism of "Prelude: Song of the Gulls"; and the oceanic spaciousness of the title track, "Islands." Of all of Fripp's albums, this is probably the hardest to understand, the easiest to ridicule, the most difficult to be generous to. And yet ... ISLANDS • Robert Fripp: guitar, mellotron, Peter's Pedal Harmonium, and sundry implements • Mel Collins: flute, bass flute, saxes, and vocals • Boz: bass guitar, lead vocals, and choreography • Ian Wallace: drums, percussion, and vocals • Peter Sinfield: words, sounds, and visions Featured players: • Keith Tippet: piano • Paulina Lucas: soprano • Robin Miller: oboe • Mark Charig: cornet • Harry Miller: string bass Side One FORMANTERA LADY (by Fripp and Sinfield). Begins with bass solo, then flute, piano, and tinkling percussion enter. Boz delivers the first two verses of foursquare melody in deadpan foursquare style. (Why couldn't Fripp ever hire singers who knew something about phrasing?) The minimalistic B section/refrain/long instrumental closeout is little more than a beat with flaccid soloing, spineless scatting by Boz and rustling clinking percussive noises in the background. Soprano Paulina Lucas comes in with some long-tone vocalizing. Debussy's "Sirens" it ain't; Lennon's "Mother" it ain't. But Islands has a bit of both. Lennon (with Phil Spector) had risked a minimalistic approach to production with Plastic Ono Band, released in late 1970. It's tempting to see an influence on Fripp here. "Formantera Lady" leads directly into ... SAILOR'S TALE (by Fripp). Ostinato. Some nice blowing by Mel Collins. Again the minor/major contrast. Then the beat slows and we get one of the tastiest guitar passages Fripp has ever committed to record. Faced with playing like this, one has to wonder why Fripp didn't shut up his vocalists more and just play his guitar. Then the fast beat comes back, with mellotrons galore. The ending - guitar downshifting decellerando, leaving only low, long sounds: a nice compositional gesture. THE LETTERS (by Fripp and Sinfield). This priceless artifact of mannered progressive rock seems to embody the dissolution of King Crimson II in a nutshell. Mr. Bangs to the witness stand: "'The Letter' [sic] is just an old-fashioned soap opera set to lumbering, churning vats of musical tar, with lyrics worth quoting if not much else: 'With quill and silver knife / She carved a poison pen / Wrote to her lover's wife / "Your husband's seed has fed my flesh."' And then the poor cuckoldette commits suicide. What is all this quasi-Victorian/Shakespearean doggerel, anyway? Are the British trying to get back to their roots? Irritating as I find it, the music is good." Side Two LADIES OF THE ROAD (by Fripp and Sinfield). Obscene lyrics with music to match, but all in good fun. (In 1990 Fripp summed up his feelings about the lyrics of "Formantera Lady" to me: "What a load of crap." "Ladies of the Road," however, he endorsed: "That was real.") The critics loved this song because at least it had the sex (and plenty of it too) if not the drugs nor exactly the rock and roll. And it reminded listeners that Fripp and company did have a sense of humor, even if it didn't come out too often - and when it did was on the blue side. PRELUDE: SONG OF THE GULLS (by Fripp). A Fripp exercise in unadorned "classical" music for strings and oboe. Bittersweet major key. Lovely in its way, it shows a different side of Fripp's background - but, to rephrase Don Heckman's tirade reported above, with Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Lord knows how many other superb classical composers available to me, I'm not sure how much heavy analysis should be lavished on amateurish orchestrational efforts like this. ISLANDS (by Fripp and Sinfield). Gorgeous melodic vocal writing. Long instrumental ending section over long harmonium tones; Fripp left in all the fluffed piano and cornet notes, a fact for which I admire him greatly, though I'm not exactly sure why - I suppose it's for having the courage to preserve the feeling of an interactive live performance. The last thing we hear on Islands, after a lengthy silent interlude following the final song, is the chamber group used for "Prelude: Song of the Gulls" tuning up and the soft yet persuasive voice of Robert Fripp telling them they're going to do it twice more, once with the oboe and once without, then call it a day. He counts off the beat, one-two-three two-two-three, and ... silence: Islands is finished. I suppose you can read into this whatever you want, but to me it seems as if Fripp is telling us (the audience), Look, this is music, and music is made by people, and people have to tune up and practice and rehearse, and there is so much more behind music than the sound, more than ever can be told. For all its impenetrability, its self-conscious artistic excess, its woefully labored attempts to capture innocence, there is a certain quality in Islands making the sum much greater than its parts, even if this sum does not quite tally up to musical greatness. The strange thing is, I listened to the album today for the first time in a couple of years, and I found, almost against my will (since I've been telling people for some time that Islands is the absolute worst King Crimson record ever put out) - I found that I actually liked it. As an overall musical gesture. The whole album has that sort of fin-de-siècle manneristic feeling, like the over-refined music of the late fourteenth century, the twilight of the middle ages - a sense of worlds falling apart, new ones as yet unborn, grand heartbreaking nostalgia for what can no longer be, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. In the composition of Islands, Fripp was learning to subtract, to take things away, to let the black backdrop of silence show through the music, to heed the oft-repeated but ill-practiced axiom that less is more. To borrow a phrase from Eno (who in turn derived it from filmmaker Luis Buñuel): "Every note obscures another." As had King Crimson's American tour in late 1969, their American tour in November and December of 1971 produced many moments of tension and even hostility among the band's members. Sinfield - who on tour played VCS3 synthesizer and worked the group's lighting and sound - in particular found the turmoil and pressures of being on the road in America difficult to cope with, and made up his mind that he wouldn't return to the States again with the band "unless specific conditions were fulfilled, and I didn't expect them to be." It wasn't long before Sinfield and Fripp had reached a point where it became clear that they were moving in irreconcilably different directions. On New Year's Day 1972, the New Musical Express reported that Sinfield had left King Crimson, and a week later Fripp explained his view on the matter: "I suppose that the thing to say is that I felt the creative relationship between us had finished. I'd ceased to believe in Pete ... It got to the point where I didn't feel that by working together we'd improve on anything we'd already done." As usual with Fripp, his dealings with the outer world were intimately bound up with his inner development. Eight years after the split with Sinfield, Fripp explained to an interviewer that he came to the decision to make the break on the same day he changed the name he was known by from "Bob" to "Robert": "I felt I'd made my first adult decision." Sinfield had had increasing difficulties dealing with his position in King Crimson, especially on tour. Fripp said that "the band often found the lights distracting", he himself had grown suspicious of the visual "trickery" associated with the British tour of 1971, "however fine it may have been. I'm thinking of the lights, and the general blood and thunder." In other words, Fripp wanted the band to be judged on its purely musical merits - again the suspicion of the "show biz" aspect of rock and roll performance. For his part, Sinfield, who had nevertheless expressed a desire to let his work grow in directions other than those offered by the King Crimson format, regarded the decision for him to quit the group as "entirely on Bob's side": "Bob rang me up and said 'I can't work with you.'" Fripp was at pains to present the split to the British press in the most rancorless possible terms, and was disturbed by the sensationalist manner in which the New Music Express handled it. The many instances of press distortion involving King Crimson constituted one reason why, later in the 1970s, Fripp would undertake a one-man campaign to reject and re-write the ground rules of the whole music industry complex. In the opening months of 1972 the remaining members of King Crimson - Fripp, Collins, Boz, and Wallace - were not exactly congealing into what one would describe as a happy family. Yet, as reports of inner dissent came out in the press, the band was booked for one more American tour. As Fripp was later to write, the "Earthbound" tour "was conducted in the knowledge that the group would disband afterwards." While in America on KC II's final tour (February-April 1972), drummer Ian Wallace bought a portable Ampex stereo cassette deck which the group plugged into the mixing board during live performances. Many performances were taped this way, and Fripp subsequently took the cassettes home and edited them down to a live album, Earthbound, released in England on June 9, 1972. Crimson's American distributor, Atlantic, declined to put out the record, saying the sound quality wasn't good enough. (My copy is a later Italian version on the Philips/Polydor label, featuring liner notes by a certain Daniele Caroli titled "Robert Fripp: musica psichedelica dal vivo negli USA" ["live psychedelic music in the USA"] and incongruously sporting a cover collage utilizing the photos from King Crimson's 1974 album Red: Fripp, John Wetton, and Bill Bruford., Sound quality or no sound quality, Earthbound is an unusual cultural document, the sole officially released record of KC II live, music somehow emerging from the wreckage of a dream. EARTHBOUND • Fripp: guitar, mellotron, synthesizer • Boz Burrell: bass and vocals • Mel Collins: saxes and flutes, mellotron • Ian Wallace: drums and percussion 21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN. The group romps ably through a version of the old war-horse that clocks in at eleven minutes and forty-five seconds. Fripp delivers an insane monster of a distorted guitar solo over Boz and Wallace's spirited thumping, then cuts out to let Collins' sax have a go. Delirious abandon, even - dare I say it - joy. PEORIA (by Fripp, Collins, Burrell, and Wallace). Ah yes, the old two-chord (I-IV) jam. I think you had to be there. Collins is cooking, though - recipe drawn from the post-Coltrane sheets-of-sound cookbook. Then who's that scat-singing? Must be Boz, how about a B minus for effort and go back and study your Louis Armstrong records ... a lot. Fripp gets in a few tasty rhythm licks before the fade-out. THE SAILOR'S TALE. Ably dispatched. EARTHBOUND (Fripp, Collins, Burrell, and Wallace). The old one-chord (I) jam. More scatting. Maybe I was unkind with the Louis Armstrong bit; Boz is clearly more comfortable - and compelling - with this kind of hollering than he was running through Sinfield's poetics sotto voce in the studio. In a couple of years Boz would be playing riffy blues rock in Bad Company, and that direction is all too evident in takes like this. Fripp turns in what is, by now, one of his patented angular, dissonant electric guitar solos. GROON. The group negotiates its way through a highly extended version of "Cat Food"'s B side, a composition which, when you think about it, is no piece of cake. Here the song serves as a vehicle for some ecstatic wailing and shrieking by saxman Collins, with Fripp comping along in the middleground. There's a moment when the music dies down a bit and you can hear ... somebody just screaming their head off. The second half of "Groon"'s fifteen-plus minutes' duration is devoted to a roiling drum solo by Wallace, the latter part of which is fed through a VCS3 synthesizer to produce all manner of sonic swoops, phases, and filtered friezes in motion. At the time (1972) this procedure was something of an innovation, at least in rock; and today, after two decades during which synthesizers have come to epitomize all that is sterile and lifeless in pop music, it's refreshing to hear a vintage machine being employed with such Dionysian glee. The contrast between Islands and Earthbound is extreme to a degree, a bit like mentioning Judy Collins and Patti Smith in the same breath. The split between studio Crimson and live Crimson had grown virtually to the point of schizophrenia: there was Fripp the painfully self-conscious composer of delicate neo-romantic refinements, refined almost to a point of transparently pellucid non-entity; and there was Fripp the jagged metal warrior, brazenly brandishing his electric guitar as a weapon, band of sonic renegade vagabonds in tow. Great musicians often have some such split musical personality - Beethoven can pat you lovingly on the cheek one minute, and wheel you around and kick you in the butt the next. King Crimson II: a period of intensive searching by Robert Fripp, who managed, in trying circumstances, some of which were surely of his own (if unconscious) making - to put out four albums of some of the most experimental, eclectic, interesting, difficult, challenging, beautiful, ugly, and at times profoundly irritating music ever to come out of the rock orbit. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| << Chapter 4 |
Progressive Ears Presents
ROBERT FRIPP - FROM CRIMSON KING TO CRAFTY MASTER by Eric Tamm |
Chapter 6 >> |