King Crimson live at Moles Club, Bath 1981: Discipline as a means to an end

Can you see the bloke out of Tears For Fears?

It’s 1981 and King Crimson has not appeared on a stage in public for half a decade or more. The individual members are now playing in bands like Foreigner, Genesis and Yes, while Robert Fripp, the driving force behind the band, has done session work and collaborations with Eno, Peter Gabriel and Daryl Hall. He feels a little antsy, though, for a bit of complicated guitar music and has been playing with a couple of guitarists in The League of Gentlemen and toying with a new band.

Discipline. What a great name for a band. Bereft of the bombast of prog, away from the anarchy of punk, the name signifies something rigorous, highly ordered and more than slightly intimidating. The eventual album cover has no oversized screaming skull, just a spherical and very complex knot on a deep red background. From the last Crimson lineup Fripp retains Bill Bruford on drums, but the band takes a different shape with the addition of an American guitarist (late of Frank Zappa’s band) fresh from his work with Talking Heads, name of Adrian Belew[1]. He offers quirky; did anyone ever do quirky while singing about summoning down fire witches before? Then there is Tony Levin, who plays bass but prefers playing a ten string guitar thing called a Chapman Stick, played by hitting the strings with your fingers.

The Chapman Stick, pictured yesterday.

They book a show in Bath, in an upstairs bar room called Moles Club, April 1981. There were, it seems, only about seven people there, or something, but this release in the increasingly-costly-to-me Collectors’ Club series (number 11 for those of you keeping up with a bingo card) allows us to hear what went on when people went to see this band they called Discipline.

In fact, it will be called Discipline for a tiny while[2] before Fripp decides to bring the King Crimson moniker out of corporate retirement[3]. For now, there must have been a certain amount of uncertainty before the band took to the tiny stage.

It needed to be said way before this that this recording is not great; while unsure of the provenance of the tapes, I can safely say it doesn’t have the widest of soundstages and can be quite murky at times. It’s hard to hear what’s being said onstage (not too much anyway) and the crowd is very close to the stage. Levin writes the short but sweet sleevenotes, where he draws our attention to one of the photos taken on his camera during the show and now replicated on the cover of this release; sure enough there’s Curt Smith out of Tears For Fears in the front row, looking like every teenage musician looks when he wants the bass player to notice that he knows how to play bass and ask him to play Stairway or Sowing the Seeds of Love, or whatever. The trepidation remembered by Levin most certainly does not come across on the disc, though, which is amazingly muscular and controlled throughout.

The entire album is played, if out of order, and arrives almost completely formed. From the outset the power and precision are apparent. Discipline is, as the album cover indicates, knotty, similar in intensity to the second number, Thela Hun Ginjeet (an anagram of Heat in the Jungle, made-up-words fans). This track may not have the immersive paranoia of the final recorded version but what is here is a well-drilled quartet that doesn’t seem to have treated this warm-up as a rehearsal in any way. An indication of where Fripp saw this in the King Crimson canon comes next with one of two old songs. Red, all drum fills and power riffing, is right up there with the mad, aggressive version of the band from 1974, but with a dynamic range offered by the tom toms which replace the old crash cymbals[4]. I read that Bruford was encouraged around this time to play on a kit with no cymbals and the drum sound is appropriately busy and claustrophobic here. The other old track is Lark’s Tongues in Aspic Part II, very much the basis for much of Fripp and Belew’s guitar work in this incarnation of the band.

The set is short enough, a nice, expansive version of The Sheltering Sky on which Levin’s influence can be heard in the looping rhythm and the ever-wonderful Matte Kudasai (it means “wait please” in Japanese) the only respite from the pounding, complicated twin guitar lines and cascading toms. It’s not quite heavy rock, not new wave, too metrical to be jazz but too melodic to be proggy. I suppose that defiance of category is why this band were such a well-kept secret, but in a place like Moles Club it must have been a blistering experience to hear the new direction the band were taking, and word of mouth soon took over.

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[1] Weird King Crimson connections, no. 75 in an occasional series: Belew co-wrote Genius of Love with the Tom Tom Club, so presumably makes money whenever Mariah Carey sells some more copies of her song Fantasy.

[2] April-October 1981.

[3] The party line states that this was a collective decision, but you try doing something with the words King and Crimson without Fripp’s imprimatur.

[4] Those ardent to turn the kids onto Crimson usually say about now that Kurt was obsessed with Red, but I’ve never really put this together with what Nirvana did. Not to my ears, I’m afraid.

 

King Crimson Live in Detroit 1971: Up yours, Motor City.

In which we join King Crimson’s second full lineup on their second date of an American tour which would end with the band splitting from Robert Fripp. Shorn of pretty much everyone who made the first album, save Fripp and the lyricist Peter Sinfield (about whom more in a minute) the band now featured Ian Wallace on drums, Boz Burrell on bass and vocals and Mel Collins on sax and flute. It’s interesting how often former members of Crimson crop up elsewhere: I first heard of Mel Collins on Dire Straits’ Alchemy album in 1984, but he doesn’t play there like he did on this Crimson tour. Another ex-member you may know is Greg Lake, who went on to be the L in ELP and then, with a little help from Sergei Prokofiev[1], wrote and released I Believe in Father Christmas, which I’m sure still pays the bills (in addition to the money all these bastards still make off me buying so many of their live albums).

Pete Sinfield’s has to be the strangest Crimson story, though. He went off to live in Ibiza before returning to write pop songs, and by pop I mean Land of Make Believe by Bucks Fizz. He’s another of those blokes who won’t be stuck for a bob either, having co-written Canadian skinny chanteuse Celine Dion’s hit Think Twice. That’s walking about with money, there.

Anyhow, back to the Live in Detroit set, a double and (are you counting?) the eighteenth in the Collectors’ Club series. This one’s long and it’s noisy. The first thing I noticed, however, was how Fripp didn’t use the liner notes to moan about anything, this time passing the biro to Wallace. It’s fitting, I suppose, as Wallace’s drum solos are the reason the thing is a double album, but if you think that means you won’t get a dose of Fripp’s trademark petulance, just you wait.

Wallace’s comments are those of a guy for whom this tour was as much a tourist opportunity as a gig. He muses on the historic Massey Hall, then outlines how tight this band had become. But he hints at the impending breakdown of relations within the band and carps about how these versions are better than the records. (By the way, Wallace died in 2007 of oesophageal cancer, a few months after Burrell, also aged 60, died of a heart attack).

They may well be tight as far as interplay goes, but there’s an admirable sense of adventure to the music (recorded pretty well, all things considered, despite a couple of dropouts and a nasty reel change on Groon). This era lies between the experimental jazz of Lizard and the denser Islands, and at first Collins takes the instrumental lead, jamming good with Wallace on an increasingly-unhinged Pictures of a City before blowing the English cobwebs of the stiff Formentera Lady with an extended aul’ blow. All the time the drums are quite martial and the guitar is more rhythm than anything (possibly because of the limitations of Burrell’s bass playing, recently taught to him by Fripp). Fripp begins a teasing little angular solo about eight minutes into Formentera Lady, but as Collins tries to match him one gets the feeling that the guitarist is trying to get rid of rather than play with the sax as they head into Sailor’s Tale and Cirkus, and the mellotron and antique synth (the latter VCS3 played by Sinfield from the balcony) muscle in.

This and the execrable Ladies of the Road[2] follow before Groon spills out all over the floor, all noodles and big drum solo. It’s about seventeen minutes of very male, longhaired banging about (no complaints there), after which you’d think they might play some of the old stuff for the Americans. But no.

They do 21^st Century Schizoid Man (you know, the one Kanye does?) as if they couldn’t get the smell of it off their hands quickly enough, then Fripp takes the mike.

Here we go. He introduces the band without offending anyone, then tells Detroit how they’re one of the favourite cities for “the cats in the band”. Before the Detroitians can say “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” he tells them that said cats are very sensitive and that shouting out for the old stuff (by which he specifies Schizoid Man, Epitaph and Crimson King) will make them stop playing at all, the philosophy of this band being to play new material[3]. At the same time this diplomatic pleading is going on several members of the crowd are shouting bits and pieces, as people on large amounts of acid are wont to do, and a member of Crimson[4] is screaming at them to “shut the fuck up”. Lovely. He goes on to tell a story about how the band’s bus was smeared with the message “Learn Epitaph”. Wasn’t that what the crowd were yelling, and isn’t yelling preferable to smearing?

Fripp counts them into a great version of what he called then The Devil’s Triangle but I’m assuming the estate of Gustav Holst insisted he call Mars, then after a delightful sequence of whooshing sounds, curtly bids them goodnight. The whimsical side of the fun loving Crims (see what I did there?) comes through for an encore, though, playing a wacky blues version of Court of the Crimson King, all screaming and dirty riffing[5]. At the end someone—I think it’s Wallace—mocks the audience, asking them whether they’re “baffled” as if that was the intention. The phrase “arrogant wanker” springs to mind, but Wallace calls it “hilarious…. Did they get it? I doubt it”, he adds with less than mature reflection.

So just when you thought you were getting an archive Crimson release on which Fripp withstood the temptation to moan in the sleeve notes, he does it from the annals of history, live on stage.  Top guitarist but a moody bollix, by all accounts.

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[1] who, I’m assured, knew nothing of the Prog.

[2] What the hell possessed them with this song? Sample lyric: “Stone-headed Frisco spacer/Ate all the meat I gave her/Said would I like to taste hers/And even craved the flavour”. Charming.

[3] Presumably because the bass player hasn’t learned it yet.

[4] I’m assuming it’s the drummer… assume away.

[5] It’s the one from the Ladies Of The Road compilation and is fun to listen to once.

 

King Crimson Champaign-Urbana Sessions: It’s called the Collectors’ Club for the same reason an anteater’s called an anteater..

This is Vol. 21 in the King Crimson Collectors’ Club so there’s no real commercial push behind this collection of outtakes from some sessions done by the Fripp-Bruford-Levin-Belew incarnation of King Crimson in 1983. The sessions are described in the liner notes as if they were aborted, but that description comes from Robert Fripp himself and we can see why that’s not the best source of objectivity in the Prog world. He discusses at length the issue of how to split royalties in the band, ‘agreeing’ with Adrian Belew‘s assertion that giving the chief lyricist and singer the same share as non-writing musicians is unfair, but does so on an album of jam sessions with no vocals. Miaow.

The sessions, I’m told, slot in between the tour for the Beat album and the recording of Three of a Perfect Pair. Although I’m not terribly au fait with Beat, the latter album is the first Crimson I heard, when I met a bloke called Jim who spoke incessantly about the Chapman Stick and linked this band with the contemporaneous work done by Tony Levin with Peter Gabriel. And that’s why there’s a bone to be picked when Fripp says these sessions were left undeveloped. Three of a Perfect Pair seems to me the result of unpacking some of the ideas in this collection and spacing everything out. For Fripp to say they ‘failed to recognise or develop’ these ideas seems strange. Or, to be technically accurate, wrong.

Belew, Fripp, Bruford, Levin.

The album begins by looking back, as San Franciso and Tony Bass Riff seem to revisit Elephant Talk and Thela Gun Ginjeet from Discipline. Those are the tracks on Discipline that had the closest connection to King Crimson live, and here the musicians are tight and, as Bill Bruford appears throughout, champing at the bit to break out. It’s very Lark’s Tounges in Aspic, all angles. But it’s hardly new, is it? Nor is the version of Thela titled Heat in the Jungle which appears later in the collection. It takes its name from a line in the recorded song, and apart from some Jan Hammer-aged analog synth and no vocals (there aren’t any anywhere) it’s just the same. It’s elsewhere, however, the developments are to be heard.

The standout track, Robert’s Ballad, is a case in point. Taking the wonderful atmospherics of Matte Kudasai from Discipline but staying away from the song, Fripp creates a beautiful arpeggio as the band (or is he multi-tracked?) move slowly around him. You can almost, not quite, hear The Sheltering Sky emerge out of the mist here as it fades. It may well be Crimson’s Blind Willie McTell, although its clear that it was subsequently used elsewhere. Lovely stuff.

The other songs aren’t realised fully, sometimes dogged by samplers and synths which date the thing badly. The imaginatively-titled Sequenced, for example, is the sound of a band playing with keyboards without integrating them into any discernable whole; Adrian Looped is clearly intended as a preliminary sketch on which to build. Again, it’s hardly Christian to judge this stuff as if it were intended for release.

But on Steinberger Melody, Fragmented, Not One Of Those and Grace Jones the sound is much more fully formed. These are clearly early versions of songs like Dig Me or Industry (Fragmented) or Model Man and Man with an Open Heart (Steinberger, Not One). Levin in particular is exploring his Inner Bald Funk, and the link with Gabriel is clear with the riff from Not One of Those, close enough to Not  One of Us from Gabriel’s third album. On Grace Jones the band strut over Levin’s walking reggae bass, and there’s a lovely African tone to Reel 3 Jam, too. Belew was, of course, around for the Talking Heads‘ Fear of Music sessions. Everyone’s got something to bring to the party (even if all Bruford brought was a bottle of Schnapps and his annoyingly tuned synth toms). Robert and Bill, to be fair to Mr. Bruford, features some really impressive interplay, without a Linn Drum in sight.

So it’s a bit of a curate’s egg: some familiar tunes reexamined to, perhaps, recycle; some new ideas to adopt or discard. I’d love to know how spontaneous this work is, but having heard enough live material from this band in all its incarnations I’m sure these are early versions. There are five or six outstanding tracks here but perhaps not for the uninitiated; it’s called Collectors’ Club for a reason….

 

King Crimson Live in Central Park, 1974: You can turn it off before the bass solo if you’d like

“So change was in the air but we were unaware of where it was leading us all”.

–Robert Fripp, from the sleevenotes.

Introductory paragraph for people who know something about King Crimson:

Recorded on the last night of their 1974 tour and hence the last night of that era of King Crimson, this gig follows the Providence gig used in the construction of the Red album and released more fully on the Great Deceiver box set. This line-up is famous for having David Cross on violin and John Wetton on bass, both coming to the end of their tenure. Only Bill Bruford on drums would resurface in a Crimson lineup when they next convened in 1981. This era is famous for improvisation and tight control and this gig is a fine example of the interplay, particularly between Fripp and Cross. The setlist is derived mainly from the Lark’s Tounges, Starless and Bible Black and Red albums, with some nods to earlier work.

Introductory paragraph for people who know bugger all about King Crimson:

King Crimson have, of late, been treated with respectability by those who know. Those who know know that, when Emerson, Lake and Palmer were getting bigger, when Genesis and Yes were getting further into their own mythology, when Prog was serious music, King Crimson were stripping down and getting loud. Crimson, formed in 1969 by Robert Fripp, became well known quickly as their first gig was opening for the Stones in Hyde Park and their first album, In The Court of the Crimson King, was an amazingly assured and inspired effort. The lead track from that album, ’21^st Century Schizoid Man’, is probably the only one you’ve ever heard, if that. This is not a band that ever got much airplay. They kept reforming, reshaping and breaking up again over the course of forty years, and over the last ten have been releasing live documents from their various lines up. Their recent reissue of three albums, especially Red, has led to quite the reappraisal, but there is a core audience who never doubted the quality of this band.

We begin this gig, the last of the tour, with the Greatest Hit, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they were playing it safe. Listen, though, to the interplay between keyboards, guitar and drums, particularly in the tempi changes, and you’ll hear a leaner, less pomp-ous band than the studio version suggests. Instead of building to the climax of their most familiar song, then, this band begins with the known material, bends it into the shape of the current band and then takes off. There’s no better guide to this album than here.

Although the sound quality of this is that of a decent bootleg, the quality of the playing more than atones for the limits of the era. Through the next hour or so we hear recognisable versions of many songs, sadly including the tedious ‘Easy Money’, but augmented with some serious improvisation from Cross and Fripp. By now Cross had moved away from the violin on many songs, using keyboard to duel with the increasingly-overdriven guitar of Fripp. On ‘Easy Money’ Fripp is driven to a level of intensity nearing an unthinkable-for-him unhingedness by the organ swell and the chords played on Wetton’s bass, and the song is all the better for it. The solo played out of this track into ‘Fracture’ is a clear indicator of the direction Crimson were going; here the other instruments stay clear of it before the ascending bass takes us into the theme. By half way through it sounds like a half-dozen Fripps on stage as the notes fly, but the mellotron in the background reminds us of the point of departure once again. ‘Fracture’ alone is worth tracking down this set to hear. You can turn it off before the bass solo at 8.20 if you’d like but indulge them a little….

And then there’s ‘Starless’, a track that represents for me the bridge between the prog and the rock, the pomp and the credibility of this band. The lyric makes way after a couple of minutes of atmospherics for a huge, thrilling instrumental sequence, with Fripp once again playing like a man about to set himself free from this band he described at the time as “perhaps… balanced in disarray”. As the music begins to get complicated the pomposity of the lyric, inspired by Dylan Thomas, is replaced by something much more threatening, much more eloquent. By ten minutes in the melody line has mutated into something much more frantic than the overblown lament of the lyric ever suggested, but it does reach a resolution by the end of its 12 minutes.

As such the encore, ‘The Talking Drum’ and ‘Lark’s Toungues in Aspic part II’, seem accomplished but unemotional, as if all the frustration and tension was spent at the end of the main set. They still bounce along at a highly entertaining crack, though. Whatever Fripp’s mental state, the final half hour of this album is a sequence of music as thrilling in this limited representation of the band as most groups can muster with all the technology easy money can buy.

And this is documentary evidence that even thirty six years ago there were wankers who talked through the quiet bits.