by Will Romano
“To be fair, at the time, it was just a very good singable line—‘21st Century Schizoid Man’—because it was percussive,” says Sinfield. “Plus, using ‘twenty-first century’ gave it a modern, slightly depressing edge, and the lyrics were written to be like flashes from the news.”
The simultaneous staccato phrasings played by alto sax, electric guitar, bass, and drums (and the pregnant pauses that follow each rhythmic grouping) in the section subtitled “Mirrors,” dangle on the edge of nothing—they feel like incomplete musical lines or thoughts. The song has us on the edge of our seats as drummer Giles swings through jagged rhythmic edges.
“Mike had the great technique of a jazz drummer,” says McDonald. “If you listen to the recorded version of ‘Schizoid Man,’ that middle section, it swings like crazy even though it’s in an odd time.”
The song was cut in one take. “We were well rehearsed,” says McDonald. “We had to be tight on that one in order for it to work.”
After the uproarious ending of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the wind instruments heard at the opening of “I Talk to the Wind” seem a peaceful respite. Yet, despite its pleasant atmosphere, “I Talk to the Wind” is just as thought-provoking as “Schizoid Man,” ultimately meditating on the insignificance and impermanence of the human race.
Lake’s breathy vocal delivery is underscored by McDonald’s multitracked clarinets (recalling a British dance hall/Beatles vibe) and breezy flute solo, the latter of which converses nicely with Giles’s light, jazzy touch.
“It’s difficult to have a flute in a rock context, but it helps to reinforce the theme—the wind,” says McDonald.
“Epitaph,” the last song on the original side one of the album, is as prophetic as it is biting, as if the speaker from “I Talk to the Wind” had finally sobered and wonders if his world can be saved. “Epitaph” does little to quiet the confusion, musically and lyrically: It is at once orchestral and military—featuring thundering classical percussion on one hand and tribal-like war patterns on the other, musically translating the lyrical imagery of the rolling wheels of Sinfield’s apocalyptic war machine.
“Epitaph” is a world spinning out of control, drawing the conclusion about our society’s technological achievement: What we do best is wage war, our signature invention. Immediately we make a connection between Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” an antiwar anthem inspired by the tumultuous times of the 1960s (post-JFK assassination) and the line in “Epitaph” concerning the wall on which the prophets wrote.
“The whole album was quite political, because I am a political animal,” says Sinfield. “We were living in very political times in ‘67 and ’68, and the record was recorded in ’69, and we were all influenced by various things happening in the world, like Vietnam.”
“Every song Peter wrote about was about the generation gap, the Establishment, and how people in power were in control of other people’s lives,” says McDonald. “As the record says, ‘An Observation by King Crimson.’ It’s observing what’s happening politically and socially.”
“I started off with some stanzas of Byronesque poetry, even based on the poem [containing the lines] ‘The Assyrian Came down like a wolf on the fold/ And his cohorts were gleaming purple and gold [”The Destruction of Sennacherib”],” says Sinfield. “That is very gothic, and if you look it up, it is influenced by iambic pentameter [poetic rhythm]: ‘The wall on which the prophets wrote is cracking at the seams/ Upon the instruments of death
. . .’ I had an idea to put music to it and Ian went, ‘I like that. I can do that.’ He took it away and did it very well.”
The brass setting on the Mellotron elevates the level of gloom, alluding to the monolithic rhythmic march of “Mars.” “There’s a finality to it,” says McDonald. “Some people have likened that middle section where the Mellotron goes soaring up to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. I don’t think we came up with the term doom rock, but it is a very doomy song, in a very real sense.”
Though it took quite some time to arrange and write, “Epitaph” may well be the perfect King Crimson song. “I will never forget the day when we recorded says Lake. ”We were looking for a solo for it, and Ian McDonald said, ‘I have an idea for this.’ We all looked at him and we thought he’d come out with some sort of sax solo or something. He said, ‘Low clarinet.’ [Laughs] Just take a listen to the record again. I mean, it comes to the solo and you hear clarinet, you know? This low, dirgy, grim [clarinet]. What an idea. Perfect.”
IN THE COURT
The original side two of In the Court of the Crimson King opens with the dreamy “Moonchild, Including the Dream and the Illusion,” a deep album cut that some might remember from its appearance in Vincent Gallo’s 1998 film, Buffalo 66.
If there is any filler on the band’s debut, it’s the studio improvisation “Moonchild.” However, it does serve two great purposes: Most of the rest of the record concerns itself with politics and current affairs of the day, and “Moonchild” seems like a psychedelic, slightly Japanese, and necessary mental tune-out or time-off that McDonald describes as a “willow-pattern” painting in musical terms.
“Improvisation was an essential part of what King Crimson was,” says McDonald. “There’s little evidence of that on the first album other than the filler improv in ‘Moonchild,’ which has vibes, drums, and guitar. Greg didn’t play on it, but his vocals were used—panned half-right in the stereo image, which he was never too happy about.”
“Moonchild” clears the palate for the main course: “The Court of the Crimson King (Including the Return of the Fire Witch and the Dance of the Puppets).” With a towering refrain, spilling-over-the-bar line drum fills, and conspiratorial lyrics, “The Court” is, next to “Schizoid Man,” the band’s most well known song.
“Originally, it was sort of Dylanesque,” says Sinfield, going on to sing in a rapid delivery evocative of Dylan: “‘On soft grey mornings widows cry . . .’ It will ruin it for you forever now if I keep singing it this way.”
“There’s a syncopated bass figure used in ‘The Court’ that was inspired by Otis Redding’s ‘I Can’t Turn You Loose,”’ says McDonald. “I actually worked that into the Mellotron part of the chorus of the song. It’s not exactly the same notes, but it’s the same rhythmically.”
The iconic flute solo in the tune picks up on the Eastern music vibe presented in the previous song, “Moonchild.” “The end of the flute solo is borrowed from ‘Scheherezade’ [Symphonic Suite, Op. 35] by [Nikolai] Rimsky-Korsakov. I put it at the end of the flute solo, and people expect it when it comes now if I’m ever performing it live.”
Crimson taps into a baroque vibe by using a Baldwin harpsichord, adding a traditional touch. “It was so essential, in my mind, that I couldn’t imagine ‘The Court’ without it,” says McDonald. “It’s the sound that accompanies the line Greg sings, ‘The cracked brass bells will ring.’ It also comes in at the end of the flute solo with a kind of splayed-out arpeggio to bring the song back to E minor for the verses.”
SECOND ENDING
Just when you think the song has come to a close, it wheezes back to life for a screeching Hammond organ and all-out Mellotron cacophonous vamp, complete with roundhouse drum fills skating across the stereo image from left to right.
“The part that opens the second ending is myself and Mike sitting side by side playing the little pipe organ used earlier in the record,” says McDonald. “It was like, ‘All right, let’s do a completely mad version of the chorus.’ It’s interesting because we are playing the chords in a new key. It’s a bit like a Picardy third, I suppose. Same sort of idea. That device helps to refresh the ear and keep interest.”
The song doesn’t so much end abruptly as get sucked into the center of the sonic image, creating a kind of vortex, calling to mind an object being beamed up into an alien spacecraft.
“Yeah,” says McDonald. “Or something swirling down the drain. Either way you want to look at it.”
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Sinfield’s use of medieval images such as puppets, the purple piper, the keeper of the city keys, a pilgrim’s door, the black queen, and on and on, are like pieces in some cosmic chess game. Authority, and perhaps an evil one at that, grinds the wheels of fate, just as a grand court jester (juggler) unleashes orchestrated madness with a simple hand gesture. His lyrics present the duality and dilemma of the Western world, the divide between the elites and the common people.
“‘The Court of the Crimson King’ is asking, ‘Are we the devil’s playthings?’” says McDonald. “It’s not necessarily promoting anything demonic. It’s a question of control.”
“Those lyrics are why I used to be called pretentious,” says Sinfield. “[The Crimson songs] were rock songs—you weren’t supposed to talk about the history of the world, the fact that we’re doomed to repeat it. It was influenced by some of the more gothic poets like Byron and Tennyson, the time of empire. Bob Dylan and others were doing similar things, and I thought I’d have a go at it with a slightly different style.”
CHEMISTRY
A lot has been made of the chemistry of the band. But it seems its inherent destructive quality ran just as strong. Was In the Court of the Crimson King a reflection of the world as much as of the band and its ability to conjure some sort of dark, mysterious force? Did the mischievous Sinfield create a controversial name (and reinforce it through overt and subliminal lyrical symbolism) only to enlist us in some fiendish parlor game for his own amusement?
“We were not promoting any kind of devil worship or anything like that,” cautions McDonald. “What we were doing was basically reflecting or illustrating the world as it is. Or the way things were heading.”
Some remain skeptical and unconvinced and think that Crimson may have been controlled by the very same forces they were singing about. “Robert Fripp and the King Crimson creed was and is a complex creature that somehow personifies the world as I see it today,” says Gordon Haskell, who would join Crimson and was Fripp’s band member in the pre-Crimson R&B group League of Gentlemen. “I have to decide once and for all if [Fripp] was playing his part in the creation of our present society or merely foretelling it.”
UNCANNY MASTERPIECE
In the Court of the Crimson King, an observation by King Crimson, was released in October 1969 and shot to number five on the British charts, into the Top 30 U.S. Famously, Pete Townshend announced to the world (in a full-page ad that ran in ZigZag magazine) that Crimson’s debut was an “uncanny masterpiece” and “fucking incredible.”
Fripp attributed the band’s successes to what he called the “good fairy.” How else to explain the band’s amazing run of luck? “Well, something was happening,” says Sinfield. “It was sort of a fluke.”
“I would say that what we got was the correct album at the end of the day,” says Enthoven. “I remember I took the record to Chris Blackwell at Island and he said it wasn’t his cup of tea but he totally understood it.” (Island released the record in Britain.) “The most interesting thing was taking it to Ahmet Ertegun [at Atlantic], who you would have thought would have hated it, but he loved it.” (Atlantic released it in America.)
But just like the sucking vortex concluding the band’s debut, things began to slide down the drain quickly. Within months of the release of Crimson’s debut, the whole thing appeared to be breaking apart. Even the illustrator of the record’s iconic image (the “paranoid man”), Barry Godber, died not long after the record appeared.
In a stunning move, toward the end of a 1969 U.S. tour, McDonald and Giles announced that they had had enough and wanted to quit the band. “Mike and Ian didn’t like flying,” says Lake. “At the time, we were on a tour of the United States ... and we got to San Francisco and they had decided that they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to tour; they were far happier in the studio just making records.”
“There seems to be something about Crimson and people leaving, and I suppose I was the first culprit,” says McDonald, who moved to New York in the 1970s and later found success with the arena rock band Foreigner. “It was my first tour and I was very homesick. I had trouble dealing with the very quick rise and acceptance the band was experiencing. I didn’t even really realize the implications of leaving and how important the band was.”
IN THE WAKE OF MCDONALD AND GILES
Following their Crimson experience, McDonald and Giles partnered for an oft-overlooked gem of progressive rock/pop, 1971’s McDonald and Giles, featuring Steve Winwood on piano and organ, and bassist Peter Giles, with words by Peter Sinfield for the twenty-one-minute epic “Birdman.”
Crimson pressed on with Fripp, Lake, and Sinfield at the helm of a new lineup, which included prodigal bassist Peter Giles, Mike Giles (who was reduced to session drummer), saxophonist /flautist Mel Collins (formerly of the band Circus), jazz pianist/composer Keith Tippett, second vocalist Gordon Haskell (that’s him on “Cadence and Cascade”).
Crimson’s 1970 sophomore effort, In the Wake of Poseidon (the title of which was a kind of in-joke referring to the tidal wave of uncertainty that nearly consumed Crimson in the aftermath of the original band’s breakup), contains memorable material (e.g., “Pictures of a City (Including 42nd at Treadmill),” the three-part “Peace,” “Cat Food,” and “Cadence and Cascade,” the latter two, despite the LP credits, written largely by McDonald and Sinfield), but it feels like a watered-down review of the debut album.
Bruford, circa ’74.
Perhaps the band was unsure of itself and straining to hold on to a formula. And just when the band appeared to be at its most vulnerable, Crimson was delivered what could have been their knockout blow: Before the end of the recording sessions, Lake announced he was leaving to join Nice keyboardist Keith Emerson in forming a new group.
“Robert wanted to carry on with King Crimson,” says Lake. “I said to him, ‘Look, if one guy was going to leave, maybe you can replace one guy, but two guys is too fundamental.’ To me, that was the end of the band. It’s hard to talk about what-ifs. I don’t know what would have happened had the band stuck together. I suspect the band would have gone on. It would have continued to make good music. The people in it were fantastic.”
Incredibly, Poseidon scored a higher position on the British charts than the band’s debut (climbing to number four and within the Top 40 in the U.S.), but more changes were to come.
LIZARD
Crimson had been reduced to a studio band by the time Sinfield and Fripp were fixing to record the band’s third and perhaps most bizarre record, Lizard—a horn-driven, EMS VSC-3 synth-seduced, oscillator-inflected, musique concrète—inspired, bizzaro prog record from the darkest corners of the duo’s collective mind.
“Robert and I spent an awful lot of time making that record,” says Sinfield. “We didn’t have anything else to do, really. It was really the two of us with a bunch of musicians coming in and out.”
Idle hands, as they say. Couple the strange musical elements with the loose album concept of masks and disguises, and Lizard is revealed to be slightly demented. In “The Battle of Glass Tears,” one section of the side-long title track (Fripp’s first foray into long-form composition), chaos ensues: Collins’s sax is slowly panned from right to left, and soon, sax fills both channels. Mellotron, cornet (played by Mark Charig), guitar, drums, bass, and acoustic piano intermingle in a free-for-all and in call and response. It’s madness.
Even “Prince Rupert Awakes” (the opening section of “Lizard”), sung by Yes’s Jon Anderson, which could be one of the sweetest melodies Crimson ever recorded, is subverted by reverse guitar riffs, avant-jazz sonic stabs, strange lyrical devices, and the Mellotron’s demonic sonic webbing.
“‘Prince Rupert’ was really about Charles II and the Roundheads,” says Sinfield. “[Charles II] had this thing about having these little gas toys that would explode when hitting the floor. I’d collect these odd facts and try to put them together in a kind of collage.”
Throughout the record there’s a constant tension between dark and light, and scattered references to the twelve Jungian archetypes, represented and reinforced by Gini Barris’s opulent, medieval, illuminated-manuscript-style LP cover artwork. (It’s possible to interpret the cover as a seditious commentary on sacred texts, which only completes the artistic package and reflects the depth of its perversity.)
“Fripp might have had [musical designs] in his mind’s eye all the time,” says Haskell, the band’s singer and bassist after Lake left. “He might have been wiser to share that vision with the rest of us, so that we could be more cooperative and understanding. One has to praise the individual players. Chaos is achieved with the record, and in places it was chaos.”
“I found it a very daunting task recording with Crimson,” says drummer Andrew McCulloch. “You would play something and Bob [Fripp] would say, ‘Right. This is King Crimson. Now you don’t play what normal people would play under these conditions. Think about it.’ It was a big leap for me.”
ISLANDS
By the band’s next studio album, 1971’s Islands, the lineup had changed again: Haskell, who left in a huff over creative and financial reasons he says, and McCulloch were gone, and in came vocalist/bassist Boz Burrell (later of Bad Company) and drummer Ian Wallace, who joined forces with Fripp, Mel Collins, and Sinfield.
In the Wake of Poseidon (1970)
Lizard (1970)
Islands (1971)
Earthbound (1972)
