by Will Romano
The time away from Crimson must have done Fripp some good: His playing on 1975’s Evening Star—acollaborative effort with Eno, similar to the duo’s 1973 record, (No Pussyfooting)—Bowie’s 1977’s Heroes, and 1980’s Scary Monsters, represents some of the guitarist’s most monstrous and inspired performances this side of the Crimson juggernaut.
“I’ve witnessed it once, the only session I ever did with Eno for the Nerve Net record [1992],” says onetime King Crimson Warr guitarist Trey Gunn. “Eno lured Robert into a kind of playing that I have never, ever heard him play before, and that no one had ever done before. That was something that Robert claims used to happen a lot, and it came out of Eno making suggestions. For instance, Eno wanted Robert to do one more guitar solo, and I was there with [producer] David Singleton when Eno said, ‘Robert, go in there and I will conduct you.’ Eno was making all of these weird gestures with his body. Up to that point, I’d never heard Robert play anything remotely like that. It was like a Debussy flute part that was utterly chromatic and melodic. Somehow, his encouragement to Robert has ... probably given blossom to a couple of genres.”
Furthermore, Fripp’s famous “sky saw” tone was an Eno creation that’s a hybrid texture of mechanical grinding noises and a violin-like screech achieved via an electric guitar signal sent through the VSC-3 Synthi synthesizer (where it is further manipulated digitally).
Fripp creates a repeating looped signal (a few seconds long) and then allows the tape signal to decay with slight sonic degradation. Waves of sound are layered but don’t disappear, and Fripp sends textural pieces soaring with his signature sustain, creating a kind of dronescape continuum.
The guitarist can thank Eno, in part, for helping to inspire and devise his tape-looping system, famously dubbed Frippertronics. “The (No Passsyfooting) record, that title, came about because Robert wrote on a card, ‘No pussyfootin’, and put it on the mixer board,” says Gunn. “This meant: ‘If we are going to go somewhere musically, let’s really go there. Let’s not hedge and go back. This isn’t rock music, this isn’t pop music, let’s go for it.’”
With signal-delay tape loops, Fripp created a bed structure and then layered changing musical ideas/phrases on “top” of it, until a tremendous fabric of sound was woven. The technique was one Fripp would use for his first solo album, 1979’s Exposure (originally conceived as the last installment of a proposed trilogy, which was to include
Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel’s sophomore “rip” record, both of which Fripp produced).
Prior to making Exposure, Fripp transplanted himself to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and gradually eased into the flow of making music again.
He jammed and/or recorded with underground and New York new wave/punk artists Talking Heads, the B-52s, and the Ramones, and even played onstage with Blondie in May 1978, one of Fripp’s first live performances in three years. Not long after, Fripp founded his dancey new wave outfit the League of Gentlemen, having resurrected the band in which he appeared with Gordon Haskell in the 1960s.
Featuring Phil Collins, Daryl Hall, Eno, Gabriel, future Crimson bass/Stick player Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, and drummer/producer Narada Michael Walden, Exposure could have been, in the best of all possible worlds, a kind of autobiography—the likes of which Crimson fans had yet to see. Yet throughout, Fripp keeps his distance, testing the waters, searching for a way to express himself, and leaving the listener in a maze—an intriguing labyrinth, but a labyrinth nonetheless.
While Fripp used some subterfuge to subvert the presentation of this material, something of the guitarist’s personality does come through. For one thing, the album opens with a taped snippet of Fripp talking, perhaps half jokingly, about the commercial potential of this batch of songs.
Featuring some fine melodies; overtures to musique concrete (taped voices, one of which belongs to Fripp’s fearless guru J. G. Bennett); ambient passages of sustained guitar noise created via Frippertronics; punky, violent bursts of sonic energy; and even moments of intimacy (e.g., in “Here Comes the Flood,” initially recorded by Gabriel for his 1977 solo debut, appearing here, quite rightly, in an understated manner), Exposure was as much a culmination of the guitarist’s exile from Crimson as it was a summation of his time with Crimson, and his view of a future Crimson.
Robert Fripp: Exposure (1979).
The knotty, odd-time workout of “Breathless,” the Hall-sung “North Star,” and the off-kilter “Disengage” (sung by Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill, whose unhinged vocal performance lies somewhere between visionary satire and absolute lunacy) use Fripp’s past as a launching pad to foreshadow early 1980s Crimso tunes such as “Matte Kudasai” and “Frame by Frame.”
Fripp’s goal of rejoining the musical world, which he dubbed, “The Drive to 1981,” was, in retrospect, a way of reconciling himself with the fulfillment of the guitarist’s spiritual enlightenment, the advent of punk, and his eventual return to the mainstream. Exposure was just one step in that process, a process that would carry him back to King Crimson.
“Sartori in Tangier” begins with Levin’s sensitive touch on the Stick, then segues into a thrusting groove: Much as a pianist would, Levin uses his left hand to hold down two repetitive notes and his right hand plays the melody. When the band picks up steam, we hear Fripp playing a violin-like sinuous lead (à la David Cross’s performance in “The Talking Drum”) that hints at the hypnotic whining of a snake charmer’s flute, or pungi (Belew once likened the sound to that of Turkish trumpet)—a fine example of musical technology converging for an intelligent ethno-rock performance.
Similarly, “Waiting Man” practically sums up the new ethos of the band, with interlocking guitar lines, the use of technology (from the Chapman Stick and electronic drums to guitar processing via dual GR-300 guitar synths), the punchy bass line harmonizing with Bruford’s Afro-Latin percussion (courtesy of the Simmons pads), a passionate vocal performance, and Belew’s ghostly guitar roar.
“Two Hands” (with lyrics written by Belew’s wife Margaret), “The Howler” (which evolves from tinny funk to prog disco to soul rock) and closer “Requiem” make you realize just how far-out this “commercial” music was and wonder why (and how) Crimson ended up on Warner Bros. Records in the first place.
The music is all over the place: “Requiem,” in particular, dissolves into near chaos. (Fripp’s wild playing fries up some free-form rock-jazz as Bruford’s subtle and sizzling ride, snare, and kick patterns propel the sonic mess along). It’s perhaps the closest thing to the 1970s Crimson this version of the band would ever get.
Belew graces the cover of Guitar Player magazine, January 1984.
Fripp’s life and music philosophies: Guitar Player magazine, January 1986.
The 1990s double-drumming duo, Bruford and Pat Mastelotto (Modern Drummer, November 1995).
Bruford: pioneering electronic drummer (Music Technology, June 1987).
When the band toured Beat, fans in attendance booed punk and ethnic music that played through the loudspeakers before the band took the stage. However, they cheered for Crimson when they applied African, Indonesian, and other wide-ranging musical motifs to rock. The irony wasn’t lost on some, who accused Crimson of a form of “cultural imperialism,” a charge also leveled against Peter Gabriel, particularly after the release of his Security record.
Funnily enough, the European progressives were slammed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for using their own heritage and bringing it to rock, when that same heritage helped to shape, at the least on some level, the basis for rock ’n’ roll.
Some music writers either disregarded this fact or made a sharp (even veiled racist) point: This wasn’t rootsy rock based on African music, but some Eurocentric concoction that pandered to a white, middle-class audience.
When some European (and American) artists reached out to include more “world” musical influences, they (incredibly) baffled critics, who either didn’t grasp the appeal of the music in the f
irst place or failed to see that music in general shouldn’t be boxed in or limited by geography or societal boundaries.
Music is a continuum, and, as such, prog rock not only helped to erase so-called lines between genres but went a long way to expose the fact that attempting to erect barriers between musical styles is backward, perhaps even wrong-minded, thinking.
Progressive rock, then, was and is a logical, if not necessary and organic, creative branch in popular musical evolution, connected on some cellular level to many more “legitimate” forms of music and genres than it’s given credit for, and something the Beat-era Crimson embodied.
THREE OF A PERFECT PAIR
Prior to the release of Three of a Perfect Pair, Adrian Belew said his lyrics would reflect the Western world’s passage from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Not only was this prophetic, but, once again, Crimson created an interesting dichotomy in the music.
Belew molds his guitar sounds into something akin to drills, power saws, and electrical tools of all sorts for songs on the second side (of the original LP)—the sounds of industry, the old age. More to the point, the guitar effects heard throughout the record capture the stuttering, beeping, and staticky tones of a dial-up Internet modem connection and fax signal transmissions—years before the Internet was given its name and commercialized.
The song “Industry” is a good example of a contemporary composition bordering on a kind of linear Steve Reich—ish art music. For the piece, Bruford combines acoustic with electronic drumming to almost unnerving effect. The plodding, rhythmic, machinelike pace of the song and the strange guitar blasts and textures underscore the music’s fusion of emotion and reserved complexity—the human and robotic together.
Discipline (1981)
The album concludes with the sonically charged “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III,” bringing echoes of the past and yet encompassing all that was new about this 1980s Crimson—a duality to the end.
Fripp expressed that Crimson had ceased to be something that possessed that “X” factor and had become a highly skilled group of individuals who merely played together, playing less for the band and more for themselves.
“No discussion followed the end of the tour to address either working together or not working together,” Fripp wrote in his online diary in January 2001.
Beat (1982)
Three of a Perfect Pair (1984)
The Compact King Crimson (1986)
Absent Lovers: Live in Montreal 1984 (1997)
“In retrospect it was inevitable,” says Spinks. “Robert can only do the same thing for so long; then he has to move on. It’s a kind of self-destruct mechanism, but it’s him being completely honest with himself.”
The members scattered to the corners of the earth: Bruford went off to work with Patrick Moraz; Levin resumed his studio and tour work (which he never truly left) with Gabriel, Stevie Nicks, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Cher, Robbie Robertson, and others, Belew fronted his own band the Bears (and did sessions with Cyndi Lauper, Paul Simon and Jean Michel Jarre, among others), and Fripp began working on a new standard tuning for the guitar, recorded with the likes of Toyah Wilcox, David Sylvian, and Peter Hammill, and taught guitar craft seminars and classes in music for the non-musician at the J. G. Benneff—affiliated Claymont Society for Continuous Education in West Virginia.
Despite certain pop choices the band made during the writing and recording stages of Three of a Perfect Pair (songs such as “Man with an Open Heart” and “Model Man” stressed Belew’s and Crim’s mainstream music sensibilities), the series speaks more of musical evolution than cold calculation.
(Michael Putland/Getty Images)
THROWING IT ALL AWAY
GENESIS ARE EITHER THE BEST OR WORST example of what it means to be a “progressive” rock band: Their music changed so drastically (albeit gradually) over a ten-year period as to render them a straight-up mainstream pop-rock group, one that defined the times in which they lived. Had Genesis been plotting to become a pop band all along?
It was in the late 1970s that Collins expressed aspirations of becoming a solo artist. In 1981 he dropped Face Value, which contained the massive hit “In the Air Tonight”; the single reached number two in Britain and number nineteen in the U.S.
One career had fed the other. As Genesis gained in popularity throughout the late 1970s, the road was paved for Collins’s solo career to take off. On his own, Collins could vent his frustrations about life as a drummer and lead singer and, more importantly, administer himself a form of therapy for the pain and heartache of his first marriage falling apart—options that were not always available to him as a member of Genesis. In some cases, listening to Collins’s solo material became embarrassing: Collins lifted the veil to reveal, in some cases, work that seemed almost too personal and emotional, making us feel as if we were eavesdropping on the man’s private conversations and personal thoughts.
When Collins’s solo albums (Face Value; Hello, I Must Be Going!; No Jacket Required; ... But Seriously) went global, Genesis benefited from the lead singer/drummer’s newly acquired high profile, and the band soared to the heights of superstardom, playing stadiums around the globe.
Collins’s gradual move away from his earlier career became complete when it seemed more people in the world identified him as a singer first, a drummer second. Collins was even using (gasp!) Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, LinnDrums, and Simmons electronic drums, creating a mathematical and even mechanical feel to some of his own and Genesis’s material in the 1980s.
“It was funny,” Robert Berry (GTR, 3) relates. “Carl [Palmer] walked up to Phil Collins when 3 played at Madison Square Garden for the Atlantic Records anniversary concert [1988], and he said, ‘What are you up to?’ Carl wanted to talk about drums, and Phil wanted nothing to do with drums. He just wasn’t a drummer at that point.”
Bolstered by Collins’s debut solo album success, Genesis’s 1981 record, Abacab, reached the Top 10. Songs such as “Abacab,” “No Reply at All,” and “Man on the Corner” all charted in the U.S. Top 40 (with “Abacab” reaching number nine in Britain). Although this direction had been hinted at on records as early as Selling England by the Pound, ... And Then There Were Three, Wind & Wuthering, and Duke, and despite the strong material on Abacab, the band had reached the point of no return.
Though classic Genesis trademarks run rampant in “No Reply At All” (keyboardist Tony Banks employs the same hand-over-hand piano technique used in “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”), the song was a way for Collins to get back to the music he loved. By using the same horn section featured on Collins’s solo record, Face Value, Genesis crossed into soul and R&B pop.
Like the Eagles’ Don Henley, Genesis’ Phil Collins emerged as a triple threat in the 1980s: a songwriter, vocalist, and drummer who successfully juggled these three musical attributes. (Larry Hulst/Getty Images)
“Abacab,” while being one of the most driving songs the band would ever record, confuses as much as it pleases.
Perhaps “Abacab” is a metaphor for the band’s music in the 1980s—slightly vapid, vague, and ingenious in its ability to get people talking, listening, and debating, while not really (seemingly) being about anything of any real substance. (Collins turned this approach into pop gold with “Sussudio,” from 1985’s No jacket Required.) In that sense, Genesis acclimated well to the corporate 1980s.
“I guess Genesis became less progressive as they continued and songs became shorter,” Steve Hackett told the author in 2002. “The single held sway over the War and Peace—type epics.... I’d like to say something controversial here: You could say that Genesis started out . . . the reverse of the Beatles, I think. the Beatles started out sounding arguably the most stupid band and then ended up sounding the most intelligent. I think vice versa for Genesis. I’m not knocking the individuals, who I consider great musicians and writers. I’m just saying in terms of the tunes, I’m not sure [that] making the hit single your raison d’être is the
best way, long term, to come up with the most interesting music.”
“After a certain point, I’m not sure you could call Genesis progressive,” says drummer Jerry Marotta. “You wouldn’t call [Phil Collins’s solo song] ‘Sussudio’ progressive either. The progressive aspect of that band took a backseat when Peter Gabriel left. Every time we went into the studio with Peter there was never any talk about what kind of record we would make. Nobody ever used the word progressive. We all went into the studio with our different approaches, influences, and backgrounds. Peter encouraged that. That’s what made those records so great, and that is why no two of them sound alike.”
Admittedly, flares of progressiveness do crop up in Genesis’s music throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, but these were fading.
After the massive success of 1986’s Invisible Touch (the title track reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Top 100 charts—the only Genesis single to do so. Genesis hit the road again to support a new batch of hit songs and then took some time off. The band would return in the early 1990s with the release of 1991’s We Can’t Dance—“a mixture of songs that came together quickly and other longer, more constructed tunes such as ‘Fading Lights’ and ‘Driving the Last Spike,’ explains Nick Davis, who coproduced the album with the band.
The song selection on We Can’t Dance gave longtime prog fans new hope. But in reality, the trio’s days were numbered. By 1996, Collins had announced that he was leaving the band, reducing Genesis to a duo—Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks, who recruited Scottish singer Ray Wilson and drummers Nir Z and Spock’s Beard’s Nick D’Virgilio for the recording of 1997’s studio album, Calling All Stations.
