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The Real Thing
:: Posted by AndrewJohn on March 24, 2013
I agree with many of the recent views posted.
To find that Graham Bonnet is to play a local music venue, ie a re-vamped pub is mind-blowing in the context of how we as fans viewed the rock star from the early seventies to today. His work especially with Impellitteri is brilliant.
Today is clearly a very different world. A humbleing is present with us all perhaps.
Gentle Giant more than many exhibited the band ethos where the members created and controlled the sound rather than it being ’magically plucked by the players with a good fairy present’in the tradition that KC promotes.
It can be fun to be academic and nostalgic with history but the most fun is to be had hearing the music. Some of which stays remarkably powerful. To see the many Japanese faces so warmly responding to The Crimson ProjeKct must be a great boost to the musicians and one I fear would not be as enthusiastically greeted by the more cynical UK audiences.
a rose
:: Posted by cantspelldiKc on March 23, 2013
Into the Frying Pan is as Krimson as it gets but nothing will ever atain the perfection of Providence
oh, and Hackett...
:: Posted by jtwillia on March 23, 2013
Hackett and the flying brick wall... an interesting idea which floated into my head long ago... Fripp and Hackett are probably my two favourite guitarists from the pre-Prog Prog bands (yes, I always cringe when I use that term!). Certainly in sounds and sometimes melodic sense the two have some similarities. But the differences are notable in a way that makes me wonder whether the wedding of Hackett with Bruford/Wetton would have really worked. Fripp is/was a highly improvisational player, alot of whose best solos during the 72-4 period were almost literally pulled out of the air. He did have worked out stuff (Fracture, LTIA2), but other stuff was drastically different from night to night-- say, with Easy Money both solo (though with some oft or usually recurring phrases) and accompaniment to the verses, you had a very different thing from one night to the next. (And you can credibility string together a hour’s worth of Schizoid Man instrumental sections with little sense of repetition.) Hackett, on the other hand, tended to work out meticulously composed parts (though often fleshed out a bit moving from studio to live) that he played largely, often exactly, the same every night. Which was the case in general with Genesis-- there was a bit of a push in the direction of improv on a few parts of Lamb, but you could largely draw a line beyond that-- as opposed to Crimson, where improvisation was a major element. Maybe Hackett’s playing would have gotten pushed in an excitingly different direction with Bruford/ Wetton, but....?????????
an impurist non-rant
:: Posted by jtwillia on March 23, 2013
As far as Crimson Project, I confess myself rather ambivalent. On the one hand, if Belew and Levin are excited to play the (now) old repertoire again (and it seems they are), can do it credibly (as it seems they can), and the arbiter of the gradations of Crimson is all for it-- then I’m all for it. On the other hand, quite subjectively, I’m not greatly interested. I suppose if they played in the Burlington VT vicinity for a low price, and there was someone else goading me to go, I’d probably go. I’d probably enjoy myself. But I’m not losing any sleep over missing it.
My ambivalence stems really from a general non-plussed response to reunions themselves (whether in the form of partial nods or "classic" line-ups). My own feeling is that bands tend to have a natural life-span, sometimes fairly extended, sometimes very brief, and I find performances of material when it was fresh and new far more engaging than as old repertoire. Which is, of course, no reason that anyone who is excited to revisit their past shouldn’t do it, or that I think it is necessarily a bad thing. I can certainly respect limited engagements of a finite nature with minimal hoopla, with musicians who ahev decided it would be fun to walk on stage with each other again and try out what they were doing long ago (the Cream and Led Zep reunions spring to mind). At the other end of the spectrum would be the likes of Yes or Deep Purple, who I feel have become more institutions than bands, playing the same basic "greatest hits" over and over again ad infinitum. I guess if they are having fun and people want to see it, I don’t have a particular problem with it, but I find myself unable to muster up even remote enthusiasm.
Which I suppose leads to that oft resurrected issue of names. Ultimately it seems everyone has their own ideas as to what constitutes proper use of band names, and I guess I have a certain ambivalence here too. I’m not quite "anything goes" with this-- say, Rod Evans (the voice of "Hush") teaming up 30-plus years ago with four players who’d had nothing to do with Deep Purple, playing Deep Purple material Evans had had nothing to do with, and calling it Deep Purple-- well, I somehow doubt even Rod Evans genuinely thought it was "really" Deep Purple. On the other hand, most of the angles seem to me to be strictly subjective; the only more or less logical, objective criteria would be the "original line-up" scenario, or, an extension of that, a gradual morph with continuity (say, Banks was out and Howe was in; an album later Kaye was out, Wakeman was in; etc.). Another extension might be a "core" members basis (Blackmore Lord and Paice in Deep Purple). Of course, the strict original members slant runs into problems (say, Ringo wasn’t the Beatles original drummer; Hackett and Collins were not original members of Genesis). With something like King Crimson, where the ultimate point of reference seems to in effect be what RF deems to constitute King Crimson on a more idea-based level, these become problematic. There was one album and less than a year of live performances with the original members, a second album with a substantial holdover from the original line-up, and, maybe, if you emphasize the non-playing
contributor, you might get as far as Islands. After that, I think any line drawn is strictly subjective, and reflects the tastes of whoever is drawing the line more than anything else. The style of the Lark’s Tongues/Starless/Red band was drastically different from that of the earlier incarnations (and the Lizard and Islands permutations were themselves a distinct departure from the original band); there were no members who had been part of any earlier permutation of Crimso; I believe I read somewhere on this site that when Fripp originally sounded Bruford out about starting a band in 1972, it was not initially projected as the "new" King Crimson. I remember Fripp being called to task in the press about opportunism in using the KC name with that band. Nothing fundamentally different from what happened in 1981, except the ’72 band didn’t play any shows under another name.
So, I guess my attitude is fundamentally the same as the last post I saw here: if it says "King Crimson" on the cover, then I guess it’s King Crimson.
What We Hear
:: Posted by simkin_eden on March 23, 2013
In a previous post I raised the thought of how individuals perceive music – what one person hears seems sublime when another hears the same it is cacophony. Why is this? The reasons we like one piece of music over another is more easily explained – where we were when we heard it, who we were with, what was happening and so on. But if I hear a song or tune that is immediately engaging why does someone else hear an irritating noise? Why raise this again? Well, here on this forum and in the UK at the moment there is a great deal of interest in David Bowie – his new CD, an exhibition at the V&A and much discussion on his importance in music over the last 40 odd years and even his influence of the perception of individuals sexuality. Yet, just on the music side, nearly all his works have passed me by (one or two tracks from the Low album which I can’t name and only took an interest in at the time of their original release because of the involvement of Brian Eno) and that’s it. He is to me one of the examples of that question of why do we all seem to hear things differently. Other genres that fit the unlistenable for me I can easily ignore, but when I see the posts here about Bowie I just cannot understand why these people who listen to KC and Fripp would bother. I don’t want to stop anyone listening to him, but I would like to know what is going on in my brain!
Gimme Back My Pain
:: Posted by davidly on March 23, 2013
I read something in these pages recently that gave me quite a start - not unlike that first intense feeling of dooom you get when you reach back and feel the presence of NO WALLET.
So I rush’d over to my record collection to find to my no un-great relief that Discipline, Beat, ToaPP, Vrooom-Thrak, HwWYHtbHw-TPtB were all, indeed, King Crimson albums; it said so right there on the covers.
Also, SaBB and Red. And Islands. And though it took me a while to figure it out, Lizard.
How odd that the only two studio titles with construkcted soley of prepositional phrases (doubled and genitively-locked at that) would be the ones that are not King Crimson. Wasn’t there something about these two that were supposed to have made the opposite true? - I thought to myself.
And, as if like clokcwork, just as I was getting ready to chuck those two records in the bin, it occurred to me that the only true King Crimson albums were the ones featuring music penned by the guy who came up with the name for the band, and it was at precisely this point that I had an eerie sensation that I had thought or felt, or even heard or read a dialogue about this very topic somewhere before (they should really come up with an expression for this feeling - perhaps Déjà Vrooom or something).
And now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why I came here to make a Guestbook entry. Oh, yeah:
I truly hope the Dear Sweet Awful Venal One gets relief from his ailing arm soon.
What's In A Name? A Lot
:: Posted by WaitingMan on March 23, 2013
Carnamagus...
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion regarding the Name vs the Spirit of King Crimson. However, given that you were not a member of the 69-74 lineups, nor any incarnation since, what makes you think your opinion is any more valid than that of Robert Fripp... who has been involved in every version of the band & whose decision it has been to bestow the Name on whichever group of players he sees as worthy of it
Robert Fripp has spoken many times about feeling the Spirit of King Crimson being present... or absent. In particular his often quoted belief that “When music appears which only King Crimson can play, then, sooner or later, King Crimson appears to play the music.”
Now, you can subscribe to his belief in the calling of a higher power or Muse... or not. What you certainly can’t do is deny his right to use the Name he has been associated with since 1969 to describe the project or music he believes it fits. The 80s band was origianlly called ’Discipline’ until robert felt the aforementioned presence. you have claimed in the past that the use of the King Crimson Name for that line-up was a purely commercial decision... Were you there? And would the name King Crimson have guaranteed more commercial success than Discipline... After all, the guys in Asia could have used any of their previous band names to draw on those legacies & pulling power, but they didn’t... & it certainly didn’t hurt their sales. Or Robert could have released the three 80s albums under his own name & not fared too differently, commercially speaking. Yet he chose to call it King Crimson for reasons best known to himself & the other 3 people in the room
Your view that the 81-84 King Crimson is substantially different to 69-74 is obviously correct... but no more so than 90125 is different to Close To The Edge, which is itself different to Time & A Word. Yet these albums are all credited to Yes, despite the different personnel involved. Meet The Beatles & Let It Be are both by the same musicians, despite the fact that the band was no longer a ’band’ by the time the latter was released... & ’Let It Be’ is, stylistically, a long way from ’I Wanna Hold Your Hand’
What you seem to be arguing is that an Artist, or a Band can’t evolve, or experiment... or progress. Which is a bit odd, given your apparent taste for ’Progressive Rock’
Belew is fundamental to Krimson
:: Posted by albemuth on March 22, 2013
For the long term (1980s to 2000s), I have not been a big fan of Belew’s song writing or lyric writing; but these have NEVER been a significant part of Krimson. In terms of songwriting, Stevie Wonder’s You Are the Sunshine of My Life, blows away everything Krimson has done.
But in terms of the Krimson sound, "that inevitable and remorseless forward motion which carries all before it," Belew made a huge and fundamental contribution. He made it possible to create what we tend to pass over lightly as "the interlocking guitar sound." But there are all kinds of ideas there, which were not available to the earlier Krimsons (and which were developed more by the 1990s Krimson, something I do not think people notice enough). Seeing the Belew-Fripp-Bruford-Levin band play right after Discipline came out, were some of the most exciting concerts I’ve ever been to.
Believe me, I was DOWN with 1970s Krimson. I was there, Baby Blue, all the way to the "last show" in Central Park. But the 1980s were terrific also, in a different and new way (at least for Discipline and Beat). Belew was maybe the only person in the world who had the chops and the sympatico to make the new breakthrough possible.
Re: Let The Debate Begin
:: Posted by Carnamagos on March 22, 2013
First, as with my prior remarks on this subject, I am not trying to start debate. I am not even trying to wangle a wry allusion or an arch put-down in the estimable Robert Fripp’s journal. I am just stating an opinion, albeit a strongly held one, akin to my equally strong feeling that Adrian Belew is to the spirit of the real Crimson what Kryptonite is to Superman.
A few old timers could just as easily claim the same about the original lineup. Some of the younger generation could do likewise with the 80’s.
Greg Lake would agree with the old-timers you mention, re. the continuation after 1969, though I wouldn’t. As an old-timer myself, where I also disagree with you is with respect to the time frame. 1981 may have been only seven years away from 1974 in chronological time, but it was light-years away in time as measured by the spirit. Just ask Can, ELP, or any number of bands from the 1970 or so era that no longer existed.
As for Crimson, to me, the relevant continuities and discontinuities are obvious. My view is simply that, in answer to the question "What’s in a name?", the answer is, "a lot".
Actually, RF had alluded to Steve Hackett. Somebody else will have to correct me - this may have been prior to the formation of the 21st Century Schizoid Band, but SH’s name was mentioned by RF as somebody to handle the guitar chores
Fascinating. Did "The Mechanical Bride" finally win over the crusty Frippster? Anyway, I’d be grateful to anyone who can provide a reference, as I’d like to read more about this, if it’s true.
As we all know, Wetton & Bruford managed to continue working together and located an inventive guitarist, by the name of Allan Holdsworth. Not being strangers to SH either, both of those gentlemen later guested on SH Genesis Revisted project.
Here, I am not sure of your point. Mine was simply that, in 1974, Hackett would have provided a spiritual continuity to Crimson as it was originally conceived, as opposed to later re-inventions that simply made use of the brand name.
At any rate, Wetton and Bruford as side-men to Hackett on a Genesis tribute CD is hardly what I had in mind in my original post, and also hardly gives us an idea of what a Hackett-fronted KC would have sounded like in 1974.
Oh, and as for Holdsworth’s alleged "inventiveness", I think that, like McLaughlin, he is actually a pretty one-dimensional player. Certainly neither can be mentioned in the same breath as Fripp or Hackett for creativity, variety, or originality. De gustibus....
We witnessed that UK sounded nothing like Crimson, despite containing 2 key members.
UK was dominated by the jazz-inflected musical tastes of the elephant in the room you aren’t mentioning, a fellow named Eddie "Don’t Call Me Edward" Jobson. (Of course, Bruford’s tastes were moving toward jazz, as well). Let’s also not forget that, prior to forming UK, Bruford and Wetton’s first choice was to re-form King Crimson, with--guess who?--Robert Fripp on guitar.
And so we come full circle. Just as well. as this has gotten far longer than I intended.
let the debate begin
:: Posted by Undisciplined on March 22, 2013
Rant Request Granted
:: Posted by Carnamagos wrote (with rebuttals) "The real King Crimson was a product of the times in which it originated. When Robert Fripp dissolved the band in 1974, the real King Crimson ended. A few old timers could just as easily claim the same about the original lineup. Some of the younger generation could do likewise with the 80’s. Then, there are those of us who just enjoy each for its own unique characteristics.
So, which guitarist would have fit in Fripp’s stead at that time? Answer: Steve Hackett (a guitarist who, interestingly, I have never seen Fripp even mention, let alone praise). Actually, RF had alluded to Steve Hackett. Somebody else will have to correct me - this may have been prior to the formation of the 21st Century Schizoid Band, but SH’s name was mentioned by RF as somebody to handle the guitar chores. (This, of course, was much more recently than 1974!) Indeed, Ian McDonald, John Wetton and Chester Thompson performed with SH in Japan during the late 90’s. This was brief, but part of the outcome from that series of events. Hackett had the chops, the style, and the sensibility, and he was already very dissatisfied with Genesis by late 1974. I think that Hackett would have been thrilled to join Crimson, and the only likely effect on Genesis would have been the acceleration of their devolution into a pop group by a couple of years. As we all know, Wetton & Bruford managed to continue working together and located an inventive guitarist, by the name of Allan Holdsworth. Not being strangers to SH either, both of those gentlemen later guested on SH Genesis Revisted project.
Alas, we’ll never know how this version of Crimson would have sounded, but at least, unlike the later outfits, it would have been worthy of the name. We witnessed that UK sounded nothing like Crimson, despite containing 2 key members.
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