With its grandiose aggregate of clashing styles, whirling free-form improvisations, soaring classical themes and dramatic showcases and showdowns, Lizard, is even by today’s standards, a remarkable and extraordinary album.
Given the ambitious ground it attempted to cover, it’s perhaps no surprise that King Crimson’s third studio album still has the capacity to polarise opinion amongst enthusiasts, and even those who helped make the record in September and October 1970.
It was during this time that Fripp and Sinfield partnership began to drift apart. New recruits, Gordon Haskell and drummer Andy McCulloch also found the recording a stressful experience. These unsettling elements, coupled with technical problems encountered at Wessex Studios, made its recording something of a fraught affair.
Nevertheless, a complex tapestry of songs and audacious instrumental firepower was somehow marshalled and assembled together in an original and distinctive manner that separated Crimson from the crowd. And it wasn’t just the music that stood out either.
Gini Barris, then just 19 years old, was commissioned to provide the gatefold cover’s sumptuous and ornate illustrations. With visual references to the Lindisfarne Gospels and 15th Century French illuminated manuscripts, it took over three months to complete, mirroring the epic, painstaking qualities of the words and music.
By the time of its release in December, Haskell and McCulloch had quit leaving Fripp, Sinfield and Mel Collins to pick up the pieces. Not for the first time, Crimson had managed to snatch defeat of sorts from the jaws of victory.
If its predecessor adopted a holding patten, Lizard represents a radically different re-imagining of what King Crimson could be and saw Fripp as composer, finally emerging completely out from under the shadows cast by the original line-up.
Melody Maker’s Richard Williams praised Crimson for grasping “the concept that rock can be built on scale to rival classical music”, whilst the Evening Standard offered the somewhat back-handed but inadvertently accurate compliment “The abyss where modern jazz and rock meet.”
Fripp’s desire to traverse that abyss and his commitment to finding a freer rock and jazz vocabulary to could be measured by the increased involvement of Keith Tippett in Crimson recordings.
Having made no secret of his admiration of Tippett’s music, Fripp formally asked the pianist, along with his wife, Julie Tippetts (nee Driscoll) to not only join the band on a permanent basis but become an equal partner in determining musical direction.
"The terms would have been that I would have had musical input. He knew that I was a strong musical personality and I would have gone in and possibly taken it all in another way with his blessing because we would have been joint bandleaders," recalls Tippett. Though tempted the pianist declined. "I hadn’t long been in London and I’d left Bristol realising that I had to go to London to play with musicians who were more experienced than myself to learn quickly — apart from that I had too much love for the sextet and it would have taken me away from the jazz scene”.
Fripp harnessed two other members of Tippett’s sextet, cornet player, Mark Charig and trombonist Nick Evans, who recalls he and Charig spent two evenings in a booth at Wessex overdubbing on top of Haskell and McCulloch’s basic tracks.
“Our parts were added in small sections, maybe four or eight bars at a time and after each snippet was recorded it was checked carefully in the producer's box to make sure it was exactly what Bob Fripp wanted. It took quite a time to get all my sections down on tape.
During that period of my life I was working with jazz musicians who were very keen on accepting the first take of any recording. You know, ‘capture the moment and maintain its spontaneity as much as possible’. This is NOT the way pop bands operate and I found the stop-start method of working a little unnerving."
This methodology presented Steven Wilson with many challenges when it came to remixing the album in 2009.
“One track would have lead guitar one minute and then the next there would be a split second silence and then it would move to a saxophone, then a tympani part, then a lead vocal. Then their would maybe be a bounce of something they’d used or not used. I mean it was as though they were trying to make an album with 48 tracks but they only had 16. It was very ambitious.
In order to do the surround sound and the new stereo mix I had to listen to the original stereo mix and then listen to all the scraps and fragments of stuff on the tapes, and match them up to what we know. Six or seven instruments all blowing away and sometimes when its free-jazz it’s really hard to hear.
I had to figure out where all the little bits were being dropped in and out on the stereo mix and that’s the difficulty with these early tapes when they’re not catalogued properly.
Multiple takes like the Cor Anglais, trumpet solos - there’s no indication on the box which take was the master because they probably thought they were never going to have to mix them again and why do we need to write anything down for anybody in the future? Having spent months working on the thing they probably knew exactly what was going on but I had to figure it all out.”
Despite the difficulties he faced piecing the 5.1 and new stereo versions together, Wilson has no doubts as to the importance of the music he was working with.
“For me Lizard has always been an album that was too big for stereo to contain. I’ve always felt that if presented in the right way, I could make a case for this being the most experimental rock record ever made. It’s extraordinary what they’re doing on this album. In terms of fusing free-jazz with progressive rock for me there’s almost no parallel.”
Sid Smith, May 2009
Taken for the 40th anniversary edition
