The other day I asked who said this. "Jamie had more of an existentialist attitude. He saw his allegiance to the truth of the whole situation – not just the rock one. So that, on some nights, if he wasn't in a mood to play, he'd do virtually nothing for the entire ninety minutes.”
It was as Josh on the gb rightly suspected, Bill Bruford. The quote was lifted from an article written by the late great Ian MacDonald for the New Musical Express, 4th August 1973. It shows some interesting insights of the post-Muir line-up as seen from the remaining drum stool at the time.
Anyway, here’s the whole shooting match.
King Crimson: Latest Shade of Crimson
Some reports from America suggested that King Crimson's recent tour had bombed completely. Others maintained that everything had gone according to plot and that audience reactions had been excellent (or "excrement", as John Wetton might say if poked with a long pointed stick).
All this goes to show that you can't believe anything these days.
However, since I have here with me alert, healthy, and intelligent Mr. William Bruford, who is prepared to answer any questions, all conflicting opinions and personal prejudices can shortly be laid to rest.
How'd it go, Bill?
"Great. Wonderloaf. We cracked it. Did 'em in. Knocked 'em on the head. They surrendered." (The witness executes a brisk flam-para-diddle on the desk-top). "Linda Solomon was lying, I tell you."
So what happens next?
"Back to the States for another two months. Then another European tour, including dates in Britain, followed by the recording of album Number Two in January '74. Fast and furious."
This Crimson tour represents the fourth time Bruford's been to America as part of a rock-group on the make. In fact the only member of the band who's new to the States is violinist David Cross; the other three are getting to be old hands at the game.
Is there a danger of becoming too blase about conquering the world? – Of turning prematurely middle-aged?
"Well, on the purely practical side I'm beginning to get the hotel-and-aeroplane syndrome under my belt – which leaves me free to worry about more important things.
"As for the music, I feel anything but middle-aged. I feel very young. I feel that everything's yet to come. Frankly, I don't really expect to be playing anything to my personal satisfaction until I'm about thirty.
"I'm a great believer in the older generation in rock – people like Robert and Jamie. It takes time to grow, and the older you are the more you tend to know."
Although nearly three months gone, the influence of percussionist Jamie Muir on Bruford and on the band in general has still not worn off.
Muir had been growing increasingly unhappy with the extra-musical pressures that affect a group on the road and, although the others had explained to him that King Crimson were bound to tackle America sooner or later, he didn't fully realise the implications until they were, virtually on the eve of the tour, staring him in the face.
The experience would have been temperamentally abhorrent to Jamie, so on that score Bill thinks his decision to quit was to the good.
"Apart from that, I don't think the five-piece line-up would have gone down as well in America. It wasn't as tight and flexible as the four-piece is, and in no way as direct.
"However I must say that the six months when Jamie was with us were invaluable in terms of experience and broadening of outlooks – mine in particular.
"He caused me to review everything about my music and woke me up to many areas I only vaguely suspected existed."
The fascinating thing about this version of King Crimson was that it dramatised a central conflict in rock – one that, with the increasing sophistication of its terms and technology, is going to confuse the music more and more in the next few years.
It's the conflict between the professional and the (for want of a better word) existentialist solution to a given musical problem: on the one hand the attitude epitomised by the jazzman's code of "T.C.B." ("taking care of business"), on the other, expression of self and situation rather than of the cooperative manifestation of purely musical consequences.
Bill expresses it this way: "I've found that you can't account for the audience in literal terms. There's no real communication involved in that sense.
"I just play the best I can for whoever's paid to hear me. If they don't grab for it, I'm sorry – but I can do no more than my very best at a given moment. Given a point in an improvisation where I could see two clear choices – to work it out musically with the others or to make a really heavy human statement like knocking over my kit, pulling down a few speakers, and diving off the stage – I can only say that, for the moment, I'd have to choose the former.
"I'd like to be big enough as a person and as a musician to do the latter and make it real – but I couldn't handle that at this stage. That's a way of illustrating the capacity I sense in older players and which I know I can only grow towards.
"When Jamie was in the band, I felt as though I was on a tightrope. These days I – and, I think, the others – am back at doing what I know. I'm comfortable in a way I can't say I ever was in the five-piece. Onstage my field of awareness is centred on the small tom-tom; I'm conscious of what's going on in the band but the audience just isn't there.
"When Jamie was there my field of awareness was disrupted. I was watching him – we all were. He really dominated everything, both as a player and a person – and, I have to admit, I'd sometimes be playing what I hoped would please Jamie rather than what I'd normally have thought was appropriate.
"Jamie was no different from the rest of us in that he played invariably what he deemed his best. But his best was entirely different from ours.
"We, being rock musicians – a profession only a short step away from straight entertainment – always felt our best was involved with the best rock we could play.
"Jamie had more of an existentialist attitude. He saw his allegiance to the truth of the whole situation – not just the rock one. So that, on some nights, if he wasn't in a mood to play, he'd do virtually nothing for the entire ninety minutes.
"Now that we're back at being a straightforward rock group, it's possible to see what happened more clearly. The tightrope I mentioned seems to have been between our choice as musicians attempting to invest the notes we played with some human significance while always retaining the internal order of the music – and Jamie as a human being, first and foremost, trying to give expression to his preoccupation, in musical terms.
"In a way the solution to go our different ways was a cop-out – ours, not Jamie's – but I'm afraid it's absolutely necessary for us, for me at least, to stand back a bit and work things out in terms that we understand and which come naturally to us, before facing up to the problem that the five-piece presented us with.
"So that, to return finally to what I was saying before about needing to grow as a musician, to be able to walk that tightrope with perfect equanimity is perhaps the best expression of what I want to have in five years' time."
I've said this before (and I intend to say it again at greater length in the near future): that, in a time when rock, taking on new associations and encountering new responsibilities, is as confused for both musicians and audience (not to mention record-companies) as it ever will be, the only way to cut away the ideological undergrowth is by the application of objective intelligence.
King Crimson play good music and that's sufficient reason for me to recommend them to you. But, far more importantly, they play to explore, not to pass the time; they're encountering problems that have destroyed other bands and they're solving them by thinking them out.
