It’s March 1971 and down in the basement of the Fulham Palace Road Café, the new line-up of King Crimson is still hard at work tackling the back catalogue. With less than a month before unofficial unveiling of the band in Frankfurt’s Zoom Club, the team are tackling Pictures of a City.
OK, so it’s as rough as a badger’s behind in places, and although Fripp and Collins are relatively circumspect on this outing, we get to hear Ian Wallace in his role as agent provocateur cajoling the performance along via his natural exuberance and some top-notch drumming.
Written by Fripp, an early instrumental version of track had initially been entwined with an Ian McDonald piece, collectively known in October 1969 as Trees (available on KCCC1). By the time the original line-up began touring America in November 1969 it had been disentangled from McDonald’s writing, and completed with lyrics provided by Peter Sinfield.
It’s clear that Boz was still finding out what his nascent bass-playing fingers could do as his mouth got to grips with Peter’s words, and though both go awry at various times, both this and the versions the Boz-era band would play a month later in concert, have an expressiveness the 1969 bad never quite found.
This track is available for download as part of a bumper collection of Mr Stormy's Monday Selections - his first year of random romps through the murky, cavernous DGM archives, torch in hand, fedora upon his head.
