An interesting Crimson gig this one. We’re deep down into the dark heart of a very long American tour and this is Crimson slogging it out rather than letting it flow. Not that this is a bad performance - far from it. However, they’ve been on the road for almost three months solid and it’s beginning to show. You can almost feel the tiredness taking the edge of things; irritable-sounding musical exchanges, missing cues, ignoring proffered suggestions, etc. There’s very much a sense that they’ve got their heads down and are just trying to get to the end of the gig in one piece.
Not that the good folks in Oklahoma are too worried by the sound of it. Were you lucky enough to have been in the crowd that night, then it’s very likely you’d have been pleased as punch to have been beaten into the ground like a tent-peg by the massive, monstrous roar of Wetton’s bass. John is very much up in the mix on this particular gig. Whilst this might be fine for aficionados of the demon fuzz, his vocals occasionally come across like an overloaded sand-blaster approaching the limits the manufacturers operating instructions.
There are plenty of superb moments to be found here though. David Cross’s overdriven keyboard vamping on Starless, Fripp’s solo shriek on Talking Drum, the rhapsodic mellotron flutes in the second improv. Oh, and a pretty devastating Fracture.
Buyer beware: The Great Deceiver is slightly truncated. Elsewhere bits of this soundboard recording were missing but the ever-resourceful Mister Stormy has cunningly stitched in a sections from a bootleg tape of another show. “The end of Talking Drum and the beginning of Larks II was missing, but for continuity purposes I took the missing section from their show at Fort Worth from the day before. Basically this amounts to about 32 seconds for TD and 1.46 for Larks.”
