King Crimson: Classic Or Dud

The Ubiquitous HIred Gun Session Veteran Shout-Out Thread ?

I feel like session dudes are different from dudes who show up in the touring lineup of Foreigner one year and are backing Ted Nugent the next and then join Whitesnake and then...and then...

You mean dudes like Bill Buford, who went from Yes to Crimson to Genesis? Or John Wetton, who went Crimson ->Roxy Music->UK->Asia? Or session cats like Jim Keltner, Simon Phillips and Pino Palladino who record with everyone while essentially playing full time in various bands? Or, like, GE Smith, who I last saw playing bass with Roger Waters?

that list would be freakin' huge. even if you just took the 80's Fripp/Belew/Levin/Bruford lineup. I think Tony Levin is 2 degrees of separation from just about everyone.

Belew gets Paul Simon (he's on Graceland!), Zappa, Talking Heads, Bowie, Nine Inch Nails ...

So I am finally getting around to chiming in on the tour- I went to see them on Sat 10/4 and immediately went on vacation afterward so the memory is not as crisp as last sunday(!)...but all in all this was a lot of fun, and hopefully set the stage for some further development of this group.

The setlist was as good as I could have hoped for- they didn't leave anything out that I would have truly wished to hear. Maybe ITCOCK, but that wouldn't really have fit.

Due to my seat I never even saw Fripp, not that it was a big deal but I couldn't get a read on him sonically either- aside from his leads, I never could really discern when he was soloing etc. He seemed like he cut a lot of solos short, most notably the Sailors Tale- that may have been just my expectations though.
Jakko was a remarkably able singer- I was surprised at how good his vocals sounded across a range of material. I was not completely convinced by Collins as a soloist- I thought he got a bit too much airtime vs his actual playing- he seemed like he sort of repeated a lot of ideas song-to-song. I did like the way he turned VROOOM into a chugga-chugga Peter Gunn theme sounding thing though.

Overall the ensemble stuff was the best- Level Five sounded great, as did Pictures of a City.

As for the 3 drummers they were the absolute highlight of the show. Maybe because you guys kept talking about Rieflin I paid extra attention to him- I didn't think he was as understated as everyone said. But overall, I thought the whole concept worked quite well, and the intensity of the percussion ratcheted up the tension nicely, and enhanced the display of overall power that the material at its best is designed for. Their combined playing on Red made the aforementioned and unfortunate soprano sax that much easier to ignore.

This was a memorable show and I hope they do more in the future, even if it's just touring occasionally. I'd definitely see them play again.

In that Fripp Wire interview above, he apparently holds a grudge because some Wire writer a few years back claimed "King Crimson were only ever a poor man's Black Sabbath, nothing more or less". Who the fuck would think that, save someone blatantly trying to troll Fripp?

The letters page in the Wire this month reveals that the writer in question was Ian Penman, and what he actually wrote was that KC were a "snob's Black Sabbath"

makes a little more sense. doesn't entirely make sense though.

doesn't make sense at all, unless all you care about KC is Fripp's guitar work.

Well, if he was trying to say Crimson was just a self-consciously "smarter" hard rock act, I suppose there are elements of that there. But there is a lot more to Crimson than the heavy stuff.

The really insulting thing about that description is the implication that snobs aren't allowed to like Black Sabbath. Nonsense. My love of Black Sabbath is every bit as snobbish as my love of King Crimson.

As for the actual nexus between King Crimson and Black Sabbath, that of course is the band Iron Claw.

hadn't heard of them, but wikipedia turned this up...

Wilson, the group's bass guitarist, decided to form a band after seeing a Led Zeppelin concert in 1969 and the band's name was eventually chosen by Wilson from a lyric from King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man".

which band?

Iron Claw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcGhHXLBa9g

My last 15 minutes have been a heavy psych workout

Lost interest in KC for the most part a while back but I'm glad everyone is seeing/talking about them. I haven't heard the 3 drummer line up yet but I did see the 2008 tour (or whenever it was) and it seems to me that Rieflin is the best possible grounding for the other two, he's a great, great musician. Larks Tongues and the Epitaph live boxset, the 4th disc in particular, were always my absolute favorites although the entire oeuvre is worthwhile in the final analysis.

Incidentally, the Jamie Muir and Derek Bailey Dart Drug album from 1981 was a seminal one for me about 12 years ago... completely free and liberating and colorful and, contradictorily, somehow totally musical whilest being absolutely not musical at all. Never did hear the MIC stuff, guess I should go track it down!

BTW I highly recommend the Elements Tour Box, even for those who are already familiar with all of this material; the alternate takes are really sequenced in a pretty amazing way. Sailor's Tale into Talking Drum into Lark's Tongue I into Fracture is some amazing stuff and it's all different from what you're familiar with.

I've been listening to it quite a bit and agree with the above. The sound quality is ace and there are some great moments throughout. The live no-vocals version of Neurotica is killer. It would have been a good addition to the tour had they deigned to play some 80s material. However, anyone buying it because it contains material from the current band should be forewarned that most of the snippets are about a minute in length. They do sound awesome though.

also has what kind of sound like canonical versions of Deception of the Thrush and Level 5 to me, plus a really cool and more itneresting version of Heaven and Earth.

Heaven and Earth was miles better than the rest of TCOL, and this version is better than the LP one.

Pretty short elapsed time from "if the tour was the end I'm fine with it" to "we're working on new KC material" via the KC fb page.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/11196079/Robert-Fripp-interview-Im-a-very-difficult-person-to-work-with.html

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10153322400567519&id=14038332518

Live album from the current tour has been released
http://shop.schizoidshop.com/king-crimson---live-at-the-orpheum-cddvd-a-p1429.aspx

seems to be a rather truncated setlist

yeah...well they did say it was a mini album. I allso thought it wasn't going to be out until january.

How stupid is that. It's not like they played 4 hours. Seems like a bait and switch to buy this taste when no doubt they are readying the whole show(s). Though of course Fripp is the king of making people buy the same thing 5 times.

I'm sure in short order every date will be available as a 'digital boxset'

Just surfaced, the only video footage of KC with Greg Lake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8t4lYNjS0Y

1st KC date in the UK announced – 11 September at the Lowry in Salford. More to come, presumably.

But this date in Las Vegas might be just as entertaining:

http://worldchampslive.com/ladychamps/register/robert-fripp-up-close/

I can think of no one better to learn public speaking from than a guy who didn't say a single word from the stage on his band's last tour.

the live ep is a nice souvenier. a bit bass heavy on the mix and I wish it was the whole show obviously but it captures the show pretty well.

EP? What's the running time?

41 minutes, but only 5 full tracks.

Yeah it's pretty odd, there's so much material to choose from, I would think a definitive document of those shows would have to be at least 2 hrs long.

This disc is "One More Red Nightmare" (never performed live!!), "ConstruKction of Light" (but just the instrumental part - sounds an awful lot like something off SaBB this way), "The Letters" (!), "Sailor's Tale" (!!), and "Starless" (!!!) It's pretty good really, my only complaint is that the "three drummer frontline" is not very audible. If I didn't know better I would think there was just one!

That's a bit disappointing about the mixing- but maybe you really need to see all three to track how each is playing.

I'm sure there will be a DVD or something, but I've never gotten much out of live videos (vs live records)

King Crimson live albums since 2000 or so tend not to have a lot of post-mixing, and I think this one is like that too. Very "official bootleg" kind of approach. I'm not sure a video would really add much to the experience. The drummer frontline was fun and all, but without Belew the band is seriously lacking in stage presence (Venal Leader hid off in the corner and was completely invisible to much of the audience for the whole of the show).

Me I'm kind of waiting for them to start selling unedited recordings of all the shows online (which they tend to do) and then just pick up the show I was at.

xp - I think the mixing is alright, it's just that the drum parts mayne don't really call for three separate players? I dunno, those who had seen the show could comment, you probably can hear all three just fine, it's just nothing like what I would expect out of such a lineup

Reiflin played a lot less than you'd expect and spent a lot of time covering the mellotron parts.

Fripp isn't diarizing anymore, but David Singleton is picking up a little bit of the slack. His most recent entry has this:

As a mastering engineer it is fascinating to read the various thoughts on the sound of the Orpheum - particularly as it shows how many people listen to music with their hifi’s already in strange settings. There is, of course, no right answer. Music can be delicate and music can hit you over the head. When compiling BBOOM, RF asked why bootlegs were often more exciting than proper releases. And the answer is absurd amounts of compression. Hence the brickwall limiting on that album, which deliberately mimicked a bootleg (and which conveniently cures some of the defects of the live mixing). The same approach has been used on most of the board recordings in the various 1970s boxed sets. The Orpheum takes the alternative approach. There is also the question of what, in a live context, is a "good mix" - Brian May used to say that the secret to an exciting live recording is that something should be too loud ie. that a well-mixed live show is not the same as a studio recording. Again, the Orpheum, rightly in my opinion, takes the alternative approach. Vive la difference.

thanks for that!

13 concerts announced: 9 UK, 2 Paris, 2 Utrecht

Meant to add link: http://www.dgmlive.com/news.htm?entry=5036

RF missed an opportunity to fuck with everybody and change the lineup again

he doesn't move that fast. It would take him another 15 years to make that decision.

too true. I doubt they'll so much as alter the setlist.

Never seen this. From the "Beat" tour, so there is a bunch of stuff they don't usually do live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64swVmq_XPk

Someone was just recommending that concert to me last week as a potential entry point to the Belew-era band. I really hate Belew, though.

10 Canadian shows in November: http://www.dgmlive.com/news.htm?entry=5138

Wonder if a second American tour is in the offing.