E’G/Warner Bros., 1982

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this album as a whole. Beat has the same hard/weird/beautiful combination that we’ve come to know and love from King Crimson, but it also leans heavily on the New York sound of its predecessor. I first had this on CD in about 1987 and I recall listening to a few tracks a lot and not knowing what to do with others. I didn’t have a lot of King Crimson context, but loved Heartbeat when it was on the radio when I was in high school. I at least had a little to go on with Neal and Jack and Me. Two Hands is beautiful, but the instrumentals kind of baffled me. It might be the weakest of the early 80s trilogy and (at least according to Wikipedia) was difficult to make. Belew and Fripp went head to head and Fripp was ready to call it a day on this version of the Crims, but they got it together and toured (and recorded another album).

Discipline pointed at a thematic fascination with the Beat generation writers (The Sheltering Sky), and this album continues with it. Opener, Neal and Jack and Me namechecks Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in its title. While the lyrics seem to have the point of view of the cars the titular characters drove in On The Road, they could also be spoken by Carolyn Cassady, lover of both whose memoir Heart Beat was published in 1976. A film version was released in 1980.

Which brings us to track two, Heartbeat, which seems to be a love song or a lost-love song. For me it was an evocation of intertwined love and lust and made me want to be landed with someone, which I mostly wasn’t in high school and college. While band members have suggested that this track and side 2’s Two Hands shouldn’t have been on the album, they’re both quite beautiful. They’re just not really King Crimson songs. (Belew would rerecord Heartbeat for his 1990 solo album Young Lions, though I don’t recall that version being wildly different.)

Sartori in Tangier, the album’s first instrumental takes its title from both Kerouac’s Satori in Paris and the city of Tangier where many of the Beats lived, including Paul Bowles, author of the novel The Sheltering Sky. For being only three and a half minutes, it still has the structure of a Crimson multi-part epic. Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick into leads into a strange combination of downtown funk and middle eastern rhythms. Stick Men (Levin and Pat Mastelotto’s project with Markus Reuter) have been performing a version of this recently that works quite well.

Oh, and here’s a really intense rendition which (based on the opening still) is from a Japanese date on the Beat tour. Seems that the string battle is just between Levin and Fripp, because Belew is on percussion.

NC_HB_Germany_1980Side one closes out with Waiting Man, another distinctive Belew vocal which like the title track of the follow-up album seems to have the vocals in one time signature against instrumentation in another. Bill Bruford’s drumming on this piece (as with a lot of the percussion in this period of KC history) seems to owe a bit to Steve Reich’s phase works such as 1971’s Drumming.

Side 2 opens with Neurotica which is an odd combination of spoken word in the style of Thela Hun Ginjeet and something much jazzier. I find the vocal portion, which describes or lists animals roaming the city (heat in the jungle indeed) to be less interesting than the music.

Two Hands wraps a fairly sparse arrangement around a lyric by Belew’s then wife Margaret. The strange point of view (I am a face in the painting on the wall / I pose and shudder and watch them from the foot of the bed) gives the song this weird voyeurism. From one perspective, an outsider of sorts recognizes love in the pair he (she?) sees. From another, the narrator of the song is watching people he doesn’t necessarily know make love. Again, an odd addition to the Crimson catalog.

The Howler poises a generally funky bassline against some rather interesting noise in the service of a relatively abstract lyric. The band doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with it and the song fades out. I imagine that a few live workouts would have made the song more interesting.

The album closes with Requiem, an improvisation in which the members of the band seem to be playing at cross purposes. This isn’t uncommon in KC improvs, but the fadeout at the end seems to indicate that this was going to be the last song of this version of the band. Fripp pulled it together and they gathered for another tour and album.

Next up: Three Of A Perfect Pair.