Archives for category: rock and roll

In the Court of the Crimson King

January 20, 2018 //

Island Records/Atlantic Records 1969 Produced by King Crimson king-crimson-in-the-court-of-the-crimson-king-4-ab
The signal blast that opens this album’s opening track, 21st Century Schizoid Man, is the announcement that there may still be insanity in the Fripp camp, but it is not cheerful. The improvisational center of the song with its nearly uncontrolled horns lays it out, as do the sections in which the time signatures shift without seeming to hint at any plan before roping it all back in. Fripp and company (this time Michael Giles, Greg Lake, Ian MacDonald, and lyrics by Pete Sinfield) are engaging in what sounds like a proto-fusion jazz experiment.
And almost as soon as it starts, it’s over.
The new recording of I Talk to the Wind, more reliant on the flute than on the Judy Dyble / GGF version recorded the previous year, is more complex and more controlled. The interplay of the instruments hints at the band’s wider ambitions than the silliness found on Cheerful Insanity.
Following the proto-jazz metal of Schizoid Man, this song’s pastoral arrangement is unexpected, but it’s thematically of a piece with the opener. The alienation of Schizoid Man’s last verse ‘Blind man’s greed / Poets starving, children bleed / Nothing he’s got he really needs’ dovetails with ‘On the outside, looking inside, what do I see / Much confusion, disillusion, all around me’. Just because it’s sung clearly with pleasing music doesn’t mean it’s not the same character.
There’s an argument to be made that the opener is an id-driven, gut-level response to the times and to the madness of the world in general. It’s the only musically heavy track on the album and a strange thing to open an otherwise soft album with. But in the sense of the album, it’s perfect. The first listeners must have been struck by the contrast between Schizoid Man’s coda and the opening of I Talk to the Wind, but, again, the themes of the album are supported by its calm. The emotional response to the world’s insanity, when articulated to communicate woe, is lost on the world. ‘My words are all carried away…the wind cannot hear.’ The pun of having a wind instrument carry the song wouldn’t be worth the bother if the song didn’t hold together. (Question though: Can someone sing the lyrics to Pete Shelley’s Homosapien to the tune of this song? ‘Said the shy boy to the coy boy…’ This would amuse me greatly.)
Epitaph, which closes side 1, is the album’s fulcrum and thematic and musical heart. Our narrator looking at the world and seeing its fate ‘is in the hands of fools’ sounds eerily timely. Balancing the possibility of survival (‘If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh’) with an honest assessment of the possibility of destruction (‘Yes I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying’), we know from the title where the song things the scales will fall.
Side 2’s first track, Moonchild, opens with a folk song subtitled The Dream, which after a couple of minutes slips into several minutes of nothing much, for want of a a more articulate reaction. Subtitled ‘The Illusion’, this is the least interesting stretch of music, possibly in the entire KC canon. It’s almost a surprise to hear the opening notes of the album’s title track which follows. I find this a little sad, because the lyric portion of the song is so beautiful.
Finally, In the Court of the Crimson King. The album’s title track has a weird structure moves from folky to jazzy to full on progressive before we knew what that meant. The lyrics about fire witches and puppets might indicate that the schizoid man has finally gone from close to the edge to over it and possibly towards peace in his own head. Musically the band is still playing games with both rock and roll and free improvisational jazz, while taking what it needs from the folk and classical traditions that were the wellspring of the UK progressive sound. The Dance of the Puppets, which takes us through the last two minutes of the album presents a strange coda which only in the last moments pulls back into the song’s musical theme.

Next up: In the Wake of Poseidon.

Tags greg lake, King Crimson

Categories Music, Rock, rock and roll

The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp

January 7, 2018 //

So this month, I’ll be diving into the studio recordings of King Crimson. I’ve been a fan since the early 80s and have seen them perform four times. (I’ll see them again in July. Woot!) I considered reviewing the albums alphabetically rather than chronologically, but was dissuaded.

While Robert Fripp is the only constant in almost 50 years of KC, both Giles brothers appeared on either or both of the first two KC albums.

There are two ways to consider this album, neither of them very useful. One way is to look for aspects of it that point to what Michael Giles and Robert Fripp would do the following year with In the Court of the Crimson King. The fact is that very little of Cheerful Insanity resembles anything in the first few years of KC. The other way to look at is to consider where it falls in the music being made at the same time. This is more helpful, I suppose, because there are bits of the album that resemble early Moody Blues, early Pink Floyd, generic English folk rock and its proggy offspring (Genesis, Jethro Tull, Yes).

I first heard this album sometime in the mid-90s when I was collecting as best I could anything with Fripp’s name on it. I couldn’t hear anything in it (and still don’t) that resembles the weirdness of that late-70s/early 80s period when he’d been applying that arpeggiating guitar technique to everything he touched (including, for example, the stylings of the first and third Roches LPs. And much as I enjoyed that early prog, Cheerful Insanity just didn’t cut it.

Part of the issue I had was that a very young Fripp only wrote three of the songs. Little Children on side A suggests why Fripp left the lyrics to others after that. This song is notable for vocals provided by The Breakaways who famously backed Petula Clark and Cilla Black on several singles.

GGF Suite No. 1 and Erudite Eyes, which close side B have a more Frippish feel to them than the rest of the album. Suite No. 1, which clocks in at just under six minutes, starts with some Paganini-like runs that are joined by bass and keyboard, but after a minute and a half or so, the baroque gymnastics are replaced with a piano/strings/vocals arrangement that brings to mind the Chi-Lites’ Have You Seen Her. This segment is followed by a harpsichord-guitar duet which is followed by a reprise of the Paganini. A single track broken into three possibly unrelated forms, pulled together by a reprise of the theme? The application of jazz theory to folk motifs is one of the main threads of early progressive rock – it’s just weird to hear it applied so strangely.

Erudite Eyes is really the only song that points to the musical strangeness that was to come. It begins as a waltz, turns into a polka, returns to waltz-time and moves into improvised psychedelic strangeness before the second minute is up.

Lyrically, the whole affair is pretty strange. Newly-Weds suggests the discord of couples keeping up with the Joneses (He worries all day about wolves at his door…but on the other hand, she’s got a ring). One In A Million’s look at a man ‘content with the things at the moment, except the yellow line by the pavement’ echoes Revolver-era Beatles (Eleanor Rigby, Taxman).

The biggest issue I have with the whole album is the interspersed comedic numbers. Most of the songs on side A are bookend with episodes of The Saga of Rodney Toady, a ‘sad young man’ who girls run away from at school dances and whose parents are ‘fat and ugly’ and tell him that will ‘meet a fat and ugly girl just like Rodney’s mother and they would get married.’ These interludes don’t speak back to the music and actually detract from enjoying the album.

Side B’s songs are interspersed with repetitions of the sentence ‘I know a man and his name is George’ spoken in the correct order once and then in permutations (Know I George his name and a man, for example) and in increasingly annoying voices. One could argue that the rearrangements of the words reflect the possibilities inherent in the structured and random mutations of music that lie at the heart of King Crimson’s most intriguing work (for me, this includes tracks like Fracture, Level 5, and Starless).

After this album was released, Peter Giles left, and Ian MacDonald and Judy Dyble (late of Fairport Convention) joined and they made a collection of high quality home recordings released in 2001 as The Brondesbury Tapes. This collection is mainly notable for Dyble’s vocal on an early version of I Talk to the Wind. Soon after, Greg Lake joined and the Crimson King was born.

Tags King Crimson, Robert Fripp

Categories Folk, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Eno’s Warm Jets

August 16, 2017 //

Brian Eno – Here Come The Warm Jets – 2017 half-speed master reissue.

When I first purchased this album on CD in 2002 or so, I knew three of the songs. Driving Me Backwards and Baby’s On Fire appear on the Ayers/Cale/Eno/Nico live album (which I originally purchased for the Velvet Underground connection, not the Roxy/Soft Machine connections). Album opener Needles In The Camel’s Eye is used over the opening credits of Todd Haynes’ criminally underrated Velvet Goldmine.

And there’s a reason Haynes used it: That opening rush of instrumentation (which accompanies a rush of glam-rocking teenagers chasing a pop star) pulls the listener right in. The intrigue doesn’t let up through the album’s 42 minutes. Lyrically, it’s almost all (in the words of Blank Frank) incomprehensible proverbs, but musically it’s a gorgeous grab-bag of styles, the way the best glam albums were back in ’73. This new remastering does a wonderful job of separating the musical components so that you can hear the strange fuzzed out guitar on the title track as something separate from the drums, keyboards, and the vocals (which are still too indistinct to figure out).

Aside from those songs, I mostly knew Eno for a lot of non-pop work – ambient work like Tuesday Afternoon (and Music For Airports), production jobs (U2, Devo, Bowie), and his collaboration with David Byrne, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. And as I write that, I realise I knew bits of 801, Bauhaus’ cover of Third Uncle, and a good bit of the first Roxy Music album. I’m pretty sure I bought Roxy’s debut the same day I acquired Warm Jets and, for the same reason – a bunch of its songs are used in Velvet Goldmine as well.

I wish I could be more articulate, but there’s nothing about this album’s 10 tracks that isn’t insanely cool. Occasionally I find myself annoyed with albums on which each track is faded out, as if neither the musicians nor the producer knew where the song ended. HCTWJ is the opposite – every track knows what it’s doing – there are crossfades between songs – like how Some Of Them Are Old weaves right into the the title track at the end of the album. On Some Faraway Beach (the original opener of side two, here the opener of side three), a slow piano-based track which ends abruptly on a strange but clear keyboard run is followed by rocker Blank Frank, but the transition between them has always felt absolutely purposeful to me. Blank Frank is another revelation here in terms of the clarity of the instruments. Keyboards and drums and guitars all seem to be in competition, but they’re all winning. Oddly, this song does fade out, but over only five or six seconds. The martial drums that anchor the next track, Dead Finks Don’t Talk (apparently a kiss-off to Bryan Ferry) work their way through some very strange guitar work before surrendering to a blast of distorted synthesizer which concludes just where it needs to.

Two thumbs up. Go buy it.

(Eno’s other three mid-70s rock albums, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science have also been reissued on vinyl with the half-speed master treatment. I’m sure those are tasty too, but I don’t love those albums quite as much as I love this one.)

Tags Brian Eno, half-speed master, Velvet Goldmine

Categories 70s, Music, Rock, rock and roll

David Cross Band / David Jackson Cultuurpodium Boerderij 19 May 2017

May 22, 2017 //

David Cross and David Jackson

So I saw this gig announced a few months ago after I’d spent several weeks listening to almost the entire Van Der Graaf Generator catalogue. David Cross played violin on Starless and Bible Black and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic by King Crimson. Jackson played horns with VDGG for most of their run. So, yeah, two incredible musicians who had each been in the game for more than 45 years. It was a gig I didn’t want to miss. Especially given the recent resurgence of King Crimson, I was quite surprised that the gig was far from sold out. Fine, I’ll take middle front at this relatively small club. (When packed, Boerderij can hold an audience of 750 or so and my guess is there were about 300 there.) To open, Cross and Jackson came out alone and traded a little humour before taking on Starless Loops from the recent Cross/Robert Fripp album of improvisations on the Starless theme, Starless Starlight. After a few more pieces, they played another from Starless Starlight. There’s one ripple of chords from Starless that always gives me the shivers and did again when Cross played it Friday night. My friend Corniel, who joined me for the gig complained that it would have been better for him if they’d just played and not joked around so much. There’s some merit to that argument, as the joking detracted from their sheer expertise. Their duo work owed more to improvisational jazz than to the progressive rock they’re best known for. After a 30-minute set, they took a break before coming back with the full David Cross Band.

In the main set, the band played several numbers from the new (very good) album, The Sign of the Crow including Starfall, the title track, Rain Rain and The Pool. Current vocalist Jin Wilde has a very interesting voice (having come out of a dance music background, it seems) handles the new stuff quite well. His tenor is well suited to the music, generally. The band’s set includes (and if the 2008 live album I bought at the merch counter is anything to go by, has included for a long time) three King Crimson songs: Exiles (from Larks‘), Starless (from Red), and the encore 21st Century Schizoid Man (from In The Court of the Crimson King). The last of these featured Greg Lake on vocals, and the other two John Wetton. On these songs, Wilde doesn’t seem to take ownership. He seems to be trying to sing like Wetton, but his voice is too different. The band, however, quite made up for it. After Exiles, the band left the stage to drummer Craig Blundell who did an appropriately hair-raising solo. (Blundell has played with numerous folks including Steve Wilson.) The band returned playing George Martin’s Theme One (recorded in ’72 by Van Der Graaf Generator) before a slightly ragged Starless. Paul Clark and his Gibson Flying V are very very good and he doesn’t try to be Robert Fripp. After a quick moment back stage they closed with an appropriately wild Schizoid Man. I wasn’t expecting it and was well impressed. (Someone commented on Blundell’s facebook page that Crimson currently has three drummers and was impressed with how well he did his part solo.)

Overall a great evening with a couple of bona fide legends.

Tags David Cross, David Jackson, King Crimson, Sign of the Crow, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

AVDGAD – 15 – Do Not Disturb

February 23, 2017 //

And last year’s fine effort brings the Van Der Graaf Generator saga to a close. Clocking in at just under an hour, Do Not Disturb is a curious effort. They three remaining members only worked together on the music for about two weeks (according to the wikibox), but it sounds much like another well-oiled VDG machine.

vdgg-dnd (Oh No I Must Have Said) Yes seems to be a response to the various failings of the electorate in the past year, though the recording was complete before, for example, the Brexit referendum…

But let’s not talk about the old days
except to say the consequences run,
to be plain, what’s over isn’t done
and you thought you were only having fun.

As always, most of the songs seem to contain epics within them, slow movements calmly orchestrated still go measure to measure with slamming drums, weirdly overlaid vocals, and histrionic keyboards, but if they didn’t, we’d question whether we were listening to the right band.

It’s definitely good stuff, but not the gut-grabbing musical assault that we were once used to.

I realised there’s another live recording: Live at Maida Vale, recorded at the BBC in 2010 and released in 2012. It’s not on the band’s Wikipedia discography, but it’s up on Spotify. I’ll probably give that a listen next week.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll