Label: Discipline Global Mobile
Release date: October 10, 1969
Production: Robert Fripp & Peter Sinfield
Album length: 43.54 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 10 / 10
“In the Court of the Crimson King”, King Crimson’s debut, is now recognized as the record that defined everything we file under progressive rock today, and it’s without a doubt one of the best and most important rock albums of all time. Quite a few years have passed since this legendary album came out, laying the groundwork for prog rock, heavy metal and jazz fusion rock too, and marking the birth of one of the greatest bands in prog history, yet it still sounds fresh. So it’s an honor to present to you the very cornerstone of the genre.
The birth of King Crimson, then, meant the birth of the genre we now call progressive rock, or art rock if you like, as some music critics labeled it back then.
It was way back in 1969, and big changes were happening in rock music. Audiences were fed up with the naive simplicity of rock and roll and blues. Total musical freedom, reflected back then in considerable independence and not an ounce of pressure on bands from the labels, and on the other side musicians who, on top of being one hundred percent professional, wrote music with heart and soul and created works of gigantic proportions.
Progressive rock was still a fresh musical direction at the time, unwittingly founded by bands like, first and foremost, The Beatles with their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1966) album, and a little later The Nice (The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack, 1967), Pink Floyd (The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, 1967), Procol Harum (Procol Harum, 1967) and The Moody Blues (Days Of Future Passed, 1967). All these now-legendary bands had already started showing signs of a new great era of outstanding experimentation in rock music, back then with a strong emphasis on the psychedelia typical of the late 60s. And then, out of nowhere, another completely new English rock band flashed onto the horizon and, with its first record, started a real musical revolution: King Crimson.
The original King Crimson lineup was one of a kind, made up of professional musicians whose styles were largely rooted in jazz and classical music. That goes especially for Robert Fripp, guitar master and musical genius, who allowed no frames or limits within his music and stubbornly ignored outside influences. By founding this band, which at this stage still ran without his dominance, with all members taking an equal part in writing the music, he discovered and crossed all the boundaries of the known in rock, jazz and classical, pulling the best elements out of each. Fripp has always been a guitar genius who gets bored extremely quickly with anything repetitive in music, be it a riff or a chorus. Today he’s the only original member of the band and, among those in the know, one of the most respected musicians in rock, his jazzy guitar style notwithstanding. Listen to his solo on “21 Century Schizoid Man”, which launched him among the most esteemed guitarists in the world, and you’ll instantly get why his guitar became the band’s central element.
The band also featured the legendary Greg Lake, who came over from The Gods and handled bass on top of vocals. His bass playing (Lake was a guitarist before joining) may not have been exactly breathtaking, especially compared to his technically far more skilled successors on the instrument (Wetton, Levin, Gunn, for example), but his clean, sincere and melodic voice is why, in my opinion, he was the best singer in the band’s history. Lake could play guitar too, but with Fripp around he didn’t get much of a chance to prove it. He got a few more chances later, when he became much better known as a member of the equally inimitable ELP and, for a short while, the even more popular Asia. But in my opinion, even then he never again matched the incredible energy and magic his singing radiates on this record. His best moment on the album is captured on “Epitaph”.
The real star of this lineup was undoubtedly the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who, on top of playing sax, flute, the then-revolutionary mellotron, keyboards and guitar, wrote every single song and took care of the outstanding orchestral arrangements that gave the album its truly transcendental quality, its light and warmth. After he left, King Crimson never again caught the perfect mysticism his work radiates on this album. He later recorded “McDonald & Giles” (1970) with Michael Giles and then, in the mid-seventies, became a founding member of the commercially hugely successful Foreigner. Today he’s returned to the King Crimson legacy and currently leads 21 Century Schizoid Band.
Michael Giles, surely one of the best drummers of his day, and one Stewart Copeland (The Police) once called his main role model, gives the songs a hellish rhythm. By weaving jazz elements into his drumming (Giles was a classic jazz drummer, which for a long time was one of the golden rules for every drummer in this band) and with brilliant work on the cymbals, he brought yet another stylistic leap in drumming technique. As the oldest member of the band, he also gave them a musical maturity that most musicians lack at the start of their journey. Fripp and Giles had already worked together in the band’s “birth” outfit, Giles, Giles & Fripp. In 1968 they released their only record, “The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles & Fripp”, a psychedelic masterpiece spiced with outstanding Monty Python-style humor, and at the same time a complete commercial flop.
Peter Sinfield, the band’s fifth member, wrote the lyrics on the group’s first albums and also looked after stage lighting and the musical equipment. He’s undoubtedly the one who breathed soul into the band and gave it its look. The guy wasn’t just a musical genius and visionary. He was also totally disconnected from this world and obsessed with neo-romantic philosophy and Celtic mythology. His romantic, fantastical, mystical and pseudo-apocalyptic lyrics, which in spirit come closest to close encounters with J.R.R. Tolkien, Shakespeare, William Blake, E.A. Poe and S.T. Coleridge, were an indispensable part of the band’s early period. He’s also the one who came up with their name. Sinfield’s masterpiece on this album is undoubtedly the lyrics for the title track.
But back to the record: the sheer complexity of the music is remarkable, offering a perfect fusion of the best musical elements from rock and jazz to classical. For its time, the record has decent sound, but with the recent remaster released on the band’s current label, it got even better, fresher and almost identical to the original recording (the long improvisation on Moonchild, for instance, is now clearly audible).
Stylistically, they were light-years ahead of other related bands back then. Even their later, commercially much more successful peers, Yes and Gensis, needed quite some time to find the right creative harmony and establish themselves. In any case, there was no other band at the time that combined so many different musical elements so perfectly, stretching all the way from hard rock and jazz to classical. Someone once said that if Wagner were still alive, he’d collaborate with King Crimson. The lyrics were at least as complex as the music itself, mainly thanks to the then far too overlooked, but now highly esteemed lyricist and roadie Peter Sinfield, who was the invisible yet always equal member of the band on stage.
Another new instrument took care of the revolution: the mellotron, which became the band’s trademark and which they especially loved using in their many romantic epics and ballads.
If you want a short but total escape from the shackles of a thoroughly spiritually devalued, modern neo-materialist world, one that keeps trying to keep you from grasping the basic truth about life while feeding on your life force and creative energy, you’ll fall in love with this album from the very first listen.
The opening track is already a real bomb, still hugely punchy and nihilistic today: “21 Century Shizoid Man”. It immediately serves up a whole palette of completely new musical dimensions and, in the structure of its guitar riffs, comes closest to the embryonic heavy metal that Black Sabbath started developing to the last detail not long after. But at its core the song is a fusion of rock and jazz. After a half-minute of hissing at the start, like something coming out of a toilet bowl (night sounds?), the white-hot main riff suddenly explodes, one no self-respecting metal band would be ashamed of. In the same breath comes Lake’s traumatized, digitized vocal, deliberately sung through an effect to create even more the atmosphere of a horrifyingly disfigured, spiritually devalued and schizophrenic 21st-century man, prisoner of his own mental matrix. Listen to the line “nothing he has got he realy needs”, which means he’s saturated with all sorts of corporate junk while on the other side being completely robbed of what he needs most (love, basic human relationships and spirituality). A decadent, schizophrenic, devalued world echoing with the neurotic screaming of a post-apocalyptic man is the best description of this song’s visualization, and it fits the album cover perfectly. Fripp steps in with his complex solo, joined almost at once by McDonald’s sax, and together they build the song up to a complex middle section, where Mike Giles in particular shows some of his best moments on the record. This central part, called “Mirrors”, is the most complex and shows Fripp in his best light. This song never fails to surprise me with its advanced visions of the future, which later became a kind of trademark of the band. The track is still the fans’ favorite today, and it’s a real shame that Fripp has pretty much forgotten about it at concerts these days. It’s still undoubtedly the trademark of the phenomenon called King Crimson.
An instant jump from a cold, rationalist, apocalyptic world into light and the world of fantasy. The romantic ballad “I Talk To The Wind” is a gorgeous track that offers a stunning contrast to its predecessor and carries me off to sound sleep, or rather dreamland, faster than anything. The flute motifs, psychedelic in places, only add to the song’s magic and mysticism. It most reminds me of a midnight gathering of Celts at Stonehenge or an elven procession from Tolkien’s stories. McDonald’s flute is especially responsible for this vibe, creating that indescribable experience in the most beautiful way possible. Lake’s esoteric vocal radiates incredible warmth too, fitting the structure of this wonderful ballad. The song is at once an outstanding document of its time and proof of how beautiful the ballads this band is capable of creating can be. The gentle sounds of flute and mellotron keep making sure Fripp’s guitar doesn’t sound too dark in the transitions. Both instruments work like a light against the heavy guitar riffs, bringing indescribable beauty into their music. The song itself is one of the most beautiful ballads I’ve ever heard and, for me, the best ballad in the band’s history.
The psychedelic, pseudo-apocalyptic and epic prophecy “Epitaph” is the central track of the album and also the peak of the record. Lake’s superbly delivered melancholic vocal, reflecting a resignation over the doings of modern man, who is shoving himself toward destruction, is without a doubt the standout element of this song. You notice it especially in the “March For No Reason” part, which gives me goosebumps every single time. With his dramatic and at times mysterious vocal, Lake proves once again that even back then he was one of the most refined singers of his time. “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” is the main chorus, repeated several times, which makes the song melodic enough even for less demanding listeners.
Another gorgeous mystical ballad follows. With its long improvisation in the second half of the song, “Moonchild” already hinted stylistically at where the band would head in the coming years, and it’s also the only track on the album that caused considerable bafflement among critics at the time. The last eight minutes are a full-on transcendental studio switch-off (a long improvisation) with McDonald’s mellotron and Giles’s drums and percussion up front, which, by their own account, they left in on purpose (didn’t cut it) to show all the labels and critics what creative freedom is.
The song is split into three parts. The opening melodic section is yet another gorgeous romantic ballad with a heartfelt Lake vocal, bringing the warmth back after the dramatic “Epitaph”. In time it tips over into the instrumental “The Dream” and finally into the esoteric, slightly oriental “The Illusion”. Those eight minutes can be given over to a longer improvisation because the musicians each devoted themselves to their own instrument, especially the then-fresh mellotron, the guitar and the drums. After the varied sounds, the atmosphere calms down again, especially toward the end, when the final, oriental part of the song called “The Illusion” arrives, dominated by the mellotron. Sensitive souls can easily be carried off on a long spiritual journey by this song, while those who stand firmly with both feet on the ground will dig into the structure of the individual parts in vain, because every bit of rationalism fails here. Anyone who is bothered by longer instrumental improvisations, or doesn’t get them, can’t expect to ever like this song as a whole.
The closing retro-romantic medieval epic “Court of the Crimson King” opens with the pompous intro “Return of the Fire Witch”. It was the first song of theirs I ever heard, so it still has a special place in my heart. It’s yet another anthem of theirs and proof of the incredible energy this band radiated back then.
Today the song is an immortal classic where McDonald’s flute reaches its full expression and whisks you in an instant into a world of fairy tales, straight into the courtyard of the crimson king, who is eternally entertained by troubadours, fairies, witches and other jesters and performers. At court, after all, everything revolves around him.
The melodic main motif repeats several times, while the lyrical message is different each time. With flute sounds that really recall the whistling of some shy forest elf, the band comes back once more with “Dance Of The Puppets”, where the main melodic chorus repeats a few more times until it wraps up, in a romantic way, a record that radiates a concept the whole time even though there officially wasn’t one (another trait of the band’s early period). The song was also released as their first single and, alongside “the schizoid man of our century”, it’s their best-known work even among laypeople.
The screaming cover of “the schizoid man of our century” and his antipode, “the crimson king”, on the other side of the sleeve is one of the best covers I’ve ever seen, and it perfectly combines musical and visual art with the band’s advanced visions, which consequently led to the establishment of a new musical genre called art rock.
“In The Court Of The Crimson King” is, then, a legendary and today cult record for all prog rock fans, and precisely the one that laid the foundations of the genre. After it, King Crimson ventured into musical territories that still seem completely incomprehensible to many, but this is the only record of theirs that almost any classic rock fan, and jazz fusion fan too, can listen to with a clear conscience, since it’s surely their most melodic album. It’s also the best possible starting point for anyone just getting to know their music.
The legendary and romantic lineup of Fripp, Lake, McDonald, Giles and Sinfield radiated incredible creative energy and perfect musical harmony, and was truly the only lineup in the band’s history that had a shot at making the band commercially successful after its first record. Sadly, this lineup was over by the end of that same year, after Giles and McDonald went their own way. Who knows what the band’s future would have looked like had it stayed together, because long after their departure King Crimson failed to establish a stable lineup, despite the many impressive musical names who passed through the group over the years. Even though every subsequent record was a distinctive chapter of its own, their later records never quite managed to catch this initial magic.
With a combination of mysticism (“I Talk To The Wind”, “Moonchild”, the title track) and a touch of the then-current peace-loving “flower power” (“21 Century Schizoid Man” and “Epitaph”), King Crimson united modern man’s eternal longing for freedom, love and self-fulfillment. That, along with the technical professionalism of the individual members, was the winning combination that captured the hearts of an always picky audience, since there was something in it for every music connoisseur. Which is just one more proof that King Crimson were (and still are) a band that offers the most in its music, while not clinging to any musical patterns or trends and always following only its own progress. In their music, parallel worlds come alive, along with all of the musical and artistic philosophy of the 20th century. This legendary album is a living witness to what creative freedom once was, and an eternal monument to its beauty.
author: Peter Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. 21st Century Schizoid Man (including Mirrors) (7:20)
2. I Talk to the Wind (6:05)
3. Epitaph (8:47)
a) March for No Reason
b) Tomorrow and Tomorrow
4. Moonchild (12:11)
a) The Dream
b) The Illusion
5. The Court of the Crimson King (9:22), including
a) The return of the fire witch
b) The dance of the puppets
Lineup:
Greg Lake – vocals and bass guitar
Robert Fripp – guitar
Ian McDonald – reeds, woodwinds, vibes, keyboards, mellotron, backing vocals
Michael Giles – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Peter Sinfield – lyrics and lighting
