It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if a band’s first six albums bore you or annoy you by turn, and you’d sooner contract food poisoning than listen to them, you’re not going to turn on number seven and say, “Wow, these guys make a swell din!” In fact it’s a pretty good rule of thumb you’ll never turn on number seven at all. It’s called aversion therapy.
Yet such is the case with progressive rock stalwarts King Crimson and their 1974 LP Red. They’d been a thorn in my ear since their 1969 debut In the Court of the Crimson King, and I wasn’t alone—for every listener enthralled by the album (“a surreal work of force and originality” said a Rolling Stone reviewer at the time) there was another who heard it my way (Robert Christgau’s verdict: “ersatz shit.”)
My favorite take on the undeniably/unfortunately influential LP is worth quoting in full, if only because it always makes me laugh. Chuck Eddy: “A history of sixties rock: On March 6, 1959, a month and three days after The Day The Music Died, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller gathered up four violins and a cello and the Drifters and recorded “There Goes My Baby,” which begat Phil Spector, which begat Pet Sounds, which begat Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which begat Days of Future Passed, which begat this shit, which killed everything. But so what, it was already dead.”
After In the Court of the Crimson King the band proceeded to pile pretentious album upon pretentious album until what you had was a veritable Mt. Everest of pretentious albums with pretentious titles like In the Wake of Poseidon and Lark’s Tongue in Aspic upon which (on a clear day) you could actually LOOK DOWN on Emerson, Lake & Palmer. This was not a band anyone would think capable of rocking out, despite the fact that they’d served up a killer rock track (“20th Century Schizoid Man”) way back on their 1969 debut. Which proved they could do it, but obviously found it lowering. Their ambitions lay elsewhere. That’s the problem with art rock. You can take the rock out of the art rocker, and odds are he won’t even know it’s gone.
So Red. The art’s still baked in, and how, but King Crimson had whittled themselves down to a trio (Fripp on guitars, Mellotron and Hohner Pianet, John Wetton on bass and vocals, and Bill Bruford on drums and percussion) and maybe that made them think “power trio” and one of them (Fripp, had to be Fripp) said, “Maybe we should give this newfangled rock ’n’ roll thing everyone’s talking about a throw. On our own inevitably pompous terms, of course. And within bounds, naturally. Wouldn’t want to go overboard.”
Perhaps tensions within the group upped the album’s aggression levels as well. But fact is that when they went into the studio the needles in the mixing desk were “bouncing and crashing sharply into the red” and Wetton and Bruford had become a “flying brick wall” (Fripp’s term), and the resulting LP was heavier and more immediate than anyone who’d given up on King Crimson eons before had any right to expect.
That said (and I may as well express my doubts right up front) on most of Red’s tracks King Crimson still gives free reign to its classical and progressive rock pretensions, and it astounds me to read that in 2001 Q magazine listed it as one of its “50 Heaviest Albums of All Time.” Because let’s face it, if you were to cart this baby to the local scrap yard you might get two bucks, tops, for the metal contained within, whereas you’d get two hundred bucks easy for Cheech and Chong’s “Earache My Eye.” And the guy in the junk yard would ask you why in God’s name you’re selling.
When it comes to Red there seems to be a case of mass hypnosis at work, because only the title cut and “One More Red Nightmare” could possibly lead anyone with ears to label Red a metal album at all. It’s harder edged in other places, for sure, and it’s this metalwards turn that led my friends to push the album on me, saying things like “It’s not the King Crimson you’re afraid of at all!”
And it isn’t, except when it is. It’s better, except when it isn’t, and all too often it isn’t. Ultimately the trio were simply to wedded to their progressive rock roots and chamber rock proclivities to ever stray too far from them. The two “Reds” are altogether new creatures, and marvelous creatures at that. “Providence” and “Starless” are, for better or worse, King Crimson being King Crimson.
“Red” is the standard bearer—this is progressive rock, of a sort, but who cares when what you’re hearing is Fripp’s guitar, unchained, throwing itself against that flying brick wall. It sounds like an exercise, which I suppose makes it math rock or something, but that guitar is brutal, mechanistic, and there are no vocals to distract from what’s going on. The song is melodic in places, soaring even, but what makes it so brilliant is the time Fripp spends in the trenches, making antagonistic noises with his axe and spilling red, red blood. Not even the brief, proggy interlude (hey, they have to at least TRY to ruin the song right?) can do more than call a short halt to the hostilities.
“Fallen Angel” has all the hallmarks of yet another King Crimson disaster—pathos-laden vocals by Wetton, a quiet opening passage featuring an arpeggio on acoustic guitar that gets my hackles up, and other such harbingers of doom. But then in comes Fripp on electric guitar sounding mean, hell even the cornet and oboe (no way could these guys have ever recorded an album without plumping up their sound) have bad attitudes, and as Wetton sings the title over and over Fripp sends out an insistent, repeated SOS on guitar to the accompaniment of horns. It’s badass.
Sure, the passage that follows is a bit too English grandiose for my liking (what does this “England’s green and pleasant land” shit have to do with a knifing death in NYC, I ask thee) and Wetton’s plummy BBC radio announcer’s voice does get on one’s nerves doesn’t it? But then guitar, cornet, and oboe go mad, the rhythm section sounds like its smashing up someone’s knick-knack shelf and while this take-out can’t quite save “Fallen Angel” it comes close.
“One More Red Nightmare” is about a guy who thinks he’s about to die in a plane crash only to wake up on a bus, which could be the funniest thing these guys ever put down on vinyl, though that’s not saying much. But if I have a complaint (and I always have a complaint when it comes to these guys) Wetton’s voice is all wrong for the song—he’s no more suited to sing rock ’n’ roll than Winston Churchill. What makes the song, which has a suitably ominous feel and (could it be?) even a touch of funk, are the cool stop-start, the ugly beauty of Fripp’s guitar sound, and Wetton’s drum bash and destructo percussion.
What’s more, King Crimson do what I would have thought impossible—make their proggish inclination to make sharp right and left turns every eighteen seconds or so work for them, rather than against them. They enthrall rather than annoy. This one’s far more menacing, danceable (and, during the long sax passage, gorgeous) than any progressive rock song has a right to be, and it’s as close as the Crimson Kings ever got to “fuck art, let’s party.”
Unfortunately, they make amends to the arts department (in spades) on “Providence,” an edited version of a live improvision recorded at June’s end1974 in delightful Providence, Rhode Island. Its classical avant garde opening goes on and on, and I can’t listen to it without seeing fauns dancing and water sprites doing whatever it is water sprites do. Soon to be ex-member David Cross (he would be given the pink slip before recording of Red began) does most of the heavy lifting on violin and Mellotron, and if it’s one of the 50 best metal albums you came to hear you will regret not having bought a used copy of the Osmonds’ Crazy Horses instead—it actually rocks.
Shards of metal come in here and there—Fripp’s guitar, some frenetic drumming, etc., but it’s not until around the five-minute mark that the band begins to produce a sound that could be described as metallic. Wetton’s up top, Fripp turns crazy circles, the drumming gets louder and louder until the seven-minute mark or so, when you’re finally treated to something that approximates a freak-out. But it only goes on for about a minute, not nearly long enough to make you forget you’ve just been buggered by arty types.
Wetton’s very un-metal vocals are back on “Starless,” a song with a long history that is too dull to go into. The intro’s pretty, Pink Floyd kind of stuff, then in comes Wetton, doing his show-stopping impression of Lord Hee-Haw. Wetton has a progressive rock voice, by which I mean he’s ideally suited to narrate staid historical documentaries but would spontaneously combust if asked to sing Chuck Berry. And it’s all kind of jazzy thanks to the saxophone, but when I say jazz I mean easy listening jazz, toothless and bible black.
Finally at around the 4:30 mark Wetton shuts up and the trio transitions to 13/8 time or something insane like that, although I have to admit that Fripp’s adamantine refusal to vary from some two-note figure is fabulously, wonderfully annoying. Very Neil Young triumphant of him. Meanwhile, Wetton rambles around on bass, Bruford runs around the room hitting this and shaking that, and this may not be heavy metal but it’s promisingly, wonderfully nervous breakdown-inducing, and it’s truly great when the three of them briefly turn up the heat and cook.
Then they return to their European roots for an instant, and if their “busy-ness” didn’t stink so of progressive rock in general or remind me of Frank Zappa in particular I might dig it. But so much is happening so fast it reminds me of what makes “Earache My Eye” worth two hundred bucks at the scrapyard in the first place—primal simplicity. There are two kinds of people—people who keep things simple, and people who couldn’t keep things simple if you put a gun to their head. King Crimson are fortunate no one has ever put a gun to their head.
If Red is some kind of metal monument, my name is Edgar Winter and I’m black. But at its best it’s grating, fierce, and ferocious, and the twin triumphs “Red” and “One More Red Nightmare” make the album a must listen. The only pity is Fripp, Wetton and Bruford could no more stay in the red than Adolf Hitler could stay out of Poland.
As it is, you walk away with two great songs and a collection of parts of songs—in short, the old progressive rock curse. But it will have to do. You say King Crimson, I hear Red—because against all odds it rocks, and because the alternatives make me see red.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
