There are few rock bands I’ve written about more than King Crimson (check it out here, here, here, and here — and there’s more if you need it: just Google “Sean Murphy + Prog Rock + King Crimson).
Peter Sinfield, the lyricist, ringleader, roadie, and all-purpose visionary of the first several iterations of Crimso, has passed on to that great concept album in the sky, and happy trails to him, for he left our world a much richer and more wonderfully weird place.
It’s my not so humble opinion that King Crimson officially established progressive rock in 1969, and a large component of this aesthetic is its socially conscious lyrics—courtesy of Peter Sinfield, and an outsider’s perspective that is neither disaffected nor nihilistic. It speaks from the underground, but is grounded in history and looks forward, not backward. For my money, his only rival as a writer during these years was Ian Anderson, and even Anderson could not quite capture the alienation, empathy, and profound sensitivity of the creative, fragile, kind, and intelligent soul like Sinfield. Without him, King Crimson’s miraculous debut would have been inconceivable, so attention must be paid, to his influence, his importance, and his legacy.
What is it about that album?
Virtually each note on In the Court of the Crimson King at once originates and defines the prog rock aesthetic. This was, in every possible sense, an entirely new sort of music: a collective of superlative craftsmen, united in the effort to create art so original, so unmotivated by commercial appeal, so honest, it couldn’t not be transformative. If the progressive movement would, for both understandable and perhaps inevitable reasons, become insular to the point of near-suffocation with its one-upmanship, navel-gazing and self-indulgent geekishness, no such criticism could be applied to both the material and attitude that inform this, in the immortal words of Pete Townshend “uncanny masterpiece.”
(You do not own a coffee mug like this unless you’re a special kind of fan)
Special props, from me, for the follow-up, In The Wake of Poseidon which, even for ardent fans, has always presented problems. For starters, it would simply be impossible to improve upon the perfection of the debut, so the second effort was invariably going to disappoint some listeners. The aforementioned structural similarities, although overblown, are difficult to overlook as well. On side one of each album, there is the frenetic, dark side of society opener followed by a gentle ballad and then an earnest (or lugubrious) statement at the end. Perhaps it’s personal preference, but I’ve always found “Pictures of a City” (which comes crashing out of the scarcely-audible tone poem “Peace—A Beginning”) more consistently awe-inspiring than “21st Century Schizoid Man”, and I consider “In The Wake of Poseidon” even better than the incredible “Epitaph” from the debut.
I wrote about this album at length here, and I will say it continues to occupy a cherished spot in my memory, heart, and mind. It was the lyrics to the title track that inspired me, as a freshman in college, to consider the ways poetry can contextualize history and contemporary concerns, be unapologetically intelligent, and thread the finest of lines between earnestness and pretension. This was the line Sinfield unwaveringly navigated in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and on this track, his topical castigation of priests, politicians, profit-seeking charlatans, and the incurious who refuse to heed history (sound familiar?) remains an indelible J’accuse for the 20th Century.
Heroes hands drain stones for blood
To whet the scaling knife
Magi blind with visions light
Net death in dread of life
Their children kneel in jesus till
They learn the price of nails,
Whilst all around our mother earth
Waits balanced on the scales…
A few other crucial contributions from PS, below.
A Salvador Dali painting put to music. “Cirkus” is a brooding masterpiece stuffed with dark and ominous imagery. The lyrics, courtesy of the ever-reliable Peter Sinfield, are astonishing and the music perfectly creates a mood suitable for the topic: spooky, intense, yet oddly beautiful (kind of like much of Crimson’s output). Possibly an allegory for the postmodern human condition, it works on a literal level as a harrowing assessment of what we do to animals for our entertainment (“Elephants forgot, force-fed on stale chalk ate the floors of their cages/Strongmen lost their hair, paybox collapsed and lions sharpened their teeth”). Heavy on the mellotron and what sounds like Mel Collins’s sax filtered through a Leslie speaker, and suitably gloomy vocals from Gordon Haskell, “Cirkus” is a definitive statement that the hippie dreams of the ’60s are over and done with.
“Formentera Lady” and the title track from KC’s fourth album Islands are for the more mellow and mature sensibility, and the full flowering of their possibilities are revealed after years of careful study. There are not many lyricists, before or since, he could or would even attempt to write words like this, balancing brainy and sensual like no one else; these are poems written for tone poems (eternal props to Robert Fripp), and they tend to stand outside time, even within the uniquely encompassing palette of Crimson’s soundscapes.
Ian McDonald’s playing and artistic flair were all over In the Court of the Crimson King and that prodigious talent is apparent throughout McDonald and Giles. By necessity, and perhaps to retain the control he coveted, the duo was content to soldier on mostly alone (there is support from brother Peter Giles on bass and a brief contribution, on organ, from Steve Winwood), but in addition to drums and vocals from Michael, Ian handles guitar, piano, organ, saxes, flute, clarinet and zither. To their lasting credit, the results are anything but minimalist; indeed, the same type of color and flair that brightened Crimson’s debut are in abundance throughout these proceedings. Lacking neither determination nor drive, McDonald and Giles made their stab at a near-obligatory side long statement. It’s an unqualified success, and the presence of friend and lyricist extraordinaire Peter Sinfield helps up the ante. While In the Wake of Poseidon is a stunning and almost entirely satisfactory follow-up to the debut, McDonald and Giles provides an opportunity to hear Crimson 2.0, or what the other half (McDonald, with Sinfield, being the alternate visionaries), given their druthers, could achieve.
“The Court of the Crimson King”” is, at times, the soundtrack to an Edgar Allan Poe story and a Hieronymus Bosch painting personified: it came out of the era and the minds in which it was imagined, a dark, sensitive and psychedelic space. This song was, possibly, the first time the mellotron was utilized with such extraordinary results. Before this—and after—it was primarily used for sonic color and texture; on this song it is, improbably, the lead sound around which the drums, guitar and bass circle. Greg Lake, who would sing splendidly for most of the next decade, never sounded as urgent or vulnerable, and none of the subsequent Crimson line-ups — magnificent as they all were in their way — could conjure up such an uncanny and indescribable vibe. This work is almost unapproachable but not aloof; it is entertaining and unnerving, but its capacity to delight and astound remains inexhaustible.
