Freestyle is what it sounds like, a departure from the rigid structure of our Monday through Friday bike banter, a chance to explore other topics, other formats, and other ways of amusing you.
I’m fascinated by acts that break rules. I’m not talking human-trafficking or drug-cartel rule breaking, though; I’m talking artistic conventions, like how the typical pop song goes verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Or how most visual art depicts real-world elements, rendered in two dimensions. An artist’s tendency to adhere to rules is illustrated by Pete Townshend’s response to his producer who told him The Who needed to fill 9 minutes to finish their next album and why didn’t he just do them all a favor and write one 9-minute song? Townshend said, “Rock songs are two minutes, 50.” Not three minutes. Not 2:45. When he finally wrapped his head around the possibility of writing one 9-minute-long song by stringing together multiple short songs, he wrote his first ground-breaking work, “A Quick One.”
I’ve never been very good at following rules, for reasons that only recently came more into focus. Breaking rules wasn’t a deliberate strategy; I wasn’t rebellious; I just wasn’t good at following the rules. As a result, I went looking for stuff that colored outside the lines in ways that others found acceptable.
I mention this because some years back I began making a mental inventory of all the songs that featured unusual construction: Peter Gabriel opened his album Security with the song “Rhythm of the Heat,” which is built on one chord. Nearly all of the songs on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love are structurally unconventional, with verses that vary in length or lack an obvious chorus. Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel” is built on a single rhythmic and melodic pattern that repeats for the whole song.
Not all simple constructions work, though. By the time Coldplay’s “Clocks” is half over I want to pour Elmer’s Glue in my ears because I’m so tired of hearing that piano riff.
King Crimson’s album 1981 album Discipline broke more rules than any other record I can think of. The opening song, “Elephant Talk,” features verses that seem spoken at first listen, but upon a deeper consideration reveal themselves to contain an understated melodic and rhythmic sense. “Thela Hun Ginjeet” is built around a stream-of-consciousness story told about a near mugging.
One song from that album stands out as the most surprising, the song that broke more rules than the others, was “Indiscipline.” I recall from conversations with friends many years ago that “Indiscipline” ranked as their favorite song from the 1980’s King Crimson. It was the desert island song. It’s mysterious, shocking and builds suspense like few compositions in musical history.
Composed of guitarist Robert Fripp (the one constant in each iteration of King Crimson), drummer Bill Bruford (who had been part of the last formation of King Crimson), guitarist and singer Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin, this was the first version of King Crimson to include any Americans—Belew and Levin. It did something to the band; the new Crimson so self-serious, but they were no less artful. If anything, the Fripp/Bruford/Belew/Levin ensemble was the bravest version of King Crimson there ever was, and that’s saying something.
“Indiscipline” is the song I look to when I want to consider music that takes the standard pop song construction of verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus and says, “Whatever, dude.”
The song opens with Tony Levin playing a two-bar repeating pattern in 12/8 (an ostinato for the theory nerds—*glances in mirror*) on the Chapman Stick, which is essentially a bass and a guitar all in a single instrument. It’s a texture that doesn’t seem like either a guitar or a keyboard. And then Bill Bruford enters with a drum solo. Not a fill, or even an extended fill, but a full-on drum solo.
I’d like to take a moment to note that of the many songs in rock music that open with drums, “Indiscipline” is the only song where the drums begin with a drum solo. Bruford’s first licks are light, so piano that they can be lost behind Levin’s playing if the volume is low. And then he bursts forth as if unchained. The playing is startling, charged, and builds tension so that when the entire band enters the sound is as much a relief as an attack.
Part of what makes the song so unusual is that the lyrics are delivered—spoken—when the song returns to the ostinato (with Levin backed by Belew and Fripp). I’m going to call those sections the verses, and there are two of them. But if they are the verses, there is no traditional chorus, no “hook” as such. And the instrumental sections, of which there are three, positioned between the drum solo and the first verse, between the first and second verses, and then after the second verse to the closing of the song, feature guitar solos by Belew, Fripp and then another by Belew, making it, possibly, the only existing rock song with not one, not two, but three guitar solos.
How is it Pink Floyd never recorded a song with three guitar solos?
The dynamic swings from the restrained verses to the sonic onslaught of the instrumental sections ratchet up the pressure; the impending detonation hovers just offstage.
In the lyrics, Belew talks (he’s not singing per se) about making something; it’s a study of the creative process. He took the lyrics from a letter his wife wrote him about a painting she was working on as they were recording the album, but Belew imbues her creative endeavor with mystery; he never actually says what the creation is. That his wife was working on a painting was revealed later in a magazine interview.
Robert Fripp, possibly the most idiosyncratic creative in all of rock music—not a crown that’s easy to claim, by any means—saddled this formation of King Crimson with a number of rules. Fripp didn’t like cymbals; he derided them, in general, as ‘taking up all the frequencies that guitars use.’ So he banned hi-hat cymbals from Bill Bruford’s drum set (that took chutzpah), though he allowed Bruford to keep his ride and crash cymbals. Bruford’s response was to play some cymbal parts on a very high-pitched (6-in. diameter) drum. I swear, I can’t think of another guitarist in history who told his drummer what instruments he could or couldn’t play.
A rule of greater consequence was how the four players couldn’t phrase things together, so a moment like the big crescendo in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” of “Let me go! We will not let you go!” is just the sort of synchronous climax that Fripp forbade the band to compose. He wanted what he called, “an almighty clattering sound.”
As a result, the pounding pulse of “Indiscipline” thrums in a chaotic count of four that feels like it won’t ever reach resolution, and this is due, in part, to the fact that while Tony Levin’s right hand (the bass part on the Chapman Stick) plays in 12/8, his left hand (forming chords) deviates in 15/8. Levin’s bifurcated effort reflects the fact that Fripp is playing in 15/8, while Belew plays in 12/8. It would be very easy to get into the weeds here (I already am for most folks, but just a little curiosity will be rewarded), but this background helps explain the overwhelming sound. What the listener hears is a driving, inevitable pulse of four in the drums and bass, while Fripp’s guitar and the stick lope along in a count of five. That’s an oversimplification, but the weeds get deep in a hurry. The band sounds both unified and untethered.
When I was in high school and not yet versed in music theory, listening to the combined effect of Bill Bruford playing a cymbal part on a small, high-pitched drum, a drum part backed by bass that thumps along with the inevitability of a zombie’s march, while some chunk of the harmony looped every five counts utterly fried my still-new brain. It was identifiably rock music if only because it carried more signifiers of rock music than any other style, yet I often remarked to myself that I had no idea what I was listening to.
After Belew’s first guitar solo he draws the listener in with an admission: “I do remember one thing. It took hours and hours, but by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think.”
The contrast between the frenzied energy of the first instrumental section with Belew’s guitar solo and the restraint of that first verse hooks the listener (I should clarify that I mean the curious or interested listener—I’m clear that King Crimson fandom serves as a gene marker for nerdiness). When the band explodes into Fripp’s solo, the entry both reduces strain and increases it, an effect with no known recipe.
The return to the verse marks a fitting moment of absurdity, with Belew going meta; he begins repeating the line, “I repeat myself when under stress.” I recall high-school-me thinking, “Yeah, I’d be stressed if I was trying to play this.” Again, the lyrics pull the song taut. We now have the form of the song and the absence of drums and shrieking guitars impends. Belew teases us, “The more I look at it, the more I like it.”
Despite the reserved playing, their fealty to rhythm, tempo, sustain, playing no more than their parts as rehearsed, the audience knows what’s coming. It feels as if the band is a class full of third graders waiting for that final bell that signals summer vacation. Belew howls, “I wish you were here to see it!” The line both includes and excludes us; we’re outside, but he’s inviting us in, and every time I’ve ever heard that line I’ve thought, “Yeah, I wish I was watching them play this right now.” In the moment that follows, the band erupts into Belew’s third solo, a feedbacking wail only an electric guitar can produce.
The band’s roar fills all available space. If nerds engaged in ecstatic dance, this would be our soundtrack. Belew’s feedback soars over the band, a rapturous, exhilarating solo in which he dances between unleashed and unhinged. It’s the sound of a soul freed.
When the final bar arrives and Belew shouts, “I like it!” the single most rational response is to nod in agreement. It’s a moment of such explosive strength—and release—that it defies description. To invoke sex and call it orgasmic is too facile, too distracting, but here a metaphor from cycling fits. Belew’s scream isn’t just the sprint to the finish, it is the bike throw at the line, the absolute height of tension and energy, an effort from which there is nowhere to go but down, to release and recovery.
In an interview with Musician Magazine, Belew made a pronouncement that taunted me for forty-plus years. “Crimson live is the thing.” Alas, I never had the opportunity to see them in the 1980s, and when Fripp disbanded King Crimson I despaired that I’d ever see the songs performed live.
When I heard that Adrian Belew and Tony Levin formed a band with guitarist Steve Vai (best known, perhaps for his work with Frank Zappa) and Danny Carey (the man in the engine room for Tool) to play the “Discipline”-era material, I was so eager to order a ticket that my hands shook.
That band, Beat, closed its second set with “Indiscipline,” a performance I’d waited for my entire life. For all the power and sheer wattage the original studio recording displays, it was no match for Belew, Levin, Vai and Carey live. So many of us yelled, “I like it!” when Belew did that as the sound decayed, so did the cheering. We had nothing left. I didn’t see how anyone—the players or the audience—had anything left for an encore.
As I stated in my opening, I’m not a fan of rule-breaking for the sake of rule breaking, but bending convention to our will in order to create something fresh is an urge that doesn’t receive enough respect, enough encouragement, and without it, I’d not have witnessed one of the single most powerful performances of my life.