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.
Beat: Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Steve Vai and Danny Carey Play the Music of King Crimson:
An Appreciation—Not a Review
Let me ask you a question: Have you ever in your life seen a musician on stage experience joy? I saw it on the face of guitarist and vocalist Adrian Belew recently and I’m convinced that what I saw him experience is something I’ve never witnessed in a musician onstage. Not only that, seeing him radiate that joy gave me something from a concert I’ve never experienced previously. Allow me to explain.
Live music has been a mainstay of my life since adolescence. The first live concert I ever saw—soft rocker David Gates and Bread—left me in awe at the way one person’s voice could draw in the attention of thousands of people, giving each of us the feeling that something not just personal, but something intimate was being shared, as if he was one-on-one with each of us.
In the decades since, I’ve seen the proverbial all. I’ve seen rock stars energize a crowd so that they danced as a single organism. I’ve seen prickly perfectionists yell at an unruly crowd. Hell, I’ve seen a audience’s adulation (and a pound of cocaine) make a vocalist levitate.
As I’m a nerdy, neurodivergent, cis, white guy, it was maybe a foregone conclusion that in my teen years I’d find my way to King Crimson, a band that hard rockers, pop fans and disco dancers laughed at through the entirety of the 1970s and ‘80s. They were dear to me, a confirmation that the universe was big enough for music that allowed an artist to chase their most quirky and idiosyncratic urges. Theirs was a music that told me there was room in the world for me.
While I loved Prog Rock, capital P, capital R, I didn’t love all of it with the blind acceptance that comes with not looking past the label. Hawkwind and Gentle Giant left me cold—all chops, no soul. And while King Crimson could be weird as a hairless cat (Who else has written a song from the viewpoint of a broken down old car?), they had heart.
In the 1980s they released three albums: “Discipline,” “Beat” and “Three of a Perfect Pair.” Around the time that “Discipline” was released, I contracted encephalitis and I spent an entire summer in bed. I wasn’t allowed to sit up long enough to play my drums. I laid around reading every music magazine I could get my hands on, and at that time Musician Magazine couldn’t let an issue go by without some mention of band leader Robert Fripp and/or King Crimson.
“Discipline” became the soundtrack for that lost summer and it served as a promise that when I recovered, I’d make music again.
“Discipline” was unique among the albums in my collection. The music was intricate as a Beethoven piano sonata, but played with the intensity of punk. The lyrics lacked the over-hyped, self-serious faux majesty that musicians will use to inflate melodies and arrangements that never had wings enough to take flight. They could groove in a way that might not make you dance, but your body was going to move.
King Crimson was an insider’s band. If you liked Crimson, you were in-the-know. A nerd’s notion of hip. The band was a mainstay of college radio in a way that Genesis was not. They carried a decidedly punk influence, a rebellious edge that said they didn’t care about commercial success. Of course, they bumped up against it—success, that is—when MTV began running a video of the song “Sleepless” from “Three of a Perfect Pair.” A hit single from King Crimson wasn’t laughable—it was absurd as a Kafka novel, which is to say that I thought the idea of a breakout hit from them was just what the world needed.
It was that sense that they were speaking a language only my friends and I knew that made them all the more beloved. In the song “Thela Hun Ginjeet,” singer, guitarist and lyricist Adrian Belew tells a story of nearly being mugged as they were making the album. It’s a stream-of-consciousness performance into a handheld tape recorder: “They grabbed it from me—took it away from me, turned it on, and it says, ‘He held a gun in his hand.'” It’s the sort of story you share with friends in the days that follow such an experience. Tell me that ain’t punk rock. Several times Belew repeats the line, “This is a dangerous place.” That line became shorthand between my friends and me. It is what we said to each other in whispers any time we knew we were out of place, and feeling out of place was as common to us as eating dinner. Crimson lyrics weren’t poetry—they were aphorisms shining a light on essential truths.
Alas, I lived in Memphis in the 1980s and King Crimson never stopped through on their tours. After “Three of a Perfect Pair,” Robert Fripp disbanded the group and when he finally revived the band in the 1990s, he built a very different ensemble. Though they played some of that material live, it wasn’t the same.
The years, they sped by, and when friends played the parlor game of, “If you could seen any band in history in concert, who would it be?” I always opened with Discipline-era Crimson.
So when I drove to Napa some weeks back, I was fixing a lifelong omission, something I’d been cheated from experiencing. Nevermind the fact that Robert Fripp—a self-professed introvert, enigma and turkey—hadn’t wanted to participate in the tour. Guitar maestro Steve Vai—who I’d been listening to since his days with another formidable task-master: Frank Zappa—took his place. And drummer Bill Bruford, who had been a star I’d steered by as a younger drummer, had retired from playing, so his parts were to be performed by Tool drummer Danny Carey, which is a bit like having “Dune” star Timothy Chalamet reprise Peter O’Toole’s role in “Lawrence of Arabia”—as if you could consider anyone else.
When Adrian Belew began singing “Neal and Jack and Me”—an homage to Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, who were the spiritual inspiration for King Crimson’s album “Beat,” Belew bared such a tight-cheeked, toothy grin I wondered if he would be able to sing his lines. On that night, the second show of the tour, he seemed to still carry some mild disbelief that finally he was getting to play these songs again.
In concert with King Crimson, Robert Fripp sat on a stool—often out of the spotlight—and played his parts with minimal expression. He’s flamboyant as an undertaker. By contrast, Steve Vai, who is old enough to be a card-carrying member of AARP—had all the swagger of Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth put together. His facial expressions, hip shimmy and whammy bar theatrics said nothing so much as, “Respectfully, Ima tear this shit up. Respectfully.”
Not only is Vai one of few guitarists able to play at Fripp’s level of intensity for the whole of a concert, he is also part of a small cadre of masters with the technical facility to recreate the idiosyncratic vocabulary of sounds that Fripp teased from his electric guitar. With my eyes closed, I could have been convinced that Fripp himself was on stage based on sound alone.
I was a drummer, so my eyes tracked to Danny Carey, and with him I felt a simpatico I could never have felt for Bill Bruford. Bruford was too alien, played parts that sometimes seemed to disregard the time signature the rest of the band was in. Which is to say, I know how hard it is to play Bruford’s parts. I’ve spent hours teasing out grace notes and sticking patterns—I knew what Carey had bled to learn those parts and I could see the concentration on his face, the silent counts his hands made during rests. There was a determination in his pursed lips that told me he wasn’t just going to play this music correctly, he needed to honor it. How dedicated was he? When Bill Bruford auctioned off some of the drums he’d used in his set during that era, Danny Carey placed a bid so high the auctioneer’s gavel came down as a formality.
Tony Levin is almost certainly best-known for his work with Peter Gabriel, but when it comes to bass parts that bassists brag about learning, it’s Levin’s work with King Crimson that will suck oohs and ahs from the mouths of the devoted. Simply playing his part on “Sleepless” is an exercise in endurance, an athletic achievement on the order of Neil Peart’s drumming in “Tom Sawyer.”
Levin’s concentration on stage, his rapture in the moment, masked some of his excitement to be playing that material. Though not given to the wagging of someone like Vai, he moved with the music and his head turned and tilted like a Balinese dancer’s, betraying some of what was taking place within him as he voiced those parts.
Ever the consummate pro, seemingly the only thing about the man that had changed since the 1980s was the amount of gray in his mustache. On the occasions when he permitted himself a moment to take a photo of the crowd with the camera he brought along, that’s when we could see just how thrilled he was.
As great as all of that was, to the degree that the night would succeed or fail, that weight fell on Belew’s shoulders. It was his night. For all of Fripp’s inventive musicality, it had been Belew who had given those songs their depth. He had imbued them with the ambition of someone who had finally been given his crack at creative freedom, or, if you will, immortality.
One of the risks of seeing a band perform material that is 40 years old is that while the instrumentalists may relearn their parts without too much trouble, 40 years can do a lot to a voice. Part of what made the show work so well was that Belew’s voice sounded largely unchanged from the 1980s, no small feat.
Whether it was his self-referential moments, such as when he sang the line, “Long, like these notes I’m singing,” in “Matte Kudasai,” or his more personal intimations as when he sang, “I need to feel your heartbeat, so close it feels like mine,” in “Heartbeat,” Belew gave Crimson soul. We connected with that person struggling to realize dreams, to reach an audience, to find their place in the world.
Belew’s onstage energy was vertical, an up-and-down bouncing like the pogo dancing we did back in the day—or a kid on Christmas morning. His gratitude came out in the between-song banter. I could appreciate the nerves that would accompany playing this music from another era. Until they applaud, it’s hard to tell from the stage just how enraptured an audience will be.
With each new song, though, the crowd erupted in cheers of recognition. Years ago, Musician Magazine quoted Belew saying that Crimson was at their best live. I’ve listened to everything I can find of King Crimson live from that era, so I know what they sounded like, and I can say that there were moments when I could have been fooled into believing I was listening to the original band.
“Waiting Man” opened with Danny Carey playing electronic drums like the Simmons drums Bruford played in the 1980s—those hexagonal pads that you saw in videos on MTV. He played six pads set up desk-flat, and they sat, waist-high, between Belew’s and Levin’s mics. Each drum was set to play a different note and the texture of the percussion sounded more like an electronic xylophone than drums. In the song’s opening, Belew joined him, playing a second part before stepping to the mic to sing.
In the song’s closing moments Belew, with Levin singing harmony, sings:
I return, face is smiling
Be home soon, cry on your shoulder
Tears of a waiting man
Every moment wait for my chance
My friend say hello
Feel no fret, feel no fret
You can wait and I wait, and I wait
And home I am.
Belew and Levin draw out the word home, a triumphant high note that comes soaring over the staccato ending.
Welcome home.
In that moment his home was the stage; we were his friends, the grin on his face banishing fret to the shadows. My friend, we’ve waited for this as long as you have. (And now I’m the waiting man, again, counting the days until I see them in Reno.)
To say Belew was happy would be to minimize the significance of what was transpiring on stage. I’m projecting here, but my writer’s heart tells me that with 40 years of career from which to look back on that material, there has to be a kind of satisfaction and pride at such an achievement. And to have waited so many years to play it again, getting on stage must have felt like the mother of all reunions. He glowed as if lit from within.
Seeing such elation restored in me a hope I’ve felt few times since I was a college kid. I walked out of the show buoyed, happy, exhilarated in my knowledge that there is still room in this world for joy.
Image of Beat by Alison Dyer and reprinted with no permission whatsoever. We’re hoping they won’t mind.