For the past two album reviews, I've been hedging around the idea that Days of Future Passed and The Soft Machine are bona fide progressive rock albums, and now we arrive at the reason for that hedging. King Crimson's 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King[1] is unquestionably and uncontroversially the first progressive rock album, if not ever (hedged bets and all, Moody Blues and Soft Machine are still pretty proggy) then certainly the first prog album to contain the roots of everything that was to come in the prog sound's immediate ten-year future and not just a few scattered foreshadowings (as is true of both Future Passed and Soft Machine). It's the first prog album to shake off psychedelia's lingering haze and come up with a something truly post-psychedelic. It's the first prog album to incorporate both classic and jazz in one track. It's the first prog album to have some spectacularly cool and weird cover art[2]. It's the first (only?) prog album to be sampled by Kanye West[3]. It's also one of the best debut albums in rock history and among my personal all-time favorite albums—top 30 for sure, maybe even 25.
So yeah. We're dealing with a heavyweight here. A big, hulking 500-lb. gorilla of a heavyweight.
Part of what's so amazing about this album is how it came pretty much out of nowhere. Get this: In the Court of the Crimson King was released in October of '69; King Crimson first rehearsed together in January of '69 and made their live debut in April of '69. Granted, drummer Michael Giles and guitarist Robert Fripp had been playing together in various incarnations of a band for about a year prior, but the fact still remains that there are only about nine months between the first time the whole group played together and the release of the debut masterpiece that revolutionized an entire genre. I'm always amazed by the quick turnaround between live shows and records with bands in the first few decades of rock music, but even among their speedily recording peers, that's astounding[4].
But even if it had taken the band ten years to make this album (and King Crimson would certainly not shy away from such lengthy gestation periods for future albums), what we'd be left with is still the real thing—the main thing—that's amazing here, and that's the music. Because holy sweet merciful crap, the music on this album is just transcendent. I mean that both in the sense that the music itself straddles many different genres and that the album tends to cross the typical divisions of taste that often separate prog fans from fans of contemporary pop, blues, etc. When was the last time you heard something from The Soft Machine outside the context of your own music collection? Probably never. When was the last time you heard something from In the Court of the Crimson King? That Kanye song? That part in Buffalo '66? That other part in Children of Men? Guitar Hero? Apparently there's another video game using "The Court of the Crimson King" in its ending credits? My point is that mainstream and mainstream-adjacent entertainment is still borrowing from this now more than 45-year-old album. It's left a huge cultural footprint that's not yet filled in. Heck, even Pitchfork (that's right, good ol' "I'll give the Mars Volta's best album a 2.0 out of 10.0" Pitchfork) likes it. At least, they like "21st Century Schizoid Man." And really, who doesn't?
In fact, "21st Schizoid Man" is as good a place as any to actually start talking about the music on the album, not just because it's the opening track (and, may I say, among the greatest opening tracks of all time!) but also because the composition of the song gets at just what's so great and unprecedented about In the Court of the Crimson King. Here in this song is what may be the first workable fusion of jazz and rock that evokes both genres without sacrificing the core animating principles of either. Undoubtedly, there had been rock music before "21st Century Schizoid Man" that incorporated jazz elements (to name an obvious example: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour collection), and earlier in '69, Miles Davis had recorded and released In a Silent Way, his first concentrated foray into jazz fusion (where part of the idea is to incorporate rock beats, structures, and instrumentation into jazz). And let's not forget last post's superstar pioneers, Soft Machine. The idea of combining jazz and rock wasn't at all new by the time King Crimson came around. But what ends up happening with both kinds of fusion—rock with jazz and jazz with rock—is that the jazz tends to take the heaviness out of the rock music. The jazzy piano outro in "Magical Mystery Tour" is a typical example, with the pop/rock punchiness of the song's mainline fading away for the jazz's smoother touch[5].
Not so with "21st Century Schizoid Man." Not at all. In this song, the jazz components are a support to the rock elements that make the song rock even harder than it would as a more traditional track. Just listen to the heavy brass/heavy metal opening riff, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It works the same way with the lengthy instrumental midsection of the song (called "Mirrors," although most people just lump it all together into one seven-and-a-half minute monster, including my iTunes), only the other way around, where the guitar solo improvises over odd-time-signatured drumming and sax not unlike how Miles Davis's trumpet winds over the soundscapes of In a Silent Way—though again, it's much harder than anything in that Miles album, the electric guitar supporting the jazz with rock heaviness. It's really something to behold, one of the crown jewels of the entire progressive rock genre and without question the highlight of the album.
Which isn't to say that the rest of the album isn't great shakes. The rest of it is great, though (with the exception of the flute in "I Talk to the Wind"[6]) it's much more focused on classical music fusion than jazz. That's fine with me, since King Crimson does about the same thing with classical music as it does with jazz, meaning that they successfully fuse it with other genres (mostly folk) without watering down either. This move with classical music isn't quite as revolutionary as KC's work with jazz on the opener. That's because it had already been accomplished with considerable verve by the Moody Blues with "Nights in White Satin." In fact, King Crimson was explicitly going for a Moody Blues sound, initially hiring Moodies producer Tony Clarke to engineer the album. Their work with Clarke didn't end up producing much tangibly (he left the recording process early in '69), but the fingerprints of "Nights in White Satin" are all over the two most heavily classical pieces, "Epitaph" and "The Court of the Crimson King." The heavy use of Mellotron is especially evocative of the Moodies, not just "Nights" but also especially their subsequent, de-orchestralized albums (and Crimson keyboardist Ian McDonald pretty much admits so).
The result, then, is something that, while maybe not as mind-blowingly new as "Nights in White Satin" would have been in '67, but is no less powerful. It may be even more powerful, actually, because unlike the Moody Blues, King Crimson knows how to write good lyrics. The grime of the opening "Schizoid Man" does a good job establishing the existential panic prevalent throughout the album—the track is rather nakedly about the dehumanizing aspects of modern warfare, especially Vietnam (e.g. "innocents raped with napalm fire," "blind man's greed" [7]). "I Talk to the Wind" picks this thread up with decidedly more metaphysical aims, where the speaker talks "to the wind" but the "words are all carried away" and "the wind does not hear." Musically, it's a sedate track, especially after the blistering assault of "Schizoid Man," but lyrically, it's just as terrified of the alienating, fragmenting effects of modern life on individual lives. Safety, communication, and even the ability to make oneself known to other human beings is all torn to shreds by the gristmill of technology, politics, and the like. Written here on digital paper in this blog, that looks like boilerplate modernism/post-modernism, but the way it plays on the album makes it seem anything but trite, the music drawing emotions and landscapes from the lyrics that feel entirely fresh. This all comes to a head with the album's twin spires of high classical fusion, "Epitaph" and "The Court of the Crimson King," where the fantasy imagery takes on a threatening, apocalyptic sweep that ties together the threads of the other songs into something that feels like the despairing end of the world (it's no accident that Children of Men used the latter track). In "Epitaph," "the wall on which the prophets wrote/Is cracking at the seams," while "Court" talks about "puppets" and the summoning of "the fire witch to the court of the crimson king"; the old foundations of security—be it political or psychological or existential—in the world are crumbling, and in their place rise rulers who take advantage of this chaos for their own bloody ends[8]. It's depressing, scary stuff, and man, King Crimson sells it with total conviction. If you ask me, that's way more compelling than lyrics about meadows and the sun going down.
Partly due to their constantly changing lineup and partly due to consistent frontman Robert Fripp's genius never being content to linger on a given style, King Crimson would go on to tread many more diverse musical territories over the rest of their career, most of them even more avant-garde than their debut. It's a shame that my self-imposed rule for this blog project limits me to one album per band, since King Crimson has many great albums, some of them (looking at you, Larks' Tongues in Aspic) arguably even greater than this one. But in terms of seismic impact on the genre, you really can't get much more definitive than In the Court of the Crimson King. So here it is: a masterpiece of avant-pop and at this point in the project, a clear frontrunner for the best album covered so far. Up ahead, though, we've got a whole lot of promising contenders for that top spot as prog enters a new decade and its classic era.
And that's all for me, folks! Tell me what you think in the comments!
Until 1970!
1] It's full title is actually In the Court of the Crimson King: An Observation by King Crimson. Oh yes. Subtitled album names? We're definitely in the realm of progressive rock.
2] A prog staple that is often superior to its music, honestly.
3] Sub-thread: How amazing is "Power"? It's not just the King Crimson sample, but I'll admit, the first time the "21st century schizoid man" soundbite hit my ears, I got chills. It's one of those moments where I just wanted to stand up and clap and say, "Yes, I finally get what everyone's saying about Kanye West."
4] To put it in perspective, it was over two years between the formation of Soft Machine and the release of The Soft Machine, a full year between the formation of the Moody Blues' lineup that recorded Days of Future Passed and the release of that album, and almost three years between Sid Barrett taking over Pink Floyd and the release of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
5] And look, as amazing as In a Silent Way is (and it is amazing, maybe even more so than In the Court of the Crimson King), I don't think anyone's going to be calling it "heavy" or "rocking." In ethos, it's still way more jazz than rock.
6] And the heavily improvised "Illusion" section of "Moonchild," which I think is the sole weak link on the album. It's not that I hate ambient studio noodling ("Moonchild" ends with about ten minutes of pure improvisation, which mostly sounds like band members picking up random instruments and playing a few bars before setting them back down again); it's actually a peaceful and atmospheric respite between the bruising "Epitaph" and the epic closer "The Court of the Crimson King." The problem is just that the track is way too long, and the novelty of the peaceful sounds wears off after probably six of those ten minutes. I haven't heard the 40th Anniversary mix of this album, but from what I've heard, Fripp cut out a few minutes from the "Illusion" improv, which sounds like the right decision to me.
7] Wikipedia says that in concert, Fripp says that the song is dedicated to "an American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew." It's not clear to me if he's saying that the song was always about Agnew or if that particular performance was dedicated to him, but either way, it's a amusing little quote I thought I'd just share.
8] Though it's worth noting that, at least according to the band, the "crimson king" in the song isn't meant to be Satan (whom that monicker often refers to) but is instead evoking a slightly archaic term for a monarch during wartime. Either way, the implications are not good.
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