Analysis of ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic,’ ‘Starless and Bible Black,’ and ‘Red’

I: Introduction

As I did with my analysis of Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair, I’m doing another trio of King Crimson albums here. And just as the 1980s lineup of leader/guitarist Robert Fripp, guitarist/singer/lyricist Adrian Belew, Stick-man/bassist/back-up singer Tony Levin, and drummer Bill Bruford was one of the very best versions of King Crimson (and I’m far from being alone in this opinion), so was this early 1970s era’s lineup, including core members Fripp, Bruford, and bassist/singer John Wetton one of the very best versions of the mighty Crims (and again, I’m far from being alone in that opinion).

This early 70s era of King Crimson was far more stable than that of the first four albums (which include, of course, In the Court of the Crimson King and In the Wake of Poseidon), which typically saw around half of the band members replaced from studio album to studio album. Instead, from late 1972 to about the beginning of the fall of 1974 (when Fripp broke up the band), this version of King Crimson could be described as ‘the incredible shrinking band,’ initially existing as a quintet consisting of Fripp, Wetton, Bruford, David Cross (violin, viola, Mellotron, Hohner Pianet, and occasional flute), and Jamie Muir (percussion and random noise-makers); for Muir would quit after the recording of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic in early 1973 to join a Buddhist monastery, and Cross would be fired in mid-1974, after the release of Starless and Bible Black and its ensuing tour.

Instead of Peter Sinfield, who wrote King Crimson’s lyrics for the first four albums, and was gone by the time of the band’s first live album, Earthbound, the lyrics of these three albums were largely written by Richard Palmer-James, a guitarist and singer on Supertramp‘s debut album.

Though, as I said above, this era’s lineup was more stable than those of the first four King Crimson albums, I suspect that Fripp was greatly affected emotionally by that ongoing revolving door of personnel changes, perhaps even a bit traumatized by all the stress of having to deal with it. I suspect that he was expecting, early on, that this new band would also fall apart in short order, since there’s a sense in the song, “Starless,” from Red and played in gigs with Cross earlier, that the song’s topic of an ending friendship is a kind of metaphor for a premonition of the band’s imminent break-up.

This sense of loss and impermanence, feared by Fripp perhaps even as early as the release of LTIA (with Muir’s quitting so soon after the album’s completion, and thus confirming, to some extent, Fripp’s fears), is something that I see as relatable to certain Buddhist ideas. In fact, just as I saw a triadic theme of the Hegelian dialectic in the three 1980s King Crimson albums, so do I see a triadic theme in LTIA, S&BB, and Red, a theme centred on the Buddhist concept of the three poisons: rāga, or attachment (LTIA), dveșa, or aversion (S&BB), and moha, or delusion (Red).

II: Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

Apart from the mellower “Book of Saturday,” “Exiles,” and the softer sections of “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One,” we can hear on this album a departure from the daintier, woodwind-oriented, and more structured music of the first four albums…though live albums from the first era, including Earthbound, did demonstrate a significant amount of improvisation. Still, this next era of King Crimson will have decidedly more improvisation, particularly of a European, free improvisational style. The music also grew noticeably darker in tone.

The title for the first and last instrumentals of the album, as well as the name of the album itself, was thought of by Muir, whose eccentric choices in percussion noises (including chimes, bells, musical saw, shakers, rattles, and such found objects as sheet metal) are evident in both of those tracks. Fripp found the title apt, saying that it is “something precious which is stuck, but visible…precious, [and] encased in form.” Bruford once claimed that Part One’s soft middle section, with Cross’s violin and Muir’s zither, is the “lark’s tongue” in the middle of the “aspic” that is the wildness of the rest of the music.

As for my personal thoughts on any possible meaning for the title of these two instrumentals and the album, I discussed in my analysis of Part III in Three of a Perfect Pair (link above) that the delicacy depicted in the title brings to mind the killing of animals for food, turning a part of the birds’ bodies into a commodity (ancient Romans, especially the wealthy, ate larks’ tongues as a delicacy and as a symbol of extravagance). This idea ties in with a recurring theme in a number of King Crimson songs, that of capitalist consumerism and materialism. This idea also ties in with the dominant theme, as I see it, of this album–rāga, or desire, lust, attachment.

In connection with this notion of lust or desire, we can see in the cover of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, with the blue crescent moon united with the sun, an idea that would later find its variation on the cover of Three of a Perfect Pair: the (sexual) union of the male and female principles–the feminine moon and masculine sun, and the phallus and yoni of the later album cover.

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One

The opening instrumental begins with Muir playing a tune on a mbira, or African thumb piano. The music is very soft here, but it will get much louder later. Behind the mbira, you can hear other percussion instruments–glockenspiel, rattling metal, etc.–and Cross playing two As, an E, and an F-sharp high on the violin, over and over again, in 6/8. The metal shaking gets louder and predominant as the glockenspiel, violin, and eventually the mbira all fade out, leaving only the shaking of metal in the end.

The next section begins with a C minor staccato violin ostinato of simultaneous two-note intervals (sometimes minor thirds, sometimes octaves, etc.) in 5/4 time. These intervals tend to rise chromatically in threes while Fripp is playing eerie chromatic descensions on his guitar, put through distortion.

The tension builds, with a snare drum roll by Bruford, then I have to turn the volume down, because the music gets really loud here. Fripp and Wetton are playing a six-note riff mainly in 7/4, sounding like an early example of prog metal.

Then the music goes back to the staccato violin part in 5/4, though live versions of “Larks’ One” tend to have Fripp play this part here, as he does in the coda, with Cross playing the violin part he plays in the coda. Hearing this latter violin part, with the eerie chromatic descension on Wetton’s distorted wah-wah bass, now makes a lot more harmonic sense.

Another drum roll leads into the ‘prog-metal’ riff again. Next comes a passage with Fripp playing dissonant, quick arpeggios abounding in tritones and shifting in and out of tonality. He originally wrote this part with the Islands lineup of Boz Burrell on bass and vocals, Ian Wallace on drums, and Mel Collins on saxes and flute, recorded as “A Peacemaking Stint Unrolls.” In Larks’, however, the guitar part is backed with the band playing in 7/4, with eighth notes subdividing the metre as 3+3+4+4.

The next passage is a frenetic one with Muir bashing away on all kinds of percussion instruments, Wetton playing more distorted, wah-wah bass, and Fripp playing his trademark screaming phrases, his chords growing dissonant by the end of the passage.

After this mayhem comes the aforementioned subdued centre of the instrumental, the “lark’s tongue” in the “aspic,” also called the “water section” by Muir, with him on zither (or autoharp, if you prefer) and Cross on violin. Towards the end of this section, it almost sounds Asian, Japanese. Then we come to the coda.

This final section is a variation on the 5/4 part leading up to the snare drum roll. This part invariably has Fripp playing what was originally Cross’s staccato violin part, but there isn’t the eerie chromatic descension on the bass.

Instead of that eerie part, indeed, replacing it, is recorded voices–first, a discussion of someone convicted of murder who is to be hanged, this death sentence mentioned right at the drum roll; then, we hear Bruford, Cross, and Muir reciting magazine passages, their words unintelligible, while we hear the band playing something peaceful in G major.

Fripp is playing chord arpeggios, Wetton is playing more wah-wah bass, Cross is playing a violin melody of G, G-flat, and D, then B-flat, A, and D (an octave lower than the first D), and the glockenspiel can be heard finishing off the instrumental.

I’ve mentioned that rāga, or desire, lust, and attachment, is the dominant theme of this album. Now, the discussion of a convicted murderer condemned to death is, of course, rather an example of dveșa, or aversion, hate–the opposite of rāga.

What one must remember, though, is that opposites are properly understood in a dialectical sense, that there is a unity of opposites. One cannot properly have a sense of the one extreme without a sense of the opposite extreme. One cannot know attachment without knowing aversion.

Book of Saturday

This song is a soft love ballad. (I previously mentioned that “Heartbeat,” off of the Beat album [link above], is extraordinarily for King Crimson a simple pop love song; now, the uniqueness of my description of that song is not contradicted by my statement here, since “Book of Saturday” has its proper share of prog elements, including shifts from 4/4 to 5/4 time.) It begins with Fripp playing an electric guitar chord progression in the key of A minor, a progression including a harmonic in B.

In the lyric, we can see the theme of desire, or attachment, clearly in how Wetton sings of the push and pull of attraction and repulsion towards the girl of the love relationship. Part of him wants to leave her, but he can’t, because part of him wants to stay, as is evident in the first verse. Love can be an addiction.

I doubt that the interpretation I’m about to make was Palmer-James’s intention, but I find it fitting to think that the sexual relationship depicted in this song is the same one of the pimp and underage prostitute in “Easy Money” (see below). The “lay[ing of] cards upon the table” and “the jumble of lies [they] told” suggests how sex is just a game to them (the game they’re “forgetting”). Furthermore, her “people, the boys in the band,” suggest that she’s had experience as one of those “Ladies of the Road,” like Lori Maddox. His swearing he likes her people reeks of a cuckold pimp’s jealousy.

Fripp does a solo that’s played backwards, perhaps a musical representation of going back in time to “reminiscences gone astray,” and “the shuddering breath of yesterday.” Cross then does a violin solo that I’ve never heard repeated in any of the live performances of this song (I suspect that he was getting nervous playing live, so he became more reticent); instead, Fripp would play some pretty chord substitutions to fill in the space.

I think that “the crewmen…[of the] banana boat ride” are all the johns who have had her at night (it should be obvious what part of the crewmen’s anatomy the bananas are that she rides on…daylight come and he wants [them] go home). Her response to his waking-up and getting rid of them is a lively one, as if wising to gave them all another ride in her “limousine.”

The “succor of the needy” sounds like a pun on “sucker,” “the needy” being all those johns, who are also “the cavalry of despair,” riding her like a horse, though the despair is all his, the cuckold pimp who has been tossed aside, while they “take a stand in the lady’s [pubic] hair.” That she’s making “sweet sixteen” reminds us of the girl in “Easy Money” who he never knew was “a minor.”

She makes his life “a book of bluesy Saturdays,” which makes me think of the Hebrew Bible, read on Saturday synagogue services, a day that he must keep holy. He has to be good and abstain from sin or work, while she’s free to be as sinful as she likes. He’d like to leave her and escape his humiliation, but he can’t, not only because she’s so beautiful and exciting (part of her attraction, of course, is that being underage, she’s forbidden fruit), but also because she’s a source of income (easy money) allowing him to sit around idly at home, not needing to find a real job.

Exiles

This song opens with a theme on the Mellotron (cellos tapes) in E; this theme was originally from something the original King Crimson played live, “Mantra,” a tune played on Fripp’s guitar.

This then changes to a violin melody by Cross over a chord progression of C major, B minor, and A minor; he then plays the same melodic contour, but higher, and over a progression of D major and C major (twice), then B minor and A minor again.

The lyric is an autobiographical one for Palmer-James, in which he feels sad about having to leave his home country of England to perform with Supertramp in continental Europe. This having to leave (“But Lord, I had to go”) made him and his bandmates “exiles,” as it were.

This sadness over leaving England is yet another example of attachment causing suffering, hence rāga is one of Buddhism’s three poisons. The palms of Palmer-James’s hands are “damp with expectancy” because of that expectant wish to leave “this far-away land” and return home.

Since this new version of King Crimson is going to get heavier over these two years of its existence, we will hear Fripp play a lot less acoustic guitar than before, which he does only on this song and on “Fallen Angel,” from Red. His playing here is typically beautiful and full of arpeggios. We also hear Cross play a little flute, and in the middle of the song, Wetton is sitting at a piano.

Leaving England with Supertramp to play gigs in Munich, Palmer-James had “to face the call of fame, or,” if success eluded him there, to “make a drunkard’s name for [himself].” His “home was a place by the sand,” that is, he grew up in Bournemouth.

Would his friends ever understand the kind of sadness he feels at having to leave his home country? To know the “rain…of an afternoon out of town,” the feeling of alienation from the town one grew up in?

Easy Money

In this song beginning Side Two of the album, we can hear the beginnings of Crimson’s move in a heavier direction. The song starts with a blistering riff by Fripp in E minor, backed by Cross on the Mellotron (string section tapes), and Muir’s sloshing his hands in buckets of mud to augment Wetton’s and Bruford’s rhythm section.

After hearing Wetton sing nonsense syllables with overdubbed vocal harmonies, the music quietens, and he starts singing the lyric, which is about a pimp making “easy money” off of his desirable, but…underage…prostitute. (It would seem that, because of his exploitative wickedness, the pain he expresses in “Book of Saturday” (as I see it, anyway) is a result of karma biting him in the arse.

Fripp arranged the music for the verses, which are in 7/8 and in E minor (though Bruford plays a cross-rhythm in 4/4), then after three bars of that, it switches to 4/4 and to A major. Wetton arranged the music for the “Easy money” refrain, which is a progression of C major, B major, C major, and A major.

Potential johns see the girls curves as she “twinkle[s] by” “on the street,” and they like what they see. The next verse, as it appears on the studio album, must be the result of the record company being nervous about the risqué verse (“Well, I argued with the judge,” etc.) usually heard in live performances of the song. When King Crimson played “Easy Money” on The Midnight Special, it wasn’t at all surprising that Wetton sang the clean verse (“And I thought my heart would break,” etc.) instead.

Whereas the clean verse seems to be Palmer-James sheepishly backing off from the smut and saying the girl is just helping her man make winning bets at the races, the risqué verse is surely the authentic one, making explicit what is merely implied in the other verses.

The judge insists on hitting the pimp with a charge of statutory rape, for no one ever told him the girl was “a minor.” That Wetton chirps of “licking fudge” makes me see a possible ulterior meaning in “lark’s tongue in…ass?” (Forgive me, Dear Reader–I couldn’t resist.) In any case, we can see here more of the theme of rāga, desire.

The clean verse, however, included a line put on the album’s inner sleeve, but never sung: “but you always make money.” It’s regrettable that we never heard Wetton sing this line, particularly in between “And they never told me once you were a minor” and the “Easy money” chorus, for the unsung line would have clarified the progression of events in the story that the lyric is telling.

“Easy money,” as understood in the way I’m describing it, isn’t just money easily made by the pimp in his capitalistic exploitation and commodification of the girl; it’s also that she is easy, eagerly servicing man after man, thus leading to his cuckolding. So we can see how “Book of Saturday” gives us his future, where he gets what he deserves. Note also Muir’s use of the musical saw at the first singing of the chorus, giving the men a ‘boing’ response to the girl.

She’s “strutting out at every race” of men running after her. I suspect that the glass being thrown around the place is a euphemism for a phallus: I’m reminded of when Steven Tyler would later sing of a groupie drinking from his glass backstage.

“Sit[ting] around the family throne” implies the large sum of money the pimp and prostitute have been able to take home. They can rest and relax for two weeks, without (her) needing to work, for with all that cash, they can “appease the Almighty” dollar…or in the case of those living in the UK, the Almighty Pound Sterling.

After Fripp does a solo, Wetton comes back with the nonsense syllables and a return to the first verse. Then he sings of the money being put in a jar, and driving her around to find more johns. This pimp exploiter is “getting fat on [her] lucky star.”

The Talking Drum

This instrumental begins with Muir playing a talking drum, hence the name of the track. I sense an intriguing connotation in the title, though, which also ties in with the previous track. “Talking” implies a human being, while a drum is a thing used by another human being. To play a human being like an instrument is to manipulate and exploit him or her, as the pimp has done with the prostitute. The selfish use of people as things again ties in with rāga, desire.

After hearing Muir’s talking drum playing, the rest of the band fades in with Wetton’s bass playing a riff based on a tritone (the ‘diabolus in musica‘) of A and E-flat, Bruford playing a straight 4/4 beat, and Cross playing a viola. Melodically, the viola, bass, and later, Fripp’s guitar lines are based on the octatonic scale, though notes outside the scale are also used.

The hypnotic improvisation rises in volume to a climax, with Bruford hitting the crash cymbal on every beat. It ends with Cross playing high screeches with his bow, and this segues into…

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two

Unlike Part One, which is credited to the entire band and thus gives more or less equal attention to all five members, Part Two was written by Fripp and is therefore a guitar-riff-based instrumental. He begins it with a stack of perfect fourths–C-F-A-sharp–strummed with some scratching of the dubbed-out strings to create a rhythm in 5/4. Wetton roots the stack with a bass line of F, G, G, F, G, G, F, G, F, G.

This rhythm guitar part, in G, is a slower variation on the staccato C minor violin motif heard in Part One. Similarly, Fripp’s guitar arpeggios of G, D, G-sharp (an octave above)–these three notes played twice, then D-flat, G, then the development of that melodic motif shortly thereafter, are slower variations in 4/4 of that fast-picked, dissonant passage I described above, which originally appeared as part of “A Peacemaking Stint Unrolls.”

Typically, the 5/4 rhythm guitar part shortens in its last bar to 4/4 before switching to the 4/4 arpeggio motif. After switching back and forth between these two motifs and their variations, the music softens with Fripp playing F and A together, then D, these three guitar notes being the fifth, flat seventh, and ninth to the tonic of G in Wetton’s bass, and the three repeated twice before the F and A go up to G and B before repeating the whole motif and later doing variations on it higher up the frets. It’s mostly in 5/4 time, with only the first bar in 11/8. Towards the end of the instrumental, when this passage is heard a third time, after Cross’s dissonant violin solo, even that first bar is in 5/4.

The opening 5/4 rhythm guitar part is heard again, with Wetton and Bruford adding a tight 5/16 behind Fripp, Wetton playing the notes of a diminished triad, C-sharp, G, A-sharp, G, A-sharp three times, then ending with another C-sharp. The rest of the band comes in, with Muir hitting a piece of sheet metal. This passage is essentially a shortened version of the opening part, followed by a return to the softer passage, with one bar of 11/8 and the rest in 5/4, as I described above.

This softer passage crescendos into a climax in G-sharp, then going up a tritone to D (five bars of 4/8 and one in 5/8), then back to G with Fripp playing the tonic, fifth, and octave of G to G-sharp, G-sharp back to G, F to G, G to G-sharp, G-sharp to G, and F, then repeating the cycle (after a break with Wetton and Bruford, which I’ll describe in a moment), which is in two bars of 6/8, then one in 4/8. In between Fripp’s playing of this, we hear Wetton playing F down to G, to the rhythm of Fripp’s opening G chord of fourths; Bruford is backing Wetton on the snare and bass drums.

The whole band joins Fripp in playing the G, G-sharp, and F riff, and Cross does a scorching violin solo over this. They come back to the softer passage, but without the 11/8 bar as I said above, and Cross is ending his solo with a high glissando. The passage crescendos again to the ending, in which Fripp plays chords, in his trademark screaming style, of descending inversions in D major, with G major as a subdominant added to the resolution.

Larks’ tongues in aspic are a delicacy, a dish that is a commodity sold for the pleasure of eating, as is the teenage prostitute for the pleasure of “licking fudge,” or the talking drum, its ‘talking’ having connotations of life. Living things, metaphorical or literal, are used for consumption and for profit, for “easy money.” The use of such things is the result of desire, rāga, that one of Buddhism’s Three Poisons given symbolic expression in the fires of the sun on the album’s cover, a fire reflected also on its blue moon.

III: Starless and Bible Black

Where the dominant theme, as I see it, of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was of the fire of desire, as captured mainly in the sun of the light of day, as seen on the album cover, as for Starless and Bible Black, the dominant theme is dveșa, aversion, hate, an idea symbolized by the darkest of night. This night is so dark that it’s starless and as black as a Bible cover. The title comes from a description of the night sky at the beginning of Dylan Thomas‘s radio drama, Under Milk Wood.

Added to this theme of endless darkness is a quote, on the back of the album cover, from Tom Phillips‘s book, A Humument: “this night wounds time.” Ironically, the cover design for S&BB is a light beige background, with only somewhat darker lettering for the title and inner sleeve. Recall in this connection that day and night, light and dark, the Good Book and black evil are all dialectical opposites, as are rāga and dveșa.

The pressures of touring and coping with the sudden departure of Muir to join a Buddhist monastery (Did he feel the danger of the Three Poisons of rāga, dveșa, and moha as already explored somewhat in LTIA?), a coping that included Bruford’s absorption of an equally extensive and creative collection of percussion instruments, King Crimson had very little in original music to record for their next studio album. They did, however, have a lot of live improvisations on tape, so these became the bulk of S&BB.

“The Great Deceiver” and “Lament” were recorded entirely in the studio. Most of “The Night Watch” was recorded in the studio, except for the opening, which was recorded live at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where “Trio,” “Starless and Bible Black,” and “Fracture” were played and recorded (The entire Concertgebouw performance was released in 1997 as The Night Watch.

The improvisation “We’ll Let You Know” was recorded live in Glasgow. A more complete version of it, coming right after a performance of “Easy Money,” can be found on Disc 2 of The Great Deceiver box set.

“The Mincer” was originally a live improvisation recorded at the Volkhaus in Zurich. Wetton’s vocals were later overdubbed in the studio. An extended version of the improvisation, called “The Law of Maximum Distress” (parts 1 and 2, excluding “The Mincer”), was released on Disc 4 of The Great Deceiver box set. A smooth version, with both parts merged together as a repairing of the original tape problem breaking the continuity of the performance, can be heard here.

The Great Deceiver

The song begins with an energetic rock riff in A and 4/4. It’s safe to assume that Wetton arranged most of the music on the song (he even added some guitar to the track), since it’s credited with his name before Fripp’s on the back cover, instead of the usual “Fripp, Wetton, Palmer-James.”

During this beginning, we can hear Cross’s violin doubling Wetton’s bass line: we never hear the violin during live performances of the song–again, I suspect it’s because Cross was getting nervous and increasingly alienated from the other three during gigs, a problem that ultimately led to his dismissal. Elsewhere in the background, we can hear Bruford shaking maracas.

Just before Wetton sings the first verse, he plays A, G, C (twice), and G-flat on the bass in a section in 6/8. According to Fripp, “Health food faggot” is not a derogatory reference to a gay man. Palmer-James was talking about “the health food version of a meatball”; he only later realized that the word can be a homophobic slur.

The song is actually about the Devil (“Once had a friend with a cloven foot”), someone to whom we should naturally feel an aversion. The one “in a chequered suit” is a harlequin, an archetypal trickster, and another great deceiver to be avoided.

This great deceiver is a personification of capitalist consumerism, a clash between the sacred and the profane that is also expressed, when you think about it, in “Bible black” and “cigarettes, ice cream, figurines of the Virgin Mary.” The deceitful use of religion to make money is a thing so hateful that it even made Jesus angry and violent (Matthew 21:12-13). A false Christ is clearly another devil (2 Corinthians 11:3-4).

The “gin-shop slag” with the “shoe-shine boy” whom “she raised…up,” “called him son,” and “canonized the ground that he walked upon” sounds like a Satanic parody of the Madonna and Child. These lines thus tie in with the chorus line of “cigarettes, ice cream, figurines of the Virgin Mary,” this last line being, incidentally, the one time Fripp ever contributed to a King Crimson lyric. Juxtaposing “Cadillacs, blue jeans,” as well as, later, “Dixieland playing on the ferry,” and “camel hair, Brylcreem, drop a glass full of antique sherry” with Fripp’s lyric all just reinforces the theme of consumerism contaminating the would-be sacred.

Fripp’s lyric was inspired by a visit to the Vatican, where he saw souvenirs being sold, rather like Jesus’ confrontation with the money-changers at the Temple in Jerusalem. The issue is a turning of religion (“figurines of the Virgin Mary”) into yet another commodity (“cigarettes, ice cream, Cadillacs, blue jeans,” etc.). The commodification of the Virgin Mary is tantamount to transforming her into a whore (the “gin-shop slag”). In this connection, we’re also reminded of the commodification of the teen hooker in “Easy Money” (“throw a glass around the place,” and “drop a glass full of antique sherry”).

We get our first reference to the night theme in the next verse: “In the night, he’s a star in the Milky Way,” perhaps a Satanic parody of the star the Magi followed to find the baby Jesus. The star is in the Milky Way because, like Macbeth, the great deceiver would seem to be “too full o’ the milk of human kindness.” Under cover of darkness, he would seem all good; but “he’s a man of the world by the light of day,” when we can see his true colours, as god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4).

The false, superficial charm of the great deceiver’s “golden smile and a proposition” shows us the con game of religion’s promise of happiness, blessedness, and edification through the “sweet sedition” of “the breath of God.”

“Sing hymns” and “get high” off of the opium of the people. Be fruitful and multiply, or “make love” and the great deceiver will “bring his perfume to your bed,” a perfume that “smells of sweet sedition.” Note in this connection how one of the subliminal commands in They Live was to marry and reproduce. Since They Live was also a critique of capitalism, we can see in this verse of “The Great Deceiver” a connection between blind faith in and obedience to God on the one hand, and on the other, the channeling of sexual energy into the making of yet another petite bourgeois family.

The devil of capitalist consumerism and commercialism will “charm your life ’til the cold wind blows,” that is, when the hard times come (as we’ve experienced all through the schizoid 21st century so far, and more than probably, will continue to do), and all our hopes and dreams will be sold off (as has been especially the apparent in the 2020s).

Lament

The song begins with a dreamy passage in F-sharp major, with Fripp playing rootless chords with a major 7th, a flat 7th, a major 6th, and back to the flat and major 7ths. After hearing these chords repeated with Wetton’s singing of the lyric’s first two lines, the same progression goes up to G-sharp major, which is heard for the next two lines of the lyric, then the same in A major, then in B major, then back to A major, then to the dominant, and back to F-sharp major and a repeat of the whole ascending cycle.

The rest of the song is essentially variations on this harmonic progression, starting with a passage in 6/4, with Wetton playing some slapping bass, and Bruford hitting percussion instruments, such as temple blocks and cowbells; then the music gets loud and hard.

Lyrically, Wetton is singing about the dreams of a teen who is learning to play the guitar, fantasizing about becoming a big rock star. Hence, the dreamy quality of the music, with the added Mellotron (strings tapes) and the saccharine violin lines (sometimes also played on the bass and guitar, too). The harmonic ascent from F-sharp major to G-sharp major, then to A and B as discussed above, reinforces the sense of a kid’s fantasy of rising in status to stardom.

Next, as I said, is the 6/4 passage with the slapping bass and the percussion. Fripp is playing a variation on the chord sequence, with pull-offs as a variation on the up-and-down movements from major 7th to flat 7th to major 6th and back. This section suggests the passage of time, from the kid’s adolescence to his young adulthood. Fripp ends the section with the gentle strum of a B major chord, then after two pull-offs, he hits a loud E 7th chord.

Now the music gets loud and heavy, suggesting that reality has punched the young man hard in the face. No, he won’t be a great rock star: he’ll be struggling, starving, and poor. Now, the ascending chord progression, in all irony, no longer represents the dream of rising to stardom, but rather the reality of escalating financial difficulties. One would naturally feel a great aversion to, a hatred of (dveșa) such a situation.

The young, would-be rock-and-roller is on the phone, asking the man on the other end to lend him some money. The loan will come with interest of ten percent, “maybe thirty, even thirty-five.” To gain sympathy and perhaps clemency from the loan shark, the kid is willing to lie about his (actually dead) father having a stroke.

The next instrumental section has Bruford playing a drum rhythm to go with Wetton’s bass part, which is a faster variation of the slapping part from before. Fripp and Cross (the latter on Hohner pianet with distortion) are playing descending and ascending chromatic octaves, going from F (leading tone) down to B (perfect fourth), then back up to and passing the F to an F-sharp (tonic), then back down to the B again. These chromatic ups and downs (representative of the kid’s fortunes) go through the typical paralleled harmonic ascension as already described.

The final verse is a reflection of the young man and a bandmate on how they tried and failed to make it in the music business: “I took my chance and you took yours; you crewed my ship, we missed the tide.” Now all they have left to comfort themselves is listening to other bands make music, and to discuss how good those bands are.

The song ends with a 7/8 riff with Fripp, Wetton, and Cross (again, on Hohner pianet with distortion) playing F-sharp, C, E, and F-sharp (an octave higher) four times, then transposing that melodic line up by a whole tone, also to be played four times, then all up again by a whole tone, played four times again.

We’ll Let You Know

As I said above, this improv was played live at a gig in Glasgow (at the Apollo Theatre), and it begins after a performance of “Easy Money.” Because “Easy Money” ends in A major, that’s the key this improvisation will be in, and since that song ended with Cross on the violin, he begins with it still in his hands, though the few notes he bows (which include a few half-hearted C-sharps and D-sharps) seem to indicate the absence of his Muse for the moment, so he puts his violin down and goes over to the Hohner pianet. Fripp hits pairs of A harmonics, as if he were tuning his guitar.

The music really starts to liven up when Wetton does some slapping bass. Bruford is hitting some syncopations on the drums and percussion (temple blocks, cowbells, gongs), contributing to what must have been a Crimson first–toying with funk.

Indeed, when Bruford lays down a beat on the drums, he and Wetton are leading the show, with Fripp bending a lot of high blue notes and, sadly, Cross drifting into the background, with his electric piano being mostly drowned out by the other three. One senses that he is feeling an aversion to his growing alienation from the other three here.

You see, Cross was originally important as a textural element in the band, especially as contrasted with Muir’s percussion and random noisemakers on the other side. But after Muir’s departure, Cross seemed to have lost his original context in the band (On pages two and three of the booklet that came with The Great Deceiver box set, Fripp observed these realities, too.). Accordingly, Cross grew frustrated with his growing marginalization in a Crimson that was getting louder and heavier.

None of this is to say, however, that his contributions no longer mattered. Even in this improv, Cross–at one point in the middle of it, as the other three are really starting to take off–hits a bluesy perfect-to-augmented fourth (D to D-sharp) high on the Hohner pianet, right at a fortuitously-timed moment when the other three leave a brief, silent gap for him. Wait for my discussion of “Trio,” when Cross really shines on the violin.

The funkiness soon winds down after some fast drumming on the snare, and the music plods about awkwardly for a moment, then in the recording studio afterwards, they decided, in all eccentricity, to cut the tape and end the recording when Wetton hits an A-sharp on his wah-wah bass.

The Night Watch

As I said above, the opening of this song is from a live performance of it at the Concertgebouw, but the band’s Mellotron broke down during the performance, so from the point of Wetton’s beginning to sing, the rest of the song was recorded in the studio.

Lyrically, the song is about Rembrandt‘s painting, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Bannick Cocq, but popularly called The Night Watch (in Dutch, De Nachtwacht), from 1642. Actually, though, this latter title is a misnomer, since the painting does not depict a nocturnal scene. For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish, giving the mistaken impression that it’s showing a night scene. This mistaken impression is reflected in Palmer-James’s lyric in such lines as “That golden light, all grimy now,” and “upon the canvas, dark with age.”

Now, such is the historical, physical explanation of the darkness of the painting and its popular name. As far as the lyric’s musing over the picture and its meaning in a literary sense, though, we’re free to interpret it as we wish.

The common name of the painting and its darkness tie in with the night theme of the album. Just as the great deceiver is a star in the night, but a man of the world in the light of day, so is the night watch really “a squad of troopers standing fast” by the light of day. And just as “The Great Deceiver” dealt with Catholic capitalist consumerism, so does “The Night Watch” deal with Calvinist capitalist consumerism.

The “Spanish wars” referred to in the song were the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Empire, which went on from the mid-to-late 1560s to 1648. The causes of the war were, among other things, the Reformation and excessive taxation. The reaction against Catholicism was the Dutch Reformed Church, which was Calvinist.

One important aspect of Calvinism is how the Protestant work ethic contributed to the growth of modern capitalism, in that Calvinists believed that their material success was proof of God’s grace and their inclusion among the Elect, or their assurance of salvation in the context of predestination.

So, when Wetton begins by singing “Shine, shine, the light of good works shine” (Matthew 5:14-16), Palmer-James is alluding to this Calvinist notion of doing the good works of the Protestant ethic, which result in the kind of prosperity described in Max Weber‘s book. These Dutch Calvinists were early capitalists, these “creditors and councillors…the merchant men.”

These “merchant men” in turn can be linked, at least in part, to the Dutch East India Company, who were one of the very first multinational corporations, and were also responsible for almost absolute monopoly, colonialism, exploitation, violence, environmental destruction (including deforestation), excessive bureaucracy, and slavery.

It’s interesting how the notion of a militia guarding a district of a Dutch city masks the colonialism and exploitation of, surely, at least some of these “merchant men,” when it’s actually the homes of the indigenous people being colonized and exploited that could have used a militia of their own to protect them from the Dutch colonizers. Imperialists and colonialists often rationalize their aggression against other peoples by claiming they’re acting only in self-defence and the betterment of their own people.

The watch may have been “depicted in their prime,” that is, as a reflection of what seemed the auspicious beginnings of Protestant capitalism, as a breath of comparatively fresh air, in contrast to the previous tyranny of feudal Catholicism; but “that golden light” that did “shine [as] the light of good works” is “all grimy now.” Historically, the painting became dark from the varnish, but we’ll give Palmer-James poetic licence in calling “the canvas dark with age,” since over time, the improvement of capitalism over feudalism would grow empty from being just another form of class conflict and oppression.

Palmer-James’s lyric gives us the painting from three perspectives: those of the subjects of the picture, of Rembrandt, and of a modern viewer of the painting, this last being the most relatable to us listeners of the song, and thus the perspective I’m by far most interested in using to give an interpretation of the picture’s, and lyric’s, meaning.

Of course, these ascending upper middle-class Dutch, representative of any bourgeoisie anywhere in the world–including, for example, the US after declaring independence from British rule, or contemporary China after shaking off the yoke of Western imperialism–are all preoccupied with “Dutch respectability.” The newly-gained wealth of these bourgeois allows them to pay for such luxuries as “guitar lessons for the wife.”

The bourgeoisie are always concerned with their social status–music lessons, foreign language lessons, etc.–to make them appear ‘cultured’…all the while enabling the kinds of colonialist, imperialist savagery that goes on overseas. ‘The blunderbuss and halberd-shaft” represent these forms of aggression that are masked by a pretense of protecting one’s own town against perceived threats from outside.

After all the Spanish wars, these Dutch bourgeoisie can now sit back, relax, and reflect on their accomplishments, enjoying “quiet reigns behind [their] doors.” To translate this experience into that of our modern world, such quiet contemplation is the privilege of the rich First World’s relaxation, as opposed to the ongoing toil, poverty, and misery of the Third World that the colonialists and imperialists cause to this day.

Still, religion can be used as a mask to hide this exploitation and abuse, like the Calvinism of the 17th century Dutch, who pretended to embody good Christian virtues. “So the pride of little men, the burghers good and true,” is a case of golden light darkened with age, the age of the consequences of all that colonialism and imperialism. One should think of this in connection with what Wetton would later sing: “gold through my eyes, but my eyes, turned within, only see–starless and Bible black.”

Trio

This live improvisation, from the Concertgebouw show, was made up of Cross, Wetton, and Fripp on Mellotron (flute tapes), while Bruford sat with his drumsticks across his chest, waiting for an appropriate moment to join in, but feeling that such a moment never came. Even though Bruford added not a single note or beat to the other three’s performance, he was given a writing credit all the same, since his silence showed “admirable restraint,” as stated in the liner notes to the compilation, A Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson.

They’re playing in C major, so Fripp, finding the keyboards to be a secondary instrument to his guitar, need only worry about playing the white keys. Nonetheless, the playing of all three is transcendently beautiful–not one note is superfluous or misplaced. This is a music of great serenity and spiritual bliss. Apart from its referring to the three players, “Trio” could represent the spirituality associated with the Trinity.

Now, no grasp of dveșa–aversion, hate–is possible without a grasp of its dialectical opposite, rāga–desire, which here could be heard as, for example, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Still, as discussed in “The Great Deceiver” and “The Night Watch,” this Bible is a black Bible.

The Mincer

Because, as I said above, this track was part of a much longer live improvisation recorded in the Volkshaus in Zurich and later named “The Law of Maximum Distress,” it fades in here with an eerie atmosphere brought about by a high ascending glissando on Cross’s violin, Bruford’s tapping of the tom-toms, and Fripp’s dissonant Mellotron (strings tapes). Cross then puts down the violin and goes over to the Hohner pianet, which he plays through distortion.

Wetton’s bass anchors the improvising with a line of A, A pull-off to G, C-sharp, D, E, and variations on that. The spooky, dissonant music of Cross’s electric piano and Fripp’s Mellotron (the latter soon switching to guitar) is heard over those bass variations and those of Bruford’s rhythms of rim-shots, hi-hat, and bass drum, for several minutes before we hear Wetton’s vocal overdubs.

Wetton seems to be singing about a home invader or killer, like someone out of a slasher film. In other words, the mincer (one who cuts into tiny pieces) is someone to whom we can only feel the greatest aversion. One ought to be reminded that the Devil, or great deceiver, was “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).

The night motif returns with the ironic “good night, honey.” Killers like this one often “come better looking” than he is (that is, they’re often deceptively charming), but the mincer is as insane as they get. The abrupt cutting-off of the tape just makes it all the more frightening.

Starless and Bible Black

Rather than hearing them in this live improvisation from the Concertgebouw, the words of the title are heard in the song “Starless,” from Red (see below). One could find some thematic links here between both tracks: a starless night, the “Bible black” of religion corrupted by bourgeois consumerism (in its Catholic and Protestant forms) and colonialism, as we already explored in “The Great Deceiver” and “The Night Watch,” and finally, the ending of friendships.

This ending of friendships is a move from love to hate (dveșa), and the rāga, attachment to one’s friends leads to an aversion to the breaking-up with them. Nonetheless, impermanence is a reality in the world, as well as a central tenet in Buddhism. The delusion (moha) that all we see and hear around us has a permanent reality, which leads to rāga and dveșa, will be the dominant theme of Red.

For King Crimson, the impermanence of the band and the ending of friendships among the bandmates was already being keenly felt, as Cross was withdrawing from the other three and, as I said above, feeling more and more frustration over his contributions to the music being drowned out by the others’ loudness. For Fripp, sensing the immanent collapse of this band must have been a disconcerting reminder of the ongoing instability of 1970 to 1972.

As these improvs generally do, this one begins softly and slowly, building to a climax. We hear Fripp’s sustained guitar leads, Cross on the Hohner pianet, Bruford playing a glockenspiel, and Wetton’s bass lines centering on the tonic.

Soon, Cross’s pianet will be played through distortion, Bruford will be shaking a tambourine, Fripp will be getting feedback from his guitar, and Wetton will be doing a slapping bass line of G hammering on to A. Then Cross will switch to playing dissonant Mellotron lines (string tapes), and Bruford will be hitting temple blocks and cowbells. The music sustains this eeriness, an eeriness we’ll later hear in 13/8 in this track’s sequel song, “Starless.” Losing everything, including the loss of friends, is scary.

Bruford will soon switch to the drum kit and improvise some great licks. Wetton is playing variations on a line that anchors the music around him: G, hammer-on to A, C, E, and back to G and A. Fripp is bending high blue notes through distorted guitar.

After the climax, the music softens a bit, and Cross switches the Mellotron from the strings setting to flute tapes. He plays some dense chords, including a stack of fourths at one point.

Finally, he picks up the violin and has a moment where, for a change, he’s the centre of attention. His violin licks ending off the track seem like an omen for his departure from the band later in the year of S&BB‘s release. He’ll have a similar moment to shine on “Providence,” but on “Starless,” a song he’s credited with cowriting and one he played live with King Crimson, he won’t be heard on the studio version.

Fracture

Like “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two” and the title track from Red (see below), “Fracture” is a guitar-based instrumental credited only to Fripp. It is called “Fracture” because, according to Fripp, it is a kind of étude, a study meant to help a musician to tackle a certain technical challenge, which is immediately apparent about three minutes into the piece, a moto perpetuo section that goes on uninterrupted for about another three minutes and ten seconds.

Fracture is like the break between the possible and the impossible, between joy and torture, and between what is challenging and what is despairingly frustrating. A guitarist named Anthony Garone, from the Make Weird Music channel on YouTube, took up the challenge to learn this “impossible” guitar part, and wrote of the difficulty of playing it in his book, Failure to Fracture. Few guitarists would have the guts to take on the challenge of playing the moto perpetuo section: most would feel only an aversion to the formidable task.

Fripp’s guitar technique is particular to him, with cross-picking as his specialty, a playing style associated with banjo playing in bluegrass. His playing is also influenced far more by avant-garde jazz and European classical music than by blues-based rock. The middle section of “Fracture” is far from the only piece that showcases Fripp’s playing in moto perpetuo. When we think of guitar virtuosi in rock, we usually think of shredders like Steve Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen, who play lightning-speed ‘sprints,’ as it were. Fripp, while not playing quite as fast, instead is more like a ‘marathon’ runner, continuing to play fast for a long time, as he does not only on “Fracture,” but also during the dissonant arpeggio sections in “Larks’ Tongues” one (as described above) and three (on Three of a Perfect Pair), and on “Frame by Frame” (on Discipline). Vai has an apt word to describe Fripp’s technical virtuosity: “relentlessness.”

Melodically and harmonically, “Fracture” is based on the whole-tone scale, with some quasi-Lydian mode variations (i.e., the sharpened fourth and perfect fifth of the mode). It begins with a fade-in of Fripp playing arpeggios from whole-tone scale notes. The recording is from a live performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

In spite of the tonal ambiguity of the whole-tone scale, the music has essentially an A major, or A augmented, tonal centre. After the arpeggiated fade-in described above, we come to the main theme, in which the rest of the band comes in, with Cross playing a viola, often using a wah-wah pedal. We hear a theme of A, F-G-B and back to A to be repeated, then the theme is transposed to C-sharp, A-B-D-sharp-C-sharp, then transposed to G, C-sharp-D-sharp-A-G, then it returns to the A-to-A contour.

All of this music, from the opening arpeggios to the augmented-triad-based melodic contours described in the previous paragraph, is heard a second time, then we come to the moto perpetuo section. Those rapid-fire sixteenth notes are about ten per second, by Fripp’s estimation. He never takes a break from them, not even once, for a little over three minutes! It’s one of the hardest passages he ever wrote for himself to play; it pushes his abilities to the limit.

Most of the passage is in 4/4, though some of it is in 5/4, during which you can hear Bruford adding glockenspiel and xylophone. There’s another part of the passage with a bar of 6/4, then of 5/4, then of 7/4, which features viola lines from Cross.

Then it returns to the main riff of the A to A, C-sharp to C-sharp, and G to G contours as I described them above. Then there’s a soft lull in the music before the loud climax.

One interesting section of the climax is when Wetton and Bruford are playing a polymetre against Fripp and Cross. The former pair are playing alternating bars in 7/4 and 8/4 to the latter pair’s three-bar sets of 5/4, all adding up to a fifteen-beat cycle. After that, all four members are playing in 5/4 after a couple of bars in 4/4.

The building climax ends with Bruford banging a gong and some feedback from Fripp’s guitar.

IV: Red

Now, the band has become a ‘trio’ (with a number of guest musicians, at least one on each of the five tracks, if you include Cross’s violin on “Providence” as ‘session work,’ that is), judging by the front cover photo of the album, with Wetton smiling, Bruford seemingly daydreaming, and Fripp looking intensely serious behind his spectacles.

This album, with the photo on the back cover showing one of the meters on the studio’s mixing desk going over to the red, indicating distortion, was a move in an even heavier direction. Indeed, the British music magazine Q rated Red as one of the fifty “heaviest albums of all time.” Kurt Cobain of Nirvana considered the album to be a major influence on him.

The choice of session musicians on Red seems like an omen for King Crimson’s imminent demise, for having not only former members like Ian McDonald (alto sax) and Mel Collins (soprano sax), but also Robin Miller (oboe) and Mark Charig (cornet)–these latter two having been session musicians on Lizard and Islands–suggests that Red was meant to sum up everything that King Crimson had been up to that point.

The red that indicates distortion can also symbolize the idea of distortion of perceptions of reality, or delusion, illusion–moha, the dominant theme of this album, as I’ll soon demonstrate through my interpretation of the lyrics of the three tracks with vocals on the album: “Fallen Angel,” “One More Red Nightmare,” and “Starless.” There’s a sense in all three songs that things aren’t what they seem to be.

But first, let’s look at the title track.

Red

The album has been called the first prog metal album (though perhaps Rush‘s Fly by Night is another early contender for that title), and such a judgement seems justified already from hearing the beginning of this instrumental, another guitar-based one written by Fripp. Apart from the heaviness with which it explodes, we also have two bars of 5/8, one of 6/8, and one of 4/4. These time changes are repeated twice before going into the main 4/4 riff in E.

During this opening, Fripp plays ascending leads that go from being octatonic-scale-oriented to resolving in C, then to E (the first and third times), and resolving in D major (the second time). While the first resolution to E has Fripp’s lead going up to a perfect fifth (B), the second resolution to E has his lead going up to the E’s tritone (B-flat).

The main riff in E has Fripp playing a yo-yoing pair of barred major thirds on the third and first frets of the G and B strings on his guitar, so A-sharp and D, then G-sharp and C. The barre then goes up to the fourth fret (B and D-sharp), then down to the third and first fret barres as already described, then the riff is resolved to E.

This riff is played twice, then transposed up a step, or up two frets, to F-sharp, then back down to E. Then the riff is transposed up three frets to G, played twice, and back down to E again.

Next comes a passage in 7/8, with Wetton anchoring the tonality in B-flat, a tritone from Fripp’s playing of parallel major thirds of E and G-sharp, and E-flat and G. This resolves to E major in 4/4, with Wetton playing some high notes in G-sharp and A, then E-flat and E. These 7/8 and 4/4 parts are repeated.

Next, they’re playing in B, with Fripp playing partially open-string chords, first with a suspension fourth, then one with just roots and fifths. Then they go up to D, and Wetton’s bass goes down to C, and they return to the main riff in E, which is a shortened version of what was heard before (i.e., without the transposition to G).

After a repeat of the alternating 7/8 and 4/4 section I described above, there’s a return to the key of B, but instead of going up to D, this time they go down to A, then to F-sharp and E.

There’s a new passage in 7/8 time, which rises in a crescendo to the middle section, an eerie one starting in G-sharp Dorian with a theme played by an uncredited cellist. It modulates back to E, then to B. This theme is repeated with minor variations, then the music goes back to the main riff in E.

We go through another sequence with the main riff, then the instrumental ends with the octatonic-oriented, ascending leads in 5/8, 6/8, and 4/4 that the piece began with. That pounding rhythm section of Wetton and Bruford drove Fripp to play as loudly so he could keep up with the two of them. Playing an instrument stereotypically associated with ‘nerds,’ Cross unfortunately couldn’t keep up with the other three’s ‘metal’ intensity. As a heavy trio now, King Crimson had nothing holding them back on Red.

Fallen Angel

The song begins in E minor with, alongside a lead from Fripp, that uncredited cellist. Then it goes to the relative major with Wetton singing over a progression of G major, C major, B minor, E minor, C major, B minor, and A minor. Fripp is doing overdubs of electric guitar leads and acoustic guitar arpeggios. Miller’s oboe will also be heard, as well as some Mellotron string tapes in the background.

Wetton sings of a young man’s love for his little brother, such a sweet, innocent little boy from his birth. Years later, the boy will join his big brother in a street gang in New York City. He’ll be killed in a fight with another gang, stabbed with a switchblade. The older brother wishes it was he who died instead.

He imagines his dead younger brother as a “fallen angel”…but if he was an angel, how did he allow himself to be involved in “knife fights and danger”? Surely, this brotherly love is blinding him from the reality that his kid brother wasn’t as sweet and innocent as he thinks him to be.

The boy fell to the ground, dead, but he also fell as Satan and the other rebel angels fell from heaven. The boy’s involvement in gang violence was a fall from grace, a case of the impermanence of innocence. So in the song’s narrative, we have the moha, illusion, of innocence and its apparent permanence masking the reality of guilt and impermanence. Fraternal love is a red distortion of the reality of the younger brother’s participation in crime and gang violence.

Now, why is there this crime and gang violence, causing one to “risk a life to make a dime”? The usual culprit–poverty, caused in turn by the mode of production that allowed for the ascendance of the “burghers good and true” sung of in “The Night Watch,” among others. Some get rich while many others get poor: “lifetimes spent on the streets of a city make us the people we are.”

All it takes is “one tenth of a moment” for the stab of a knife to change one from living to dead–such is the fragility of life’s impermanence. A protective young man would wish to tell his younger brother to “get back to the car” and avoid getting killed in a fight with switchblades.

The mellow music turns heavy, and with a switch from 4/4 to 6/4. Fripp starts playing distorted arpeggios in B minor. This switch from mainly acoustic guitar to distorted electric guitar, from mellow to heavy, musically represents the switch from a brother’s sentimental love, and its illusory idealizing of his “angel” kid brother, to the forced realization that this “angel” has fallen, from life and from grace. We also hear Charig doing a solo on the cornet.

The “West-side skyline crying” verse is mostly repeated, again a change from soft and acoustic to loud and electric, musically reflecting this switch from sweet illusion to harsh reality. A brother dying from a knife fight on the West Side implies the blue-collar neighbourhood of West Side Story, in which Bernardo, Maria’s brother and leader of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks, is stabbed by Tony in revenge for Bernardo’s stabbing of Riff. It’s doubtful, to say the least, that Wetton’s singing is meant to represent the voice of Anita, Bernardo’s kid sister, of course, but I don’t mean “Fallen Angel” to be a retelling of the fight-scene from the musical; rather, “West Side” is an allusion to it, to evoke similar feelings and a similar atmosphere.

“The snow white side streets” are “stained with his blood,” a stark contrast of the angelic purity of white with the violence of red. My West Side Story allusion above is to indicate that the Bernardo-like stab victim only seems an angel to his loving family, whereas his own violence shows him to be far from angelic. Rather, he was “wicked and wild.”

Growing up in poverty explains the gangs’ violence to each other, but it doesn’t justify it. Their anger should be directed at the ruling class instead. Then they’d be true angels…avenging angels, but true ones nonetheless. The song ends with that 6/4 part with Fripp’s distorted arpeggios and more cornet soloing from Charig.

One More Red Nightmare

The song begins with a dark riff in E and in 7/4 alternating with a pair of bars in 4/4, with notes of E, G-sharp, and A-sharp played three times, then a chord of tritones in E and A-sharp. This is all transposed up a tritone, then returns to E. Then it’s all transposed back up the tritone to A-sharp, then up another step to C, and we have the first verse. That melodic contour will also be heard with thirds in the guitar.

This is the one time a 1970s King Crimson song lyric was ever written by John Wetton, rather than by a lyricist from outside the musicians of the band. Instead of singing about an illusion of goodness masking evil, we have the reverse here: he’s dreaming of being on an airplane about to crash and kill everybody, but he wakes and realizes he’s on a Greyhound bus, perfectly safe. Moha goes both ways, with this “red nightmare” another distortion of reality.

The progression for the verses is C minor, G-sharp major, F-major, and back to C. As for that tritone-oriented riff in alternating 7/4 and 4/4 as I described above, Bruford doesn’t some great licks there. There’s one percussion instrument he uses on the album, and it’s featured on this track. I’d always assumed it was a piece of sheet metal, as was used by Muir from time to time on LTIA. Apparently, what it really was was a damaged cymbal left in the trash in the recording studio; Bruford took pity on it and fell in love with its “trashy sound.”

After the first two verses and refrain of Wetton singing the title of the song, it shifts to an E-minor section in 6/4. Fripp is playing arpeggios, and he’s overdubbed some guitar lines with the wah-wah pedal. Ian McDonald begins the first of two alto sax solos for this song, starting the first one off with a long trill of E and D.

Moha–or ignorance, delusion, illusion, confusion–comes from a failure to accept that impermanence is the only constant in the universe. One hopes that the good times will last forever, hence, rāga, or greed, desire, lust. One can’t imagine, on the other side of the coin, that the bad times will eventually be over, that ‘this too shall pass,’ hence, dveșa, or hate, aversion, hostility. So in the singer’s illusory dream, he thinks he’ll really die on the plane.

But then, “reality stirred [him]” and “the dream was now broken.” The song ends with a repeat of the 6/4 section and another alto sax solo by McDonald.

Providence

This live improv got its name simply from having been performed in Providence, Rhode Island, of course (a longer version can be heard on The Great Deceiver box set), but I’m intrigued with the connotations of the name of the city and improv, especially as juxtaposed with the spooky mood of the music played.

One of the oldest cities in New England, Providence was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian, naming the area in honour of “God’s merciful Providence,” which he believed gave him and his followers a haven after having been exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This religious feeling ties in thematically with songs like “The Great Deceiver,” “Trio,” and “The Night Watch,” as I interpreted above. Protestant colonial settlement is linked with beginnings of capitalism, and the benefits gained therefrom are most impermanent.

“God’s merciful Providence” is surely a case of moha, or ignorant delusion, when one considers how selectively said-Providence is meted out. Those in the middle classes and upward, especially those in the First World, are provided for well enough in most cases; in the lower classes, and especially in the Third World, though, one isn’t provided for all that well, to put it mildly.

Thus the juxtaposition of the track’s title with its outright horror-movie-like music is most apt. The improv begins with Cross’s violin improvising sadly, and all alone. He wavers in and out of tonality, Wetton’s distorted bass is heard emerging from the background, Fripp plucks a note on his guitar, and Bruford hits a gong. The band seems to be finding its footing.

Fripp goes over to his Mellotron and uses the flute tapes to accompany Cross’s increasingly dissonant playing. Wetton’s distorted, feedback-swelling bass is adding to the tension, as is Bruford’s gong.

This music is such a demonic contrast to the symbolically Trinitarian serenity we heard in “Trio,” I’d say, dialectically so, for that serenity was a moha mask to cover the frightening reality of a world decidedly lacking in “God’s merciful Providence.”

As the horror builds, Bruford plays around with more percussion instruments, including the temple blocks and a xylophone. Eventually, Fripp leaves the Mellotron and goes back to his guitar.

The music starts to pick up the pace when Bruford gets behind the drum kit. The music reprises its heavy, Red nature, but not in the conventional, guitar-driven sense, for it’s Wetton’s aggressive bass and Bruford’s pounding on the drums–that “flying brick wall,” as Fripp described them–and not so much Fripp’s playing, that’s providing the heaviness.

After that heaviness reaches a climax, the music settles down a bit, and Cross resumes his dissonant violin playing, while Fripp can be heard in the background playing a rhythm part with his wah-wah pedal. Once the music has reached eight minutes, it is faded out, the last thing we hear being a repeated three-note phrase of descending violin notes.

Starless

This epic twelve-minute song sees the old King Crimson ending in a blaze of glory. It begins soft and sad and with vocals, is eerie and dark in the middle and building into an explosive climax, then fast and frenzied, and it ends with a loud, powerful but instrumental restating of the original, sad themes.

Since the band would soon break up after the completion of this album, the lyric’s subject matter, about the ending of a friendship, is most apt. Wetton wrote the sad opening, which had different lyrics and/or verses in a different order. The band originally didn’t like what Wetton had written, but after adding the later instrumental section, they played the whole song with Cross during their 1974 tour.

The song, in its embryonic, Wetton-composed form, was originally going to be called “Starless and Bible Black” and to be the title track of the previous album; but since the others didn’t like it at the time, disappointed Wetton shelved the song, and when in its completed form, the song was to be included on Red, its title was shortened to “Starless.”

It opens with sad Mellotron lines in sixths and backed with soft bass and drums. The bass is playing a D at first, and the harmonic progression is a D augmented chord and a D7, without the major third as a leading tone. It resolves to G minor, with a lead then played by Fripp–originally played by Cross on the violin, with a few changes of notes–over a progression of C minor, D minor, and G minor.

This is all repeated (the guitar line up an octave), then we go into the first verse. Mel Collins’s soprano sax can be heard improvising in the background.

As the sun is setting, Wetton sings of a “dazzling day,” with “gold through [his] eyes.” This beauty is an illusion, though, symbolizing the illusion of a permanent friendship; for when his eyes are “turned within,” they “only see” the friendless reality of a darkness so absolute, it’s “starless and Bible black.”

The love of that friendship would seem to be the kind of love preached in the Bible (e.g., in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13), but this is a love that does not bear or endure all things. This love does fail. It does not remain with faith and hope. It is of a black Bible. The original lyric had “gold through my eyes” changing to “steel grey,” but emotively speaking, it has about the same effect: a change from a pleasant illusion to a harsh reality.

At the word “black,” the progression goes from D to C, then to B-flat major, A minor, and to G minor. The second verse establishes the idea of a friendship going sour. The “charity” of the “old friend” may remind us, with bitter irony, of the three things that are supposed to abide forever, according to the King James translation: faith, hope, and charity. The “cruel, twisted smile” tells the singer that that ‘everlasting friendship’ “signals emptiness for [him].”

In the third verse, we hear that uncredited cellist in the background, playing a lamenting line as Wetton sings of a “silver sky” that “fades into grey,” which is “a grey hope that all yearns to be […] black.” In this line, we observe how a flawed friendship worsens until one actually wishes for hope to change into black despair, since continued hope is only sure to disappoint.

The rest of the song is instrumental, and with no disrespect intended to Wetton, by far the best part of the song. Wetton plays a dark bass line in 13/8: C, G-flat, G-natural, these three notes again, E-flat, and the cycle repeats. Fripp, as if taunting his fans with, “No, art-rock nerds, I’m not going to display my guitar virtuosity for you. Suck it up!” plays his ‘one-note solo’ here, starting on G.

Then, Wetton’s bass line changes to F, down to A, and up chromatically from there to B-flat, B-natural, and C, and to G-sharp (with Fripp playing a G-flat) and back to F to repeat the cycle. Then it will return to the cycle starting on C as described above (with Fripp playing G-natural). Finally, we’ll come up to G, and 13/8 will change to 4/4 for a brief while, then we’ll return to 13/8 and the bass line starting on C, to repeat all of this again and again.

This section will build to, as I described above, an explosive climax, with Wetton’s bass growing louder and heavier, Bruford adding percussion (including the clicking of temple blocks in a 4/4 cross-rhythm), and Fripp switching his “one-note solo” up to A, then A-sharp, B (by which time Bruford is playing an assertive beat on the drums), C, and finally D, which brings us to that climax, with Fripp leading us there by playing D-sharp, F, F-sharp, and G.

While he is bending high Gs and G-flats, Bruford is about to do some wild smashing about, and Wetton’s bass is at its ballsiest. In The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (published in 1983), the reviewer of Red says, “Bruford punctuates magificently.” These words perfectly describe his powerful bashing during this section, as well as his playing on “One More Red Nightmare.”

After this climactic section–which ends in a 4/4 swing time, with low, distorted G notes and Fripp playing squealing high notes–the 13/8 bass contour returns at double the speed, making the band race in 13/16 time. McDonald does a frantic alto sax solo, with the background music’s tonal centres going from C minor (tonic) to F minor (subdominant), back to the C tonic, then to G (dominant), thus sounding like King Crimson’s perverse parody of 12-bar blues again, something I discussed in my analyses of the band’s first two albums.

McDonald had expressed regret over leaving King Crimson with original drummer Michael Giles back in 1970, and was about to rejoin the band. His superb soloing here shows that had the band survived and done a tour to promote Red, he would have held his own just fine with Fripp, Wetton, and Bruford, and the new quartet would have been a formidable Crimson.

In between this and the next 13/16 section is a brief replaying of the melody sung by Wetton, but with Collins’s soprano sax and Miller’s oboe. In the background, Wetton is playing Cs on his bass, and Bruford is doing some fast tapping of the hi-hat. After Collins’s playing of the “starless and Bible black” melody, we go back to the frantic 13/16 part, but instead of hearing McDonald’s alto sax again, we hear Fripp playing screaming variations of his former high string bending of Gs and G-flats.

The song ends with a return to the opening theme, heard then as a guitar lead (or live, as a violin theme), but now played by Collins and Miller (live, it would have been a guitar lead). Instead of being soft and sad, though, it’s loud, heavy, and powerful, with our trio pounding away in D, then ending in G minor, with a high ninth from the soprano sax and oboe.

V: Conclusion

As I said above, a quartet of Fripp, McDonald, Wetton, and Bruford would have been an amazing band, but it wasn’t meant to be. Fripp abruptly broke up King Crimson, having gone through some kind of emotional crisis and wanting to take a year off (the capitalist consumerism of the record company’s wish for the band to produce hit singles must have added to the pressure of a musician who didn’t want to have to sacrifice his artistic integrity to the tyranny of profits). Parallel to Muir’s joining a Buddhist monastery, Fripp was yearning for some kind of spiritual enlightenment, and he believed he’d found it in the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff through John G. Bennett.

Now, Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” is not Buddhism, of course, but one can glean the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism in it. In any case, one can see how in Gurdjieff’s ideas, our living in a hypnotic “waking sleep” and needing to “wake up” can be likened to what I said about about moha, illusion. Through Gurdjieff’s notion of “intentional suffering,” one can free oneself of desire (rāga) and overcome one’s aversion (dveșa) to all that one finds unpleasant.

Seen from this angle, Fripp’s and Muir’s departure from King Crimson shows how LTIA, S&BB, and Red all thematically demonstrate Buddhism’s Three Poisons. Fripp and Muir tasted the toxins, got sick from them, and had to leave in an attempt to cure themselves.