I: Introduction

Lizard is a 1970 album by King Crimson, their third, after In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) and In the Wake of Poseidon (1970). It represents leader/guitarist Robert Fripp‘s attempt at establishing a new lineup for the band, replacing Ian McDonald (sax, flute, Mellotron, etc.), Michael Giles (drums), and Greg Lake (bass, vocals) with Mel Collins (saxes, flute), Andy McCulloch (drums), and Gordon Haskell (bass, vocals), while Fripp would double on guitar and Mellotron.

The lineup wouldn’t last, though. In fact, the recording of Lizard had hardly been finished when the band fell apart. Haskell, who’d sung a guest vocal on “Cadence and Cascade” on ITWOP, quit because he, more of a soul/Motown kind of musician, couldn’t connect with the music he was required by Fripp to sing and play. McCulloch quit shortly after that, meaning that Lizard, just like its predecessor, ITWOP, would have no touring band to promote it.

Haskell would eventually be replaced by singer Boz Burrell, whom Fripp taught to play bass. McCulloch would be replaced by drummer Ian Wallace, a housemate of McCulloch’s. This lineup of Fripp, Collins, Burrell, Wallace, and lyricist/lightshow-man Peter Sinfield would produce the band’s fourth studio album, Islands. They would also be…finally!…a touring band, and though Sinfield would quit, leaving Fripp the only remaining original member of King Crimson, they’d release Earthbound, the band’s first (and poorly-recorded) live album.

To get back to Lizard, Fripp brought in a number of session musicians to add lots more colour to the album, as well as a more pronounced jazz influence. These included pianist Keith Tippett, whose by turns jazzy and dissonant playing was previously heard on ITWOP (“Cadence and Cascade,” “Cat Food,” and “The Devil’s Triangle”). On Lizard, this kind of playing is heard on both acoustic and electric pianos.

New session musicians include Marc Charig (cornet) and Robin Miller (oboe and cor anglais). These two would also be guest musicians on Islands (with Tippett) and Red. Nick Evans (trombone) is another guest player on Lizard. Jon Anderson of Yes did guest vocals on the song, “Prince Rupert Awakes.”

A major issue for Fripp and Sinfield when it came to making Lizard would have been to come up with material that sounded fresh. After all, a major criticism of ITWOP was that it sounded too much like a reworking of ITCOTCK, and not enough as an entity in its own right.

It’s been said that Sinfield used the image of lizards to symbolize the old guard, the established order. They also represent obstacles and conflict, as well as a cycle of rises and falls. In connection with this last idea, one may note that the ouroboros is not necessarily just a serpent coiled in a circle biting its tail, but also possibly a dragon doing the same thing, as a symbol of eternity, a reptile passing through endless cycles. By extension, one could imagine an auto-cannibalistic lizard.

For King Crimson, that ‘old guard,’ or ‘established order’ would have been the original lineup and the music they’d played. This old way was a lizard’s skin they still hadn’t quite shed as of ITWOP, hence the reworking of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” “I Talk to the Wind,” and “Epitaph” as, respectively, “Pictures of a City,” “Cadence and Cascade,” and “In the Wake of Poseidon.” This new album, Lizard, implies that the old skin has finally been shed.

At the same time, though, the shedding of a lizard’s old skin results in a new skin that will become an old skin to be shed again. So in this way, we see how lizards also represent cycles. In other words, there would be a return to the old situations, that is, the conflicts that resulted in another falling apart of the band, as we see in the departures of Haskell and McCulloch. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Attempts at transformation, symbolized in the imagery of alchemy in Sinfield’s lyrics, are part of that wish of Fripp and Sinfield to turn the problems of King Crimson back into the triumph of the original lineup, like a transforming of base metals into gold. The ability to achieve this goal of alchemy has, of course, eluded man ever since it was first attested to in a number of texts from the first few centuries AD. Similarly, Fripp’s and Sinfield’s attempt to bring back the gold of their band resulted in obstacles, conflicts, and ultimate failure with the departure of Haskell and McCulloch.

As for the worth of the music on Lizard, well, that depends on the judgement of the listeners. For his part, Fripp has never liked the album; whoever does like Lizard is, by his estimation, “very strange,” though he found himself liking it more upon hearing Steven Wilson’s surround sound mix of the album for the 40th anniversary reissue. He said, “For the first time I have heard the Music in the music.” Fripp also recommended getting an early edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to interpret the lyrics.

The album’s outside cover, by Gini Barris, spells out King on the back and Crimson on the front, all in medieval illuminated lettering. Each letter has its own picture, referencing the song lyrics. King references those of the “Lizard” suite on Side Two, and Crimson references the four songs on Side One.

The images referencing “Lizard” are all medieval in content, while those referencing the four songs on Side One are a combination of medieval and modern scenes. The King letters thus depict such scenes as Prince Rupert, a peacock, and the Battle of Glass Tears. As for Crimson, the C shows the “Cirkus,” the R “Lady of the Dancing Water,” the I, the Beatles in “Happy Family,” the M seems to depict this line in “Cirkus”: “Gave me each a horse, sunrise, and graveyard,” the S shows scenes from “Indoor Games,” such as swimming “in purple perspex water wings,” the O according to Sinfield’s “Song Soup on Sea” has a picture representing “Dawn,” and the N shows Jimi Hendrix, Ginger Baker, and Peter Gabriel playing the flute.

Here is a link to the album’s lyrics, all written by Sinfield, while all the music is credited to Fripp. Here‘s a link to all the tracks on the album.

II: Cirkus (including ‘Entry of the Chameleons’)

The song begins with Keith Tippett playing soft arpeggios in E minor on an electric piano. Haskell will sing a tune of mostly seesawing major or minor seconds, the first four lines of each verse going largely back and forth between E and D until the last words of each fourth line, being an F-sharp. Then, in the fifth and sixth lines, his singing mostly seesaws back and forth between G and F-sharp, until the last words of each sixth line, which are A and B. Finally, lines seven and eight of each verse are largely a back-and-forth of C and B, until the last word of the eighth line, which slides up from the B to a D-sharp, the leading tone of E minor.

Sinfield has said that “Cirkus” is about the beginning of his life, of all life, and of the universe. We certainly get a sense of that in the first verse, given metaphorically in its depiction of the night coming to dawn. The first line beautifully paints a picture of the black sky studded with stars.

Night here is Nyx, a primordial Greek goddess from the beginning of time, hence the first verse gives us the birth of the universe, with her as its mother, as well as Sinfield’s and ours. The dust she fused would be like the dust (adamah) that Adam was made from. Nyx “squeezed [Sinfield] to her breast” like a mother feeding her baby, and carbon is one of the building blocks of life. That she “strung [his] warp across time,” that is, used a loom, suggests a loose association with the Moirai, or Fates who spin the thread of life and destiny (even though, technically, Clotho used a spindle and distaff).

She gave him a horse, which represents the education he’ll need to ride on through life, though this equine will turn out to be to be a zebra, since his education will be a conventional one of simple, black-and-white answers. The sunrise and graveyard she gave him are simply his birth (the dawn) and his death, as the Moirai give all of us, birth and death as cyclical as dawn and dusk: reincarnation.

After this verse of the birth of Sinfield (and of all of us, and of the universe), his dawn–when he looks to the east, full of questions, and feels Nyx’s motherly love so fully that he is the only one to her, he is her other self (“only I was her”)–the music gets a little tense. Fripp plays a dark line on the Mellotron, low brass tapes, of mostly A-sharp and G, back and forth in another seesaw pattern, with two high Es, the second of which begins a descending E minor arpeggio.

Now, the rest of the band come in, Fripp’s acoustic guitar in particular, for the second verse. Sinfield has washed away the mud of his innocence and rough-around-the-edges ignorance and naïveté, and after the “zebra ride” of his bland, black-and-white education, he has come to the “cirkus.”

So, what does the “cirkus” represent? On some level, it’s about society in general, including politics and the media; but Sinfield’s lyrics are so jam-packed with metaphors and symbolism, all piled on top of each other, that many layers of meaning can be found in them. I’d like to delve into a meaning that I don’t think has been dealt with much, if at all…and I think that meaning can be gleaned from the title’s odd spelling.

Why a k rather than a second c? Recall how the outside album cover shows Crimson on the front and King on the back, and recall that the C shows the…cirkus. This song is, on one level, about society, politics, and entertainment (i.e., the media) in general, yet it’s also about a particular subset of society and entertainment (Fripp’s and Sinfield’s band!) and the ugly politics inside it…the cirkus of the crimson king.

So, after finishing his dull education, Sinfield has met with McDonald, then Fripp and Giles, and finally, Lake…he’s gone to the cirkus. When he “spoke to the paybox glove which wrote on [his] tongue,” he found himself being paid to write poetry, the lyrics on ITCOTCK. His going down “to the arena” was his experience operating the lightshow for the band’s performances. The “megaphonium fanfare” was the audience’s enthusiastic reaction (e.g., the Hyde Park gig), and ringmaster Fripp “bid [Sinfield] join the parade.”

Haskell’s shout at the end of the second verse suggests something many Crimson members over the years have felt about the band: “It’s an absolutely terrifying place.” Haskell and McCulloch felt that way, hence, they quit almost immediately after the recording of Lizard was finished. Despite Fripp’s sundry denials about being a dictator, and his insistence that he was only the glue that held King Crimson (“a way of doing things”) together, let’s face it: with all due respect to him, he was a dictator, as was Frank Zappa. Judy Dyble, who sang on another version of “I Talk to the Wind” during the transition between Giles, Giles, and Fripp and King Crimson, didn’t get along with Fripp, saying that working with him was “quite frightening.”

With Haskell’s shout comes a fitting return to the tense, seesawing Mellotron-brass line of mostly A-sharp and G, a melodic representation of the cyclical theme of Lizard. Fripp adds some of his trademark fast cross-picking on the acoustic guitar, ending it with E minor arpeggios.

“‘Worship!’ cried the clown. ‘I am a TV.'” is, on one level, a general critique of viewers’ mesmerized and uncritical taking in of all of the clownish nonsense in the media. More specifically, it could refer to King Crimson’s appearance on Top of the Pops, faking a performance of “Cat Food.” After all, the TV was “making bandsmen go clockwork,” in the mechanistic fakery of King Crimson’s ‘performance.’

The penile “slinky seal cirkus policeman” and “bareback ladies have fish” sound as if a member of King Crimson was enjoying naked groupies, possibly those with STDs.

The “strongmen” and “plate-spinning statesmen” who are “acrobatically juggling” represent, in my interpretation, the members of the band demonstrating their superb musicianship, amazing audiences the way they did at such gigs as the aforementioned Hyde Park show. They are “strongmen” and “statesmen” because of their abilities and power, like political power in how they have created the laws, as it were, for a new genre of music–what would be called ‘progressive rock.’

The strongmen are by the feet of the clown who, recall, represents the entertainment media, and he’d have the lion tamers “quiet the tumblers,” that is, tame and control the members of King Crimson so they won’t be too wild in their musical experimentation. After all, we can’t have the system changed, including that of the commercialization of music, that turning mirror of illusion that we’ll come back to in “Happy Family” as regards the experimentation of the Sgt. Pepper album, which was nonetheless as commercially successful as any other Beatles album.

After this verse, we hear Collins play a sax solo over a Mellotron theme (strings tapes) whose melodic contour is the same as that of the leading theme of “Big Top,” at the end of Side Two of Lizard, implying a cyclical return to “Cirkus.” The theme here is a descending line of G, F-sharp, E, D, resolving to a B-minor chord; it will later be harmonized in thirds. Then, as the sax solo continues, we hear on the electric piano C major chords with, on the tops of them, added octaves, sevenths, sixths, and fifths, the chords being playing in a strumming style. After the C major, we get B minor, then the ‘strummed’ C major chords, then G dominant ninth, back to the C major chords, and finally a dominant chord in B leading back to the E minor key of the final verse.

This verse, as I see it, is about the tensions in the original lineup of the band that would lead to the departures, first of McDonald and Giles (the former of whom would regret leaving not long after), then later on Lake, who was eager to work with Keith Emerson. The tension is vividly expressed in how the metaphors express how the difficulties affected the band’s playing: “elephants forgot…strongmen lost their hair” (like Samson), and in the sharpening of the lions’ teeth, the band members fought.

“Paybox collapsed” implies the loss of money that could have been made had the band remained intact and thus rose to higher successes. The “pandemonium seesaw” of all of this fighting in the band, expressed as I’ve described above in the tone painting of the up-and-down melodies in Haskell’s singing and in the Mellotron (low brass tapes), is like a collection of all the demons in Hell of Milton‘s Paradise Lost, ejected from heaven, just as Crimson were ejected from the heaven of commercial success.

Sinfield “ran for the door,” and Fripp, the “ringmaster shouted” for him to stay, since “all the fun of the cirkus” hadn’t been exhausted yet.

The song ends with, after the seesawing Mellotron brass theme, an instrumental section called “Entry of the Chameleons.” Mark Charig’s cornet has made an appearance already, and with the beginning of this section we hear more saxophone soloing by Collins. As the sax soloing is going on, Haskell’s bass is playing ascending fifths or triad notes in succession; but when we hear the cornet again towards the end, Haskell is playing ascending tritones on the bass. At the end, the drumming stops, but cymbals are sustained as we hear cornet licks and electric piano in the background.

III: Indoor Games

The song begins with McCulloch hitting the closed hi-hat to give us a beat, and just before Collins’s saxes (including a baritone and a…tenor?) provide the main riff of the song, we hear a quick A major ascending arpeggio on a VCS3.

While “Cirkus” and most of the rest of the songs on Lizard are, in my interpretation, about the conflicts and difficulties King Crimson was having trying to stay alive as a new band after the original lineup fell apart, “Indoor Games” seems to be about the decadent parties the wealthy and successful have–that is, the indulgence of the capitalist class, including the management of any business…including, in turn, EG Management, who managed King Crimson and who will be obliquely referred to later in the song. In other words, the upper echelons of society have fun, while those down below, including King Crimson, get all the headaches.

The decadent partying includes the use of drugs, something Fripp stayed away from. The “indoor fireworks” are too absurd to be taken literally. I suspect that their bright lights are actually those seen during an LSD trip. The “kitchen staff” could be a metaphor for those who made the acid.

“Dusting plastic garlic plants” could be a metaphor for smoking marijuana, with “snigger[ing]” in the draught” as the laughing from getting stoned, as well as enjoying a draught or two of the joint or from some beer, in the draught by an open kitchen window. You, the master of the house and having the money to enjoy such a party, “ride through the parlour wearing nothing but your armour”; that is, you’re naked and riding a woman in your living room, and your “armour” is a dissociative drug like ketamine.

After the refrain, “playing indoor games,” which is two bars in 7/8 time (subdivided 3+4), we immediately come to the second verse. You, the rich master of the house, are surrounded with “sycophantic friends,” who must pretend they like all of your performances, however absurd they may be, since you’re their boss. You have “rancid recipes,” which sound like more drugs, and you’re wearing a toga, making this ‘indoor game’ a toga party.

In between the second “indoor games” refrain and the third verse is a return to the sax riff, with the VCS3 in the background. You spin a teetotum, that is, you gamble, and your daring risks with money excite “your seventh wife,” whose connection with your rich in-laws (what I’d say “her sixty little skins” represent) “reinsures your life.”

Sulking in one’s sauna from having lost a jigsaw corner sounds like the First World problems of the spoiled rich. “Train[ing] baboons to sing” sounds like a record company like EG trying to promote a new band they’ve just signed…that they’re singing baboons implies they have little talent, and if EG is the company, perhaps this is self-deprecating humour on Sinfield’s part.

That the rich would “swim in purple perspex water wings” implies that they are spoiled children in need of the water wings to keep their heads above the water. Jumping on choppers on Saturdays is something that David Enthoven and John Gaydon, the E and G of King Crimson’s EG Management (the “Chelsea brigade”), might have done. This verse ties the band’s record company in with the decadent partying of the rich capitalists, something the struggling band was far less able to enjoy, if at all, at the time.

It surely was far more than trendy to go on hard benders, as these decadents would have done. “It’s all indoor games,” even if it’s riding around outside on motorcycles, because “indoor” is really about being on the inside, among the privileged wealthy.

After this verse is an instrumental section with guitar and sax licks, as well as with the VCS3 in the background. Then we come to the final verse.

A game of bagatelle without balls is a pretty absurd and pointless one, so one’s conspiring “children” (i.e., one’s guests at the party, who are getting bored) try to find wilder and more exciting forms of entertainment. They’d “fertilize your fire” (light up and smoke more joints), or do other, riskier things to amuse themselves.

“Go[ing] madder” could be a result of excessive drug and alcohol abuse, the kind that Brian Jones was indulging in around the time he drowned in his swimming pool in 1969. These kinds of deaths by misadventure, “broken bones, broken ladder,” would be common at wild parties with a lot of booze and drugs. The Rolling Stones’ free concert at Hyde Park, incidentally (where King Crimson stole the show), was meant to be a tribute to Jones, who’d been replaced by Mick Taylor because of the former’s alcohol and drug problems.

The song ends with Haskell saying “hey-ho,” then laughing. His laughing was genuine, as he found Sinfield’s lyrics to be absurd and unintelligible. The band decided, at this point in the song, to let the tape continue rolling to include his laughter. Given my interpretation of the song, having the laughter seems fitting–it comes across as the laughing of a drunk and stoned man at a party.

IV: Happy Family

The song begins with a dark-sounding descension, in E minor, of E, D, D-flat, C, B, B-flat, A, G, and E in the bass and guitar, with the VCS3 on the top, all in three-bar groupings of 6/8 time.

The “happy family,” in all irony, is of course the Beatles, who had pretty much acrimoniously broken up as of the writing of this song, and therefore the breakup was still a hot topic at the time. Jonah is Lennon, Judas (or Jude) is McCartney, Silas is Harrison, and Rufus is Ringo Starr.

Though the song is about the Beatles, I’d say that the Beatles of the song are, in turn, a metaphor for King Crimson, too, who’d just experienced a kind of breakup of their own that same year (and would soon experience yet another [near-]breakup just after finishing recording Lizard), and who’d also had a moment of great, if fleeting, success and influence on music. Since Sinfield wasn’t a musician in the band (apart from playing around with the VCS3, at least), we could even see King Crimson as being as much a quartet as the Beatles were.

So the “happy family” moniker could apply to Crimson as much as it does to the Fab Four. The “one hand clap,” something from an old Zen koan, expresses on the one hand a making of sounds that cannot be made with an insufficiency of hands (i.e., other band members), the paradox a logical absurdity, and on the other hand an end to the applause now that the band no longer exists. None of the four came back because the broken-up band (be it the Beatles or the original Crimson lineup) wouldn’t get back together.

“Brother Judas[‘] ash” is from McCartney’s marijuana use, and his “swallowed aphrodisiac” is other drugs of his, from the pleasure they give him. Starr, Harrison, and Lennon would “blow [their] own canoes,” that is, go their own way and start solo careers, since the tensions in the band had reached such a high (“punctured all the ballyhoo”) that they no longer wanted to work together. The same could have been said of Giles, Lake, and McDonald: there was the collaborative ‘canoe’ of McDonald and Giles, and there was the canoe of ELP’s debut album, all from 1970, like Lizard.

After the first verse of “Happy Family,” we hear Collins playing the flute, and Tippett has already been doing a lot of jazzy and dissonant playing on the electric piano, including–during the singing of the first few lines of the second verse–some parallel fourths.

The Beatles “whipped the world and beat the clock” with their phenomenal success, and “with their share of stock,” they obviously got very rich, too. They were “shaken by [the] knock, knock, knock” of opportunity when it came, a success that surely messed with their minds as much as it glorified them. The 1969 success of the original King Crimson, though on a much smaller scale, could be expressed in these lines, too.

One senses, in the line “cheesecake, mousetrap, Grytpype-Thynne,” that the promoters of the Beatles saw in the band a get-rich-quick scheme, since that’s what the villainous character voiced by Peter Sellers on the old 1950s British radio comedy, The Goon Show, used to have up his sleeve. Once the Beatles broke up, though, they couldn’t be replaced, the way Rin-Tin-Tin was with several different German shepherds from the 1930s to the 1950s, after the original dog died in 1932. Could Fripp really replace the original King Crimson lineup? At the time, it seemed doubtful.

After this verse, we return to the opening theme, the descending one on the guitar and bass; instead of hearing the VCS3, we have some dissonant electric piano playing by Tippett.

The next verse essentially describes what the Beatles did after their breakup. Ringo had the big nose, and was portrayed as something of a clown, but no longer would he be now that the Beatles were no more. Since I suspect that the Beatles are in turn a representation of King Crimson, “Rufus” could also be original drummer Michael Giles, who in leaving the band, has put away his ‘cirkus’ clothes.

Harrison grew a beard, and the “flask of weird” is on the one hand drugs, but on the other, “Silas” could also represent another lead guitarist, Fripp, whose “flask of weird” could be the more eccentric, complex, and dissonant musical direction he was leading the band in.

John Lennon “grew a wife,” Yoko Ono. McCartney’s “pruning knife” could represent his craftsmanship as a musician, pruning away the less desirable aspects of his music in order to perfect it. I wonder if ELP’s song, “Knife-Edge,” wasn’t written and recorded too late for the knife to be Lake’s.

After this verse, Collins solos on the flute, while we hear Tippett’s jazzy piano chords (as well as Fripp’s on the guitar), and Nick Evans’s trombone is heard in the background, with a bit of the VCS3, which helps reintroduce that opening, descending guitar/bass theme.

In the last verse, the applause is pale, like that one-hand clap, because there are no more Beatles (or a performing King Crimson at gigs, for that matter) to clap for; “each to his revolving doors,” that is, each band member has gone his own way. Harrison was always “searching” in his music, spirituality, and travels; Fripp was also a “Silas” of sorts, searching for different ways to make music.

Lennon was “caustic,” since he was often violent and verbally abusive, by his own admission, in spite of his peacemaking persona. McCartney was “so sweet” in all those popular songs he wrote for the band, though officially credited to both him and Lennon.

The mirror of illusions we first heard of in “Cirkus” will spin here, too, in relation to the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album; after all, “what goes round must surely spin.” If rock bands like the Beatles and King Crimson, with their long-haired men, lose from having broken up, never to ‘come back’ in either a reformation or a new, stable lineup, then “the barbers win,” because they’ll get more money for more haircuts.

Note how, at the end of the song, the chaotic background music disappears, with only Haskell singing and a marimba and maracas in the background, soon to go themselves. The music is over, as is that of the Beatles. Is King Crimson’s music over, too, or can Fripp bring the Lizard band to life? The answer seemed uncertain at the time, and ultimately, the answer would be a no.

V: Lady of the Dancing Water

The song begins with Collins’s flute soloing over Tippett’s electric piano playing ascending chords of G minor seventh, A minor, B-flat major seventh, and resolving to F major for the verses, in which Fripp accompanies, on acoustic guitar, Haskell’s singing.

Unlike the lyrics of all the other non-instrumental tracks on this album, which as I’ve explained above are densely stacked with metaphors and are therefore cryptic to the point of being almost impenetrable, those of this song are quite straightforward. This is a love song, though not as radio-friendly as “Heartbeat” was intended to be.

The chord progression for the verses is, essentially, F major and A minor seventh chords played twice, then B-flat major and C major for the dominant…though certain chord substitutions may apply. For the bridge, the progression is B-flat major seventh, C major, and F major seventh–again, chord substitutions may apply.

For the refrains (Evans’s trombone enters in the first of these), during which Haskell sings of Sinfield’s “lady of the dancing water,” the progression is F major, F dominant seventh, B-flat major, B-flat minor added ninth, then back to F major…and again, depending on how one interprets the chords here, there may be substitutions.

To add to the romantic atmosphere, the lyric is full of the imagery of nature (grass, water, autumn leaves, “earth and flowers”). Sinfield also adds the four elements he referred to earlier in “In the Wake of Poseidon,” but in this song with the “blown autumn leaves” providing air, as well as “the fire where you laid me.”

VI: Lizard

Recall that lizards here represent cycles of change: birth, life, death, and rebirth, as expressed in the shedding of a lizard’s old skin. This third album was Fripp’s and Sinfield’s attempt to resurrect the band after McDonald, Giles, and Lake left. The attempt, fraught with conflicts and difficulties all the way through, ended ultimately in failure when Haskell and McCulloch quit so soon after the recording was finished.

Prince Rupert Awakes

Haskell may have already quit before the vocals for this first part of the suite were recorded, since we hear Jon Anderson sing them instead. Some claim that Fripp recruited Anderson because the vocal melody was out of Haskell’s baritone range, and that therefore Haskell was still in the band; but Anderson never sings in his mixed or head voice here, except for a high vocal harmony during the chorus, which Haskell surely could have done in falsetto. The great majority of the singing is in chest voice, most, if not virtually all, of the notes being ones Haskell hit in other songs on the album.

Remember that Haskell never wanted to play music like this. He was an R and B man, and he did the recordings on this album only because his wife had asked him to do it for the money. If he’d already quit before the recording of the vocals for “Prince Rupert Awakes,” then that would have made Lizard come full circle, with Anderson as the Haskell of this album where Haskell was the Lake of ITWOP (i.e., “Cadence and Cascade”), finishing up the incomplete vocals of the album.

Now, Prince Rupert was an actual man of history, an English-German army officer appointed commander of the Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War. One battle of the First English Civil War was that of Naseby, which is represented in the “Battle of Glass Tears,” one that Prince Rupert and the Royalists lost.

Prince Rupert was known to be a rather blunt, hasty-tempered man who made a lot of enemies. For these reasons, as well as the ‘defeat’ in putting together a new touring King Crimson lineup, I would say that Prince Rupert is really Prince Robert, that is, the historical army commander is meant to represent Fripp. During the creation and recording of Lizard, Fripp battled with, and even bullied, Haskell and McCulloch, often driving the latter to the verge of tears. Small wonder the band fell apart so soon after recording the album.

So if “Lizard” is really an allegory of the misfortunes of King Crimson, then “farewell, the temple master’s bells,” etc., is a saying goodbye to the original lineup, whose great success in 1969 was “Eden guaranteed.” While “Prince Rupert’s tears of glass” originally referred to toughened, tear-shaped glass beads made by dripping molten glass into cold water, something the prince had brought to England in 1660, here I’d say that Sinfield is poetically talking about Fripp’s irritations while recording Lizard.

Fripp’s “tears of glass” cause more of his own suffering, as well as that of his bandmates, and so the glass tears cut into their orange-yellow eyelids, making them bleed even on days off (i.e., the Sabbath). These glass cuts also “scar the sacred tablet wax/on which the lizards feed,” that is, they harm the “sacred” art that King Crimson is working on, Lizard, which is meant as a shedding of the old skin–the original lineup–to have a new skin–the current lineup.

The verses are in A minor, with Tippett’s acoustic piano playing a melancholy beauty in the background, a melancholy intensified by the dissonances Fripp is playing on the electric keyboards. The progression seesaws between the tonic and F major three times, then goes to E major for the dominant, to resolve back to A minor. This progression is repeated for the next four lines of the verse, but this time to be resolved to A major, leading to the chorus.

With Anderson singing this now happy-sounding music, King Crimson manages to sound like Yes. The chorus seems to be about throwing away the past, that is, the original 1969 lineup, and with it the democratic decision-making of that band, to replace it with Fripp’s unquestioned leadership, hence the “hollow vote.” You “wear your blizzard season coat,” for the band has become a colder, less sunny experience. We’re burning bridges here, for we’re not going back to the original lineup (“four went by and none came back,” recall).

We “stake a lizard by the throat” because in spite of all of these attempts by this lineup to resurrect King Crimson, this band is fated to die just as the original did. Just as “Happy Family” was an ironic reference to the miseries of the Beatles (and by extension, also to King Crimson, as I’ve argued), so is the happy, A-major melody of the chorus an ironic comment on the fortunes of the Lizard lineup.

In the next verse, back to the A-minor progression, Sinfield seems to be equating himself with Polonius, King Claudius‘ chief councellor in Hamlet, and according to the prince of that play, he’s “a foolish, prating knave” who sticks his nose in other people’s business and ends up slain by the prince. This would make Fripp, or ‘Prince Robert,’ into Prince Hamlet. In Fripp’s increasingly hegemonic rule over the band, where Sinfield’s involvement must have seemed officious, his obscure lyrics thus garrulous and prating, he must have felt as though Fripp’s Hamlet was telling him either to quit King Crimson or to “kneel” to the authority of ‘Prince Robert.’

After all, Fripp was trying to bring about the “harvest dawn” of a new day for Crimson, and Sinfield’s officiousness, his “tarnished devil’s spoons/will rust beneath [Fripp’s] corn.” Bears roam across Fripp’s “rain tree shaded lawn,” that is, his new lineup roams about playing Fripp’s sad music. The “lizard bones” are the agent of transformation (“the clay”), like the alchemical change from base metals to noble ones, and the result of that change is a swan…yet it will feel like a swan song when the band falls apart again.

Note that there was the dawn of Sinfield’s birth (and that of the cosmos) in “Cirkus,” and now there’s the “harvest dawn” of Fripp’s musical project, of his new dominion over the band, him as the ‘king’ of Crimson. There will also be the “Dawn Song” of the “Last Skirmish” of “The Battle of Glass Tears,” which I would allegorize as the conflicts of the Lizard lineup leading to its end when recording was finished, something accurately predicted all the way through the recording.

Assuming that Fripp understood Sinfield’s cryptic critiques of him in the lyrics, I see no wonder in how Fripp hated this album: it brings back so many painful memories for him–those “glass tears.”

There’s a repeat of the ‘happy chorus’ and a “na-na-na-na…” vocalizing of the melody after that.

In the third verse, Anderson sings of the court of piepowders, which had jurisdiction over personal actions or events happening in a market, including disputes between merchants and acts of theft or violence. I’d say the “Piepowder’s moss-weed court” represents Fripp’s authority over the band, where the “lizards [were] sold,” that is, where the shedding of the old skin happened. The “leaden flock” of the new lineup of Haskell, Collins, and McCulloch had to be alchemically transformed into the “rainbows’ ends and gold” of a band as superb as the original Crimson, a new lizard’s skin as shiny as the old skin had been when it was new, the dawn of a new day, and a new cycle of birth, life, and death for the band.

With this new version of King Crimson, an alchemical transformation symbolized by the peacock that now brings tales “of walls and trumpets thousand-fold,” Fripp can unroll his “reels of dreams.” The “walls and trumpets” suggest the Biblical Fall of Jericho as given in Joshua 6:1-27, in which the Israelites marched around the city walls of Jericho once a day for six days, seven times on the seventh day, the priests blowing their horns daily, and the people shouting on the last day, causing the walls finally to fall.

I imagine Sinfield’s Biblical allusion here to signify Fripp’s hopes of making a ‘breakthrough’ by taking Crimson in a new musical direction, to contrast with what was criticized as a repetition, in ITWOP, of ITCOTCK. Such an idea anticipates the next track in the “Lizard” suite, an instrumental with a number of wind instruments (Charig’s cornet, Evans’s trombone, Miller’s oboe, and Collins’s saxes)–the ‘horns’ that were meant to break down the walls of Fripp’s Jericho-like frustrations at making new music.

Bolero-The Peacock’s Tale

The instrumental opens, fittingly, with a horn, the cornet. Tippett’s acoustic piano is in the background, as is McCulloch’s snare drum, playing a bolero rhythm, but in 4/4, rather than the 3/4 time you’d hear in Ravel‘s piece. Themes from “Prince Rupert Awakes” are repeated here.

The main theme of the instrumental is played on the oboe, a rather saccharine tune against major seventh chords of the subdominant and tonic, then the subdominant goes to the mediant (a minor chord), then back to the subdominant, and back to the mediant, but a major chord this time, on which the oboe holds a high root note that, sustaining, becomes a major seventh against the background progression’s change back to the subdominant, to repeat the progression.

There’s some collective improvisation in the middle of the piece, featuring all those wind instruments blowing away and showcasing again the more pronounced jazz influence on Lizard. I recall a criticism of the album in the second edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide, which said that the brass and reed solos tend to meander–I have to agree. Now, in spite of how gently melodic the “Bolero” is, at one point in the middle of the improvising, Tippett’s otherwise pretty piano playing suddenly boils over in triplets of tone clusters in the upper register.

The main oboe theme returns, and the piece comes to an end. I understand that this music is among the minority on the album that Fripp has actually liked. He once said that Miller’s oboe melody “sustained [him] in difficult times.”

The Battle of Glass Tears

This track opens with Miller having switched from the oboe to cor anglais, playing an ominous theme on it in G minor. The instrument is largely heard solo at first, with occasional piano chords in the background–a tonic chord, a diminished chord, and one in E-flat major. Then we hear Haskell singing the first verse.

i: Dawn Song

In keeping with the album’s theme of cyclical change, we have another poetic depiction of dawn, as with the beginning of “Cirkus.” Every dawn begins the cycle of a new day, and the darkness of the dawn is at one with the darkness of the previous night. Dawn leads to day, then to night again. In all change, there is sameness: becoming is the Aufhebung of the dialectic of being and nothing (Hegel, Science of Logic, pages 82-83), the being of daylight, the nothing of night’s darkness, and the becoming of the rising light of dawn.

Similarly, the dawn of a new King Crimson lineup will end in the dusk of its falling apart at the end of the recording sessions of Lizard. The shining new lizard’s skin will become another old skin to be shed again, and the sense that this new lineup won’t last has been felt throughout the recording sessions, with the growing tensions between Fripp and Sinfield on one side, and Haskell and McCulloch on the other.

These tensions in the band are what Prince Rupert’s Battle of Glass Tears can be said to represent. The preparations for war in the two verses of “Dawn Song” can be said to symbolize these growing tensions in the band.

“Spokeless wheels” seems to be an allusion to a poem by Robert Graves called “Instructions to the Orphic Adept.” The adept “shall reply: ‘My feet have borne me here/Out of the weary wheel, the circling years,/To that still, spokeless wheel:–Persephone./Give me to drink!”

The Orphic adept hopes for immortality, for his soul to escape the limits of physical life and the cycle of reincarnation, “the weary wheel, the circling years.” The adept would drink from the pool of Memory, rather than drink from the spring of Forgetfulness, which the common people drink from, then are reincarnated, forgetting their previous lives (Graves, pages 155-157).

Similarly, Fripp and Sinfield had been hoping for a lineup that would last…OK, maybe not immortal, but you get the idea. The “still, spokeless wheel” of “Persephone” would replace “the weary wheel” of having to do any more reincarnations of King Crimson. Here, however, is the problem: Persephone, who spent each spring and summer on earth with her mother, Demeter, and each fall and winter in Hades with her husband, the king of the same name, was, in effect, experiencing the cycles of life and death that are reincarnation in essence. Becoming is the sublation of being and nothing. Fripp’s and Sinfield’s hopes are dashed on the rocks.

As Haskell is singing in his low baritone, you can hear McCulloch tapping on a ride cymbal, and soon Miller plays a high melody on the oboe to parallel Haskell’s voice. Tippett is also in the background, playing chords on the electric piano.

ii) Last Skirmish

The whole band comes in, with that ominous theme originally played on the cor anglais now played by Fripp on the Mellotron (strings tapes). Fittingly, Haskell’s playing dark tones on the bass, and McCulloch is bashing about on the drums. Collins will soon come in on saxes (tenor and baritone) and flute.

This “last skirmish” is indeed that: a cacophony of battling instruments–mostly King Crimson members, but also Evans’s trombone and Tippett’s piano. It’s musically symbolic of all the fighting that was going on during the recording process.

iii) Prince Rupert’s Lament

This track should be called “Prince Robert’s Lament,” since, though it’s meant to represent Prince Rupert’s defeat in the Battle of Naseby, it seems to be prophetic of the debacle that would result from this new lineup’s incessant squabbling.

In G minor, as is largely the rest of “The Battle of Glass Tears,” it fittingly is a plaintive electric guitar solo, Fripp using his trademark sustained notes to weep out his pain, backed by repeating low G notes on Haskell’s bass and McCulloch hitting a tom-tom.

Big Top

Just as “Dawn Song” cyclically brought the album back to “Cirkus” in terms of its lyrics, so does “Big Top” cyclically bring us back there through its music and metaphorical concept.

In C major, but starting with a G augmented chord as the dominant to bring us in, “Big Top” brings back that descending melodic contour on the Mellotron (strings tapes) that I mentioned above, heard in the middle of “Cirkus.” Now, whereas then it sounded melancholy, now it sounds quaintly and whimsically merry, an old-fashioned kind of tune you might hear at the circus or at a carnival, or something like that–corny music from a century ago.

The progression mostly goes back and forth between the tonic C major and dominant G major, though at one point, the tonic C goes down a tritone to G-flat minor.

The Mellotron melody is in descending thirds, in 6/8 time, rather like a waltz, with the background instruments often hitting dissonant notes, as a parody of such sentimental music. Haskell is seesawing back and forth between root notes and fifths, Miller’s oboe is practically quacking like a duck, you can hear that marimba from “Happy Family,” and Tippett’s piano is playing chords that often clash.

The music eerily ends, fading out with a speeding up of the tape and thus a raising of the pitch of everything, as if to signify a hastening of the bitter end of this ill-starred lineup.

VII: Conclusion

Later lineups would last longer. The Islands lineup lasted long enough to play gigs and record Earthbound (though without Sinfield), as I mentioned above. Next would come two of the best incarnations of King Crimson, the Larks’ Tongues to Red period (with or without percussionist Jamie Muir and/or violinist/keyboardist David Cross), and the 1980s lineup–all the exact same quartet of Fripp, Bill Bruford (drums), Adrian Belew (guitar/vocals/lyrics), and Tony Levin (Stick/bass/backing vocals).

After these peak moments came the 1990s “double trio” (the ’80s band, plus Trey Gunn on Stick and Warr guitar, and Pat Mastelotto on drums), some quartet variations on these same musicians, but without Bruford, then finally the 2010s septet/octet, with Jakko Jakszyk replacing Belew, three drummers (Mastelotto, Gavin Harrison, and Bill Rieflin and/or Jeremy Stacey), Levin, and Collins came back. They disbanded in 2021, supposedly never to reform.

Fripp said in 2021 that King Crimson had “moved from sound to silence,” just as back in late 1974 he’d said that the band had “ceased to exist.” As long as he’s still alive (acid reflex or heart attacks notwithstanding), though, how do we know that the cycles of dusk back to dawn won’t pull through again, and we see yet another reign of the Crimson King?