Pay no attention to the man behind the amplifier. That's the first principle you needed to accept if you wanted to immerse yourself in the King Crimson experience as presented on their recent tour, which concluded with a four-night stint at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square. The man in question was, of course, the band's founder/guitarist/(very) silent leader Robert Fripp, who had apparently spent the entire tour performing seated behind his amp so that only his head was visible to the audience. Knowing the Crimson King's penchant for taking an intensely philosophical approach to his art, it's likely that this inscrutable move had something to do with the pursuit of egolessness or some such notion (this interpretation was further supported by Fripp applauding the rest of the band from the shadowy sidelines when they stepped to the front for a bow at show's end).
Fortunately for the faithful followers who sold out the first three nights of the prog-rock pioneers' Nokia stand, Fripp's curious performance strategies did absolutely nothing to interfere with the precise-but-furious firestorm that emanated from said amplifier throughout the evening. Nor did his four comrades shrink from the challenge of matching their fearless leader's instrumental intensity. The tour had been promoted as a celebration of King Crimson's 40th anniversary (while they didn't begin working under the name King Crimson until 1969, the original lineup was in place the year before), but there wasn't much made of this, since no one but Fripp has been in the band anywhere near that long, and post-'70s Crimson has never shown much interest in performing the early material. That said, the band hit the road for the first time in five years with a new lineup that includes two '80s-era veterans (singer/guitarist Adrian Belew and bass man Tony Levin) and a drummer (Pat Mastelotto) who's been on board since '94. New drummer Gavin Harrison, formerly of Porcupine Tree, completes the current formation.
The double-drummer setup was exploited for maximum impact throughout the night, as Mastelotto and Harrison opened up the show with a percussive duet that eventually gave way to “The ConstruKction of Light,” launched into a double-strength drum solo mid-set, and led the band into their encores with a third helping of unaccompanied boom-thwackery. Though the pair's tandem attack was a formidable one, neither drummer overplayed, and they provided a perfect match for the mighty, percussive rumble of Tony Levin, who alternated between his tapping technique on the Chapman Stick and his fierce attack on the bass, which he often hit with his wooden “Funk Fingers” invention for a unique slap effect. It takes a sturdy sound to stand out atop the fearsome polyrhythms produced by this Hydra of a rhythm section, and from start to finish, Fripp and Belew sustained a sonic juggling act that found them alternately trading chattering, overlapping, precise picking patterns, and sharing the guitar-solo load with an otherworldly arsenal of string-derived surprises that variously evoked everything from a violin section to a zoo overloaded with braying beasts.
Fripp and Belew's one-guitarist-with-four-hands feel was at its apex on the tunes from the band's '80s albums. In those days, Fripp, Belew, Levin, and drumming demon Bill Bruford ina ugurated the concept of a kind of rock gamelan orchestra, constructing a complex latticework of melodic and rhythmic lines (surely one of the truest embodiments ever of avant-jazz giant Ornette Coleman's much-touted “harmolodic” concept). With two hard-hitting skinsmen sitting in for Bruford, KC 2008 breathed new life into the hypnotic, African-inflected patterns of “Frame by Frame,” the whisper-to-a-scream dynamics of “Indiscipline,” the urgent, fret-burning safari of “Thela Hun Ginjeet” (an anagram for “Heat in the Jungle”), and the Stick-led prog-funk throb of “Elephant Talk,” among others. In fact, roughly half the show was devoted to songs from this celebrated era of the band's long life. Latter-day KC was represented by the appropriately stomping “Dinosaur,” the dreamy “One Time,” the aforementioned “ConstruKction of Light,” and a couple of others, but predictably, the biggest crowd reaction was elicited by two instrumental excursions into the mid-'70s salad days of the band's initial phase. Today we know the dark, doomy tone and savage, thrashing riffs of “Red,” the title track to the band's 1974 album, as the harbinger of everything from Tool to Nirvana, but hearing Crimson '08 tear into it anew with teeth-gnashing abandon, its ferocity feels as overpoweringly of-the-moment as it must have when it first saw the light of day. Similarly, “Lark's Tongues in Aspic,” from the 1973 album of the same name , was the textbook definition of “epic,” presenting a literal interpretation of the term “progressive rock” with none of the form's notorious tropes or excesses. And ultimately, that's exactly what King Crimson has always been about, regardless of the numbers on the calendar.
--Jim Allen [August 27, 2008]
