Without any perceptible marking of time signature or chord changes, Fripp’s burnt, saturated sound unfolded in a way that nothing else did outside of Éliane Radigue’s tape works and certain Tangerine Dream tracks. What came to be called ambient music was taking shape in the work of Fripp’s friend and collaborator Brian Eno, and it is not a stretch to say Fripp’s guitar performances were just as important to this idea as Eno’s music. (Crimson and the Pistols both eventually played the show.) In the seven years following the ’74 King Crimson breakup, the mobile and independent unit was Fripp, who played guitar with David Bowie (“Heroes”), produced albums by Peter Gabriel and the Roches, and presented shows of solo guitar and tape loops, which he called “Frippertronics.” King Crimson’s site offers a high-fidelity recording of the first time Fripp performed Frippertronics live, at the Kitchen in New York, in February of 1978. In that same Melody Maker interview, Fripp described the “old world” as “large and unwieldy, without much intelligence-just like the dinosaur.” He said that “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent” would be the characteristics of “the new world,” which is how many people saw punk in relation to the mainstream music typified by, say, Top of the Pops.
At the philosophical level, Fripp and the punks were also not that far apart.
As Lydon said in 1975, “Kids want threatening noises, because that shakes you out of your apathy,” which describes what King Crimson had recorded just one year earlier.
The King Crimson album from that year, Red, sounded like punk rock before there was such a thing. When I looked up both bands in Artforum’s online archives, I discovered that King Crimson had been mentioned twice (in passing), while the Sex Pistols have been cited eighty times.Īrtistic cohorts (what artists do) and critical cohorts (what critics write) and cultural cohorts (what everyone else actually does) are like transparencies on a light table, passing over one another and occasionally lining up. I thought of this when I watched the band play their possibly last-ever show in New York a few weeks ago. But in terms of the higher echelon of bands like Yes and ELP, it didn’t make it.” King Crimson wasn’t in McLaren’s “hates” column by name, but they were there in spirit. Founder Robert Fripp confirmed the affinities in a 1974 Melody Maker interview in which he talked about their recent (but not permanent) breakup: “In terms of most bands, of course, was remarkably successful. Jon Anderson of Yes sang on a Crimson album, and Bryan Ferry auditioned for the band after Lake’s departure in 1970. Greg Lake-the “L” in ELP-was King Crimson’s first singer. Those two columns were the shadow commandments of New York critics for decades, and it would not be wrong to lump King Crimson in with other progressive-rock groups like Yes and ELP. The loves included “sex professionals, renegade artists, hard Rockers, IRA terrorists, working-class heroes and, well hidden, the first printed mention of ‘Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS.’”
IN NOVEMBER OF 1974, Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and Bernie Rhodes collaborated on a T-shirt printed with two columns of text: a list of “hates” alongside a list of “loves.” As reported in Jon Savage’s 2002 book England’s Dreaming, those hates included Yes, ELP., and Bryan Ferry.
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