KING CRIMSON

all images © Chuck Bryant

original concert poster

(Click here for the official King Crimson site)

My last day as a fifteen-year old. With general admission, as most concerts were, getting a good seat (or standing place) meant getting to the auditorium doors early and running like crazy once inside. This remained mostly the norm until December 3, 1979, when a stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati resulted in 11 deaths and dozens of injuries.

Probably no one came to see Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. Probably most people came to see Badfinger. I came to see the current incarnation of one of my favorite bands from junior and senior high: King Crimson. Our preacher's son, Bill Wooldridge, called this British prog-rock band "some of the heaviest stuff" he'd ever heard. I bought the album and I agreed.

Along with Yes, Genesis, and the Moody Blues, King Crimson used the Mellotron extensively (comments below). In one picture below you'll see Mel Collins rolling the Mellotron around the stage just to provide something to watch during one of the extended jams. Whooohoo.

By the fourth album, Islands (which this tour supported), only Robert Fripp remained from the original lineup. Musically each album held together well despite the frequent turnover (see the chart below).

	In the Court of the Crimson King	In the Wake of Poseidon	Lizard	Islands

gtr/kbds	Robert Fripp	Robert Fripp	Robert Fripp	Robert Fripp
bass	Greg Lake	Peter Giles	Gordon Haskell	Boz
winds/kbds	Ian McDonald	Mel Collins	Mel Collins	Mel Collins
drums	Michael Giles	Michael Giles	Andy McCulloch	Ian Wallace
vocals	Greg Lake	Greg Lake	Gordon Haskell	Boz

I took these original photos with an Instamatic. Thanks to Photoshop, those faded 3x3 prints can still yield some pretty decent images.

Robert Fripp

Boz Burrell

Mel Collins

Ian Wallace

Early performance art

THE MELLOTRON: Not a synthesizer and actually not even an instrument, the Mellotron's distinctive sounds came from a bank of keyboard-triggered tape-loop cartridges with pitches pre-recorded note for note from actual instruments (most often strings, brass, and flutes). Think of it as a primitive analog sampler with an often haunting quality (probably a chicken-and-egg situation: it sounds haunting because of the compositions these prog-rockers used it in, and they used it in those pieces because it has that haunting sound). Its use faded around the turn of the decade as most acts shifted to technically more accurate string synthesizers, such as the ARP String Ensemble, and even more so with the advent of digital sampling. Hardly anyone uses them today.

Hearing it still takes me straight back to junior and senior high.

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