KING CRIMSON — Live In Detroit, MI, 1971 (review)

KING CRIMSON — Live In Detroit, MI, 1971 album cover

Promos, fans club and other releases (no bootlegs) · 2001 · Proto-Metal

4/5 · 2022-10-30
Warthur

This is one of numerous soundboard recordings out there of the Islands-era King Crimson lineup.

The usual caveat applies that if you really like this period of King Crimson enough to be interested in this release in the first place, you'll probably want to just get Sailors' Tales, which includes the most polished and tidied-up versions of this and numerous other similarly quality live recordings of the lineup among its many treasures at a fraction of the cost it'd take you to purchase each and every relevant Collector's Club release separately.

We know that in late 1971 the band were feeling increasingly unhappy together; the Earthbound tour of the US in 1972 was undertaken essentially as a contractural obligation job. This Detroit recording from November 1971, then, comes from around the time that the bubbling troubles in the background were about to come to the fore. (Note: the Collector's Club release of this live set lists the date as December 1971, but this is a mistake.)

Now, let's not sell the band short - musically speaking, they're pros, and they do a bang-up job on here, with most of the set captured well by the soundboard recording bar for the odd hiccup here and there (the most obviously noticeable one being that the tape runs out during the second encore piece, Lady of the Dancing Water). On that basis alone I'd give it a solid four stars.

However, the historically-minded Crimhead listening to the album can hear the various cracks appearing - as well as some surprising points of common feeling between the band members. For instance, the way he cracks up in laughter mid-delivery makes it clear that Boz simply can't bring himself to take Peter Sinfield's lyrics to Ladies of the Road seriously (and nor should he, it's a deeply misogynistic song which is in the running for some of Frank Zappa's crudest material when it comes to being cruel about groupies), and we know that not too long after this Sinfield and Crimson parted ways.

At the same time, whilst Robert Fripp over the years has gained a reputation for being grumpy and irritable about people demanding retired songs from the setlist (though in recent years Crimson has become much more accepting of some parts of their back catalogue than they'd been for quite some time), it's clear that in this instance, when the band are faced with the inevitable calls for Epitaph, Fripp is far from alone in his annoyance. (Based on Sailors' Tales, it doesn't seem like the Islands-era lineup ever included Epitaph in their repertoire.)

There's a pretty united front from the band on this point, in fact - and it's Boz, not Fripp, who expresses his displeasure in the rudest terms. For his part, Robert gently and patiently attempts to engage with the audience member in question and explain exactly why calling for songs like that is annoying to be band and gives a simple request that people cut it out. He's perfectly calm and polite about it all, but he's also adamant that it's important to the band's morale that they play the material they choose to play, rather than just running over the old numbers on demand, because otherwise what's the point?

The band as a whole get their own back on the nostalgia junkies, though - the first encore is a rendition of In the Court of the Crimson King... as a standard blues number! The band do an excellent job improvising this transformation of the track, with Fripp even cleverly working in some of his distinctive solos from the more familiar version into the rendition.

As well as displaying a prickly, almost Zappa-esque sense of humour in moments like that, this lineup also offers up some deep, extended improvisation. There's a Fripp solo in the middle which seems to be an early draft of a musical idea from Larks' Tongues In Aspic, which is interesting to hear; sadly, it's all too short, and taking its place is an Ian Wallace drum solo. I don't like drum solos in general - mostly because too many drummers overestimate people's attention span and mistake quantity for quality, dragging them out entirely too long when if they'd been a fraction of the length they'd have been more impressive. Wallace is exactly one of those drummers. Still, one whiff in as improv-heavy a set as this ain't that bad.