KING CRIMSON — Live At Jacksonville, 1972 (review)

KING CRIMSON — Live At Jacksonville, 1972 album cover Promos, fans club and other releases (no bootlegs) · 1998 · Proto-Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
This is a 1972 live recording of the Islands-era lineup of King Crimson, on the Earthbound tour. As always with this lineup's live work, there's an obvious caveat here, which is that the excellent Sailors' Tales boxed set compiles a great number of performances from this lineup (including this one), plus excellent remasters of the studio albums from In the Wake of Poseidon to Islands, and as such if you're interested enough in this lineup to go poking about in the depths of the Collector's Club, it's probably worth your while at least considering the box - sure, it's expensive, but the sheer bang you get for your buck makes obtaining these performances individually very much the expensive way to do it.

That said, supposing you weren't interested in the box and just wanted a decent live recording from the Earthbound tour - how would this serve you? Pretty well, as it happens! The recording quality is not perfect - though sourced from a soundboard, it like all the Earthbound tour recordings were recorded to cassette rather than reel-to-reel, with an inevitable loss in quality given that cassettes were a somewhat more rudimentary medium at the time. Still, it's a good step above Earthbound itself and is of reasonable quality by the overall standards of the tour, and this particular evening finds the band (who, remember, were only slogging through this tour out of contractual obligation before they went their separate ways and Fripp installed the Larks' Tongues In Aspic lineup) in excellent form.

We're treated to a really dynamite improv on The Sailor's Tale, with a really nice guitar solo from Fripp as its highlight; the downside of this is that it's followed up by an Ian Wallace drum solo, and with the best will in the world, even if you like drum solos, Wallace's tend to be just a bit too long for my taste - it could have been a third of the length and three times as effective for it.
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