BEAT: 21st Century Crimson Men (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

The ‘80s lineup of King Crimson was radically different from what had come before; it had its own distinct sound and sensibility. How closely will BEAT follow the sound, character and structure of those arrangements?

Well, I’m in charge of picking the arrangements and the songs. And I think some of them have essentials that have to be followed. There’s not much reason to fool with certain things; they are what they are, and people will want to hear them that way. It will never be exactly like the record, because I don’t want Steve Vai or Danny Carey to play exactly like the record. I want them to be themselves. And I think that’s what the audiences want.

But I think having Steve Vai in the band, for example, there’s a lot of places where I see that we could gradually develop outward from there on our own. I mean, I want to see him playing Steve Vai stuff, and I want to hear that myself. He sends me a video almost every day showing me where he is in his journey of finding everything, and I can see that he’s getting more and more comfortable with all of it. And I’m coaching him a little bit, saying, “That part right there, you don’t have to play it like Robert [did]. You can do your own sounds.”

I feel it may be close to the original stuff a bit more at the beginning, but we have 65 shows. And we’re not a cover band; we’re gonna develop it. The idea is to celebrate the music, but it’s also to push it forward in our own ways and make it more in sync with what is happening now.

Personally, though, I have gone back and taken great lengths to find some of the sounds that I had back then, which are now pretty hard to find. And I’ve changed my own gear to be half modern and half vintage. A big part of that [‘80s Crimson] sound was two things in the guitar world. There was the running dual guitar, things that were clean sounding on songs like “Three of a Perfect Pair” and “Frame by Frame.” And then there were the different things that each of us did in our own way. Robert with his type of soloing, and me with all my crazy sounds and my soloing.

And then there were the synthesizer parts on songs like “The Sheltering Sky.” The essence of that sound has a lot to do with the [Roland] GR300 guitar synth of that era. Roland has released two new synthesizers that can do some of that, and Steve will be using some of the new stuff. I’ve heard what he’s doing with it, and it’s very good. But I’m going to use my original GR 300.

I don’t think I’ve seen anybody play a GR300 in decades!

No, you haven’t.

Both you and Steve Vai are veterans of Frank Zappa’s band, which in the music world is a shorthand for “They can do anything.” Still, Steve sounds nothing at all like Robert Fripp. In BEAT, will you have the same musical role that you had in ‘80s King Crimson, or does Steve’s participation alter that equation?

I don’t think it does. There are one or two places where I’ve said it would be better if I played Robert’s part, for whatever reason. In “Sleepless,” for example, it’s easier for me to play his guitar line than to play the sweeping synth stuff while I’m singing.

But mostly, no. I went out to Steve’s studio and we worked for hours on sorting those things out; I’d sit with him and talk about songs: “This is this; you do this, and I do that.” A lot of times he thought Robert [had been] doing something I was doing! That’s typical, because it’s hard to listen to those records and know what’s going on. But we straightened it out pretty quickly.

A lot to do with this particular band is to highlight the songwriting, because that’s my side of it more than anything else. I had some hand in some of the heavy instrumentals, but that was more Robert’s territory in that band. And so we decided, “Let’s pull out a lot of songs, some of which were hardly – if ever – done [live] by King Crimson.” So my plan is to do things that people will expect – the essentials – but then surprise them with some things that they maybe never got to hear. And then we’ll open it up from there, so you’ll think, “Wow, these guys are taking this somewhere!”

The ‘80s lineup would sometimes play 1974’s “Red.” Are you going to consider dipping back farther into the catalog, or will you focus tightly on that ‘80s period?

When we first started in the ‘80s, we went out and played some shows just to start breaking in the new material. And we realized we didn’t have enough material to even do a concert! At that point, Robert was very stiff about introducing anything from the past. But he finally said, “Let’s learn these two: ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic’ and ‘Red.’” And we played those for the next four years. So I consider “Red” to be part of that repertoire, of that band.

And, yes, we are doing it. Steve was happy with doing it, but he didn’t think that we should do more [from the back catalog] than that. Everybody loves that one, and it’ll be a big shot in the arm to hear it. But that’s as far as we need to go, because there’s more material on those three records than we could possibly play in one concert anyway!

In revisiting the material from Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, have you made any new discoveries about those pieces?

I knew what Bill [Bruford] was doing because I’m [also] a drummer, and he was my favorite drummer at the time anyway. But the surprising thing to me was how many things I discovered that the other guys were doing. I was so busy taking care of my roles, writing the material and then touring; it was all just a race against time. And so I didn’t always have the time to check out: “Wow. Tony Levin is playing one of our ‘guitar’ parts right there!”

But it’s more to do with what Robert and Tony were doing that surprises me now. And it’s always amazing. When I look back at our live shows, I think, “Oh, my gosh, how did I do that?” But I’m not trying to do it note-for-note the same way now anyway. But I feel like I’ve got a leg up in the sense that I do know some of it and I will be attacking it in that way. And yet playing with the new [gear] that I have available now, there are so many exciting guitar things that I want to apply to that music.

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